Russia studies ecosystem
The Russia Program
The Russia Program at GW is a university-based analytical center that combines knowledge, technologies, and networks into a research ecosystem.
About
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has put an end to the conventional ways of studying and understanding Russia. The war has destroyed horizontal connections, dismantled research cooperation, made fieldwork almost impossible, and called into question previously-acceptable methods and sources of information.
Hosted at GW's Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (IERES), The Russia Program is responding to the challenges of studying Russia after February 24 with the creation of a novel research ecosystem that renews our methodological toolkit, creates new knowledge commons, focuses on key research questions, and reengages with Russians—all on a platform designed to spread knowledge to a broader audience.
| Learn more about IERES programs |
Mission
We combine knowledge, technologies, and networks to research and educate on Russia, and enhance your impact in dealing with it.
The Russia Studies Ecosystem
An ecosystem is a dynamic self-sustaining structure that thrives as long as its elements are interacting
Learn more about IERES
IERES is part of The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, one of the world’s leading schools of international affairs and the largest school of international affairs in the United States. Located in the heart of Washington, D.C., its mission is to educate the next generation of international leaders, conduct research that advances understanding of important global issues, and engage the policy community in the United States and around the world.
IERES has continued to be ranked the #1 University-Affiliated Regional Studies Center in the U.S. (#5 in the world) in the University of Pennsylvania 2020 Global Go To Think Tank Index Report. It is organized around seven programs, which helps to further consolidated the Institute’s
primary mission to serve as a field-defining leader in scholarship, education, and advice for policymakers addressing relations between the United States, Europe, Russia, and Eurasia.
The Institute’s hallmarks are combining academic rigor with policy engagement, promoting interdisciplinary perspectives, and recognizing that Europe, Russia, and Eurasia cannot be understood in isolation from each other or from larger global trends. IERES unites a vibrant, interdisciplinary community of scholars and scholar-practitioners, both faculty and visitors.
Learn more about other programs of IERES:
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Three key research topics
- What are Russians’ values, beliefs, and thinking?
The war invites us to favor more granular and grassroots approaches for a thicker conceptual knowledge of Russia and its society.
A forward-looking research project that studies Russia by giving more prominence to diversity.
How is the regime evolving in its internal balance and external outreach?
An in-depth research project that scrutinizes Russia’s political culture and ideological outputs, and maps its actors, institutions, and societal relevance
A research project that explores how Russia reinvents itself as a Global South power and how the Global South positions itself on the war
How to envision Russia’s future?
This project aims at mobilizing humanities and social science knowledge to explore new horizons and generate new visions of the future
A multidisciplinary research project that explores how Russia’s Arctic regions are changing and how local populations are dealing with sustainability issues
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New Methods and Knowledge Commons
The Russia Program renews research methods, data collection, approaches to fieldwork, and information accessibility
A program for investigative research that seeks to go beyond conventional methods and mine unique data, taking the field of digital humanities to a new level.
A project that bridges scholars and research assistants and help to organize remote
fieldwork in their respective localities in post-socialist countries.
fieldwork in their respective localities in post-socialist countries.
A pioneering digital archive project that makes available and searchable declassified government files to create new virtual libraries without borders
Applied oral history aims at comprehending the present through retrospective analysis of political actors' motivations and behavior and provide insights for future policy-making.
Our Team
- Ivan GrekDirector of GW’s Russia ProgramIvan Grek, PhD, is a Deputy Director of GW’s Russia Program
- Kevin LimonerKevin Limonier is Associate Professor in Slavic Studies at the French Institute of Geopolitics (Paris-8 University). He is also Deputy Director of the GEODE center and scientific director of the Observatory of the Russian-speaking Infosphere, a research structure dedicated to the analysis of post-Soviet digital spaces. His research focuses on the development of new methods of mapping cyberspace, especially in the post-Soviet context, and has widely published on the Russian internet.
- Israel MarquesIsrael Marques received his Ph.D from Columbia University in 2016. He was formerly an assistant professor of Politics and Governance at the National Research University – Higher School of Economics in Moscow, Russia before resigning due to the invasion of Ukraine. He is now a nonresidential fellow at IERES. His primary research explores the political economy of public services in middle-income countries, particularly Russia and post-communist Europe. His recent research explores how and when electoral autocracies can use services as a tool for reproducing political power.
- Jason RobertsJason Roberts is an assistant professor of instruction at the University of Texas at Austin in Religious Studies and in Slavic and Eurasian Studies. His research focuses on religious culture, medieval and Early Modern intellectual history of Christian theology, and Christofascism and Integral Traditionalism. His work on illiberal religion has been published in the Journal of Illiberalism Studies.
- Eric LohrEric Lohr is the author of Russian Citizenship: From Empire to Soviet Union (Harvard University Press, 2012) and Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign Against Enemy Aliens during World War I (Harvard University Press, 2003). His recent review essay “The Bolshevik Revolution is Over” appeared in the Journal of Modern History. He is currently writing Russian Autocracy: A History and The Brothers Trubetskoi: Liberals between Tsar and Revolution. Lohr received his M.A. in Russian Studies and Ph.D. in History from Harvard University, where he also served as an assistant professor of History. He is chair of the History Department and James H. Billington Chair of Russian and Soviet history and Culture at American University.
- Vera KuklinaPhD, is a Research Professor at the Department of Geography at GW. She has degree of Candidate of geographical sciences (equivalent of PhD) from V.B. Sochava Institute of Geography of the Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences. She works on the urbanization of indigenous peoples, traditional land use, socio-ecological systems, cultural geographies of infrastructure and remoteness. She also co-leads an ArtSLInK initiative, focused on convergence of science, arts and place-based local and Indigenous Knowledge systems. She has published in Environmental Research Letters, Polar Science, Polar Record, Eurasian Geography and Economics, Polar Geography, Geoforum, and Sustainability.
- Michael David-FoxProfessor, Director: Georgetown University’s Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies (CERES). He is a historian of modern Russia and the USSR, whose work has ranged from cultural and political history to transnational studies and modernity theory.
- Dmitry DubrovskiyDmitry Dubrovskiy is a historian, and a Research Fellow at the Central and East European Law Initiative in Prague, as well as at the Center for Independent Social Research in Saint Petersburg. He was the founder and lecturer of the Human Rights Program at Smolny College at Saint Petersburg State University from 2004 to 2015. He has served as a visiting lecturer at Bard College in and Witwatersrand University, as an adjunct assistant professor at the Harriman Institute from 2015 to 2017, and as an associate professor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow from 2018 to March 2022. His research interests include academic rights, freedom of speech, and minority rights.
- Adam LentonAdam Lenton is a PhD candidate in Political Science at George Washington University and an incoming Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Wake Forest University. His research examines nationalism, security, and political development in Eurasia, with a focus on ethnic minorities in Russia. His research has been published in Russian Politics and Problems of Post-Communism, together with articles published by PONARS Eurasia, Riddle.Russia and Russia.Post. He is currently working on a book project which explores the relationship between Russian imperial expansion and regional identities in Russia.
- Nikolay (Kolia) ShiklomanovPhD, is a Professor of Geography at GW. His main area of interest is permafrost and its interactions with natural and human systems. His research includes long-term permafrost observations in the Circumpolar Arctic, permafrost-related process studies, and the effect of permafrost on human activity and infrastructure. Since the early 1990s, Dr. Shiklomanov has been actively participating in fieldwork in the Alaskan and Russian Arctic. As an educator, he teaches courses in Physical Geography, Climatology, and Arctic Environments at GWU as well as international field summer courses in the Arctic.
- Irina Meyer-OlimpievaThe Founder and Executive Director of CISRus, Irina works as a Research Professor at IERES and as an associated researcher at The Center for Independent Social Research in St. Petersburg. Her research is focused on various issues of post-socialist transformation such as labor protests and labor relations, science and innovation, informal economy and corruption. In the US, she explores Russian speaking immigrant community.
- Paul BehringerPaul J. Welch Behringer is a senior fellow at Southern Methodist University’s Center for Presidential History, where here he leads the oral history project on U.S.-Russian relations during the administrations of Bush and Putin (2001-2009). Since January 2022, he has also been the University of Nebraska-Lincoln DPAA Research Partner Fellow, conducting research in support of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency. Behringer is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its Components. His book on the U.S. and Japanese intervention in the Russian Civil War is under contract with Oxford University Press.
- Périne SchirPérine holds an MA in Sociology and Philosophy from Rouen University and is an adjunct professor of International Relations at the Faculty of Law at Rouen University. Her PhD research focuses on the French political and intellectual movements that position themselves between the mainstream right and the far right, and their ideological genealogy. She also works on the history of White Russian émigrés and their connection to the French far right.
- Maxime AudinetMaxime Audinet is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Strategic Research (IRSEM, Paris). He holds a Ph.D. in Political science and Slavic studies from the University of Paris Nanterre (2020). His research focuses on the role of influence in the foreign policy of authoritarian states, following on from his Ph.D. work on Russia’s public diplomacy (cultural diplomacy and international media). He takes a particular interest in the actors and practices of Russia’s information influence in the post-Soviet space, in Europe, and in sub-Saharan Africa.
- Guzel YusupovaGuzel Yusupova is a Visiting Professor at EURUS, Carleton University, Canada. Before the 24th February she was a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) & Senior Researcher at North-West Institute of Management, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. In 2017-2020 she held academic appointments at Durham University and Loughborough University, UK. Prior to that she was a postdoctoral fellow on projects in Sweden (REMESO, Linkoping University) and Austria (IWM). Her broader research interests include nationalism studies, sociology of ethnicity, diversity and inequality, qualitative and digital methodology.
- Asel DoolotkeldievaDr. Asel Doolotkeldieva is a non-residential fellow for the RussiaProgram at GW. She earned her PhD from the University of Exeter (UK) in Politics and previously engaged as a Visiting Fellow at Zentrum für Osteuropa- und internationale Studien (ZOiS), The Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), Berlin, and College Mondial (FMSH), Paris. Her academic interests include regime dynamics, social mobilization and identity politics in Central Asia. Presently, she is leading a research project on protests and mass revolts in Central Asia.
- KazushigeAssociate Professor at the College and Graduate School of International Relations at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan. He received a Ph.D. in International Relations and Political Science from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. His current research focuses on global International Relations theory, peacebuilding/conflict management, and the role of non-Western powers (especially Russia, Japan, and China) in the transformation of international orders
- Darya HermanResearch Director, The Bridge Research Network
Graduated from Grodno State University (Belarus), where she studied medieval history with a focus on the Byzantine Empire. Has experience in archival and research work. She assisted Belarusian and Polish historians in collecting documentary and archival sources, which resulted in 3 monographs, 1 PhD thesis and 7 articles in academic journals. She was also a participant in international forums on contemporary history and border issues (Poland 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018; Belgium 2018). - Alexey MedvedPrinciple Investigator, The Bridge Research Network
Graduated from the Department of History of the Middle Ages, Institute of History, St. Petersburg State University (Russia). His research interests include medieval history and 16th century German history. He was an expert of the Electronic Russian Historical Encyclopedia "World History". He was co-editor of the scientific almanac Proslogion: Problems of Social History and Culture in the Middle Ages and Modern Era. Author of a number of articles in the electronic version of Diletant journal (Diletant.media). Experienced in media and television.