Aksana Ismailbekova completed her dissertation at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany. Based on her PhD dissertation, she wrote her monograph Blood Ties and the Native Son: Poetics of Patronage in Kyrgyzstan, which was published by Indiana University Press in 2017.  Ismailbekova is a research fellow at Leibniz-Zentrum-Moderner Orient (ZMO). Her research work focuses on kinship, ethnicity, patronage, conflict and gender in Kyrgyzstan.

She has been a collaborator of the Basel Institute on Governance on two research projects: “Informal Governance and Corruption” funded by the British Academy Anti-Corruption Evidence Programme (2016-2018) and “Harnessing Informality” (2018-2020) funded by the Global Integrity Anti-Corruption Evidence Programme.