Dr Elena Barabantseva is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Manchester (UK) was born in Minsk (Belarus) and studied International Relations at the Belarusian State University. She came to Manchester in 2000 as a Chevening student with the scholarship from the Open Society Institute and Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and have grown into this city. She received PhD in International Relations from the University of Manchester in January 2006 and joined Politics in September 2006.

She is a member of the Critical Global Politics research cluster and also work closely with colleagues in Chinese Studies. Her research on the role of overseas Chinese and ethnic minorities in the Chinese state's pursuit of modernisation-driven national project was published as Overseas Chinese, Ethnic Minorities and Nationalism: De-Centering China (Routledge 2012, 2013 in paperback).

She was an elected member of the British Association of Chinese Studies governing board from 2011 to 2014. She currently serves on the editorial board of the Asian Ethnicity Journal (Routledge).