Profile
Thesis title
Race, Gender, and State Sovereignty in Global Mobility: Problematising the Hague Child Abduction Convention
Supervisors
Summary of research
Yijia's PhD project focuses on unilateral parental child relocation—commonly referred to in legal discourse as international child abduction. The 1980 Hague Child Abduction Convention addresses such cases by requiring the prompt return of children to their country of habitual residence. Her research critically examines this return mechanism and how it reflects and reinforces global hierarchies of race, gender, and state sovereignty. Drawing on archival sources and critical legal theory, she argues that the Hague Convention disproportionately serves state interests, especially those of Global North countries, over the rights and safety of relocating parents and their children, particularly mothers fleeing domestic violence. She analyses how racialised anxieties underpinned the Hague Convention’s formation and how its framework reclassifies vulnerable parents as legal wrongdoers. By comparing the Hague Convention with international refugee law and a parallel European treaty, her thesis contributes to private international law, feminist legal theory, TWAIL, and the study of global mobility governance.
Biography
Yijia Liu is a PhD candidate in Law at Queen Mary University of London, supervised by Dr Hedi Viterbo and Prof Neve Gordon. She is the recipient of the Modern Law Review Scholarship (2025-2026) and the Postgraduate Research Fund at Queen Mary (2024). She holds an LLM in Public International Law from the University of Amsterdam and a Juris Master from Peking University.
Yijia serves as Assistant Editor for the Queen Mary Law Research Paper Series, Research Coordinator for the Forum on Decentering the Human, and Peer Review Editor for the Queen Mary Law Journal. She has co-taught LLB and LLM modules on child law at Queen Mary.
Yijia Liu is the recipient of the Modern Law Review Scholarship (2025–2026). She was awarded the Helen Reece Scholarship for her critical work on international child abduction in the fields of feminist legal theory and family law. She has presented her work at international conferences including the Law & Society Association (2024) and the Socio-Legal Studies Association (2025).
Publications
Book review
- Liu, Y. (Forthcoming, 2025). Book Review: Childhood in Liberal Theories: Equality, Differences, and Children’s Rights by Nicolás Brando. Child and Family Law Quarterly.
Book
- Liu, Y. (Associate Editor and Author, 2021). 逆全球化的挑战与机遇: 法意看中国 (Challenges and Opportunities for China). The Contemporary World Press. ISBN: 978-7-5090-1558-2.
Translations
- Charlesworth, H., Chinkin, C., & Wright, S. (1991). ‘Feminist Approaches to International Law’ (The American Journal of International Law, Vol. 85, No. 4, pp. 613-645). Translated by Yijia Liu and with a preface by Yijia Liu. Published in PKU International and Comparative Law Review, Vol. 18 (2023).
- Gordon, N., & Perugini, N. (2020). Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire. University of California Press. Translated by Yijia Liu. Chinese edition forthcoming.