PhD theses

Western education is often assumed to produce reform-oriented elites who improve governance beyond the West, yet the conditions under which such graduates gain influence remain poorly understood. This dissertation examines how Western-educated nationals are recruited, selected, and positioned to shape governance in Georgia and Azerbaijan. It combines a critical review of existing scholarship with comparative analyses of the political and institutional conditions affecting elite recruitment, entry into government, and professional influence. Particular attention is paid to how educational credentials interact with competencies, personal connections, and political considerations in selection for state careers. The dissertation also moves beyond a state-centred perspective by examining how Western scholarship alumni contribute through civil society, international organizations, academia, business, and transnational networks. It argues that Western education does not automatically translate into authority or reform. Its effects are mediated by domestic institutions, elite networks, recruitment practices, and the career pathways available to graduates.

Western education is widely credited with carrying democratic change back to non-Western countries – and, for women, possibly with offering a route around patriarchal constraint at home. This dissertation asks what that story leaves out. Across four papers grounded in comparative fieldwork in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, it follows the full arc of the Western-education trajectory – who reaches it, how it is experienced, and what it converts into on return – and argues that intersectional gender inequality shapes every stage. These stages are not separable: the selection effects of each phase are carried into the next, so that a returnee’s sociopolitical engagement cannot be read apart from who was filtered in, and who was filtered out, at the very start. The question is not whether women access Western education, but which women: reported gender parity conceals the systematic filtering-out of rural, low-income, and ethnic-minority women long before selection, while those who do go West return to a domestic field that assigns the same degree a different value depending on the gendered, classed, and ethnicized body that carries it. A pre-departure study maps who is filtered out before mobility; a critical-integrative review synthesizes a fragmented cross-disciplinary literature into a single filtering account; a post-return study shows how intersectional positioning sorts returnees across a spectrum of sociopolitical engagement, from formal authority through civic redirection to exit; and a policy analysis turns the same lens on the scholarship programs themselves. Together they make one argument: a process this unequal at entry cannot deliver the democratizing results claimed for it.