Tomila Lankina
British scholar
Tomila Lankina is a political scientist whose research focuses on historical political economy, democratization, and subnational governance. Her work examines comparative politics in Russia and Eastern Europe, as well as India, with particular attention to how historical and colonial legacies shape political institutions and social development.
She is a Full Professor of Politics and International Relations at the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics. In 2025 she was elected as a fellow of the British Academy.
Biography
Tomila Lankina was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan into a family of indologists. She received her PhD in politics at the University of Oxford at St Antony’s and later Balliol College in 2001, with the dissertation "Local Self-Government and Ethnic Mobilization in the Russian Federation, 1990-1999." Previously, she earned an MA in International Relations, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, United States in 1995, and a BA in Indian Studies in 1993 at the Tashkent Institute of Oriental Studies.
Research
Tomila Lankina’s early works are dedicated to subnational governance and the diffusion of democratic and authoritarian institutions, the colonial legacy for regional development, and protest in electoral autocracies. Her articles on post-communist regions analyse how geographical proximity to the West and European Union aid shape democratic trajectories in Russia’s regions and explain institutional choices in local government, including the survival of elected mayors, through competing democratic and authoritarian diffusion pressures. In studies on colonial India, she examines how Christian missionaries and patterns of religious competition affected female education and left long-term human capital and democratic legacies at the subnational level. In later works on contentious politics in Russia, she develops and employs protest-event datasets to document regional variation in civic activism, explore the political and institutional conditions underpinning protest, and found that during the 2011–12 electoral protests in Russia national media coverage and regime-led repression mitigated public support for protest movements and their demands.
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