Participants
Mark R. Beissinger is the Henry W. Putnam Professor of Politics at Princeton and Director of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS). His recent writings have dealt with such topics as individual participation in the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and in the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions, the impact of new social media on opposition movements in autocratic regimes, Russian imperialism in Eurasia, the historical legacies of communism, the relationship between nationalism and democracy, the impact of the Great Recession on protest in the post-communist states, and the evolving character of revolutions globally over the last century. He is the author of Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State (Cambridge University Press 2002) and the co-editor (with Stephen Kotkin) of Historical Legacies of Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe (Cambridge University Press).
Katharina Bluhm is Professor for Sociology and director of the Institute for East European Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. She has held previous appointments at the University of Osnabrück and has been a visiting scholar at Harvard, Berkeley and the National Research University – Higher School of Economics in Moscow. Her research interests focus on varieties of capitalism in Central and Eastern Europe, economic and political sociology. She is the author of Modernisation, Geopolitics and the New Russian Conservatives (Leviathan 1/2016), Machtgedanken. Ideologische Schlüsselkonzepte der neuen russischen Konservativen (Mittelweg 6/2016), and co-author of Business Leaders and the New Varieties of Capitalism in Post-Communist Europe (Routledge 2014).
Ewa Dabrowska is a PhD candidate in the research group on Political Economy and Transnational Governance at the University of Amsterdam. She holds a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts in Cultural Studies and a Bachelor of Science in Economics from the European University Viadrina. She works on ideas and interests in the Russian political economy, the new conservatism and economic nationalism in Poland and Russia, and the role of money and finance in patrimonial capitalism.
Nadja Douglas is a Research Associate at ZOiS. Her current research project focuses on the relationship between public initiatives and state power structures in the post-Soviet region. She studied Political Science, Philosophy and History at the University of Bonn and holds a Master's degree in International Relations from Sciences Po Paris (2008). In 2016, she obtained her PhD from Humboldt University Berlin; her thesis deals with public control of armed forces in the Russian Federation. Previously, she worked as an advisor on security and defence policy in the German Bundestag, and as a research fellow at the International Secretariat of the Parliamentary Assembly of the OSCE and the Development and Peace Foundation in Bonn. Between 2015 and 2016, she was a member of the editorial team of the electronic digest "Russland-Analysen". During the German OSCE Chairmanship in 2016, she worked as a Liaison Officer at the OSCE Mission to Moldova.
Rebecca Fradkin is a PhD student at the University of Oxford in the Department of Politics and International Relations and at Nuffield College. Fradkin previously received her MPhil in Comparative Government from Oxford and also holds bachelor degrees in Political Science, Comparative Religion, and Russian, Eurasian and Eastern European Studies. She has worked in the public sector and conducted extensive field research in Russia and Central Asia.
Nina Frieß is a Research Associate at ZOiS. She studied Political Science and Slavonic Studies in Heidelberg, St. Petersburg and Potsdam. From 2009 to 2016, she was a research fellow at the Department of Eastern Slavic Literatures and Cultures at the University of Potsdam. In 2015, she completed her doctorate on the contemporary memory of Stalinist repressions. Her dissertation was awarded the Klaus-Mehnert-Prize of the German Association for East European Studies e.V. (DGO). The working title of her current project at ZOiS is "Literature and power in the post-Soviet space". It focuses on the role of Russian and Russian-language literature in selected post-Soviet countries.
As a Research Associate at ZOiS, Tatiana Golova is working on a research project on public mobilisation in regional federal centres in Russia. From 1994 to 2000, she studied Sociology at the State University of St. Petersburg, at the University of Bielefeld and at the European University in St. Petersburg. Here, she gained her first research experience at the Institute of Sociology at the Russian Academy of Sciences in the field of youth sociology (1998-1999). She gained her doctorate in 2009 at the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg with a thesis on the link between spatial and identity construction in the radical left-wing milieu. From 2009 to 2014, she worked at the Institute of Sociology in Magdeburg, and from 2014 to 2015 as a research fellow at the Institute for East European Studies at the Free University in Berlin.
Kerstin Jacobsson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Gothenburg. She works in the field of Political Sociology. Among her research interests are social movements and civic activism in Central and Eastern Europe. She has edited several books in recent years on this topic in collaboration with scholars from the Central and Eastern European countries, e.g. Urban Grassroots Movements in Central and Eastern Europe (Ashgate 2015).
Markku Kivinen is Professor of Sociology and since 1996 Director of the Aleksanteri Institute at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Kivinen's academic focus is on social theory, Russian domestic and foreign policy, transition studies in comparative perspective, social inequality, power and democracy. Since 2012, Kivinen leads one of the Academy of Finland's Centres of Excellence in Research "Choices of Russian Modernisation". Kivinen is the editor of the Routledge Series Studies of Contemporary Russia. Besides, he has published two novels. Betongötter (Secession Verlag 2014) has been published in German and Diplomatic Endgame is forthcoming in German and Russian translations.
Janis Kluge is a PhD candidate in International Political Economy at Witten/Herdecke University and a researcher at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) in Berlin. In his research, he analyses how foreign investors, entrepreneurs, and large domestic businesses cope with political risks in Russia.
Patrick Köllner is Vice President of the GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies and Director of the GIGA Institute of Asian Studies. He is also Professor of Political Science at the University of Hamburg. He studied at the universities of Konstanz and Essex and holds a doctorate from the Humboldt University of Berlin and a habilitation from the University of Trier. His research interests revolve around political organisations and institutions in Asia from a comparative perspective. He currently works on think tanks in Asia and is co-editor of a forthcoming volume on comparative area studies.
Alice Lackner is a Research Assistant at ZOiS where she is involved in the statistical analysis related to the ZOiS surveys in Ukraine. She is currently studying in the MA programme “Sociology – European Societies” at the Free University Berlin. Before, she graduated from the RWTH Aachen University with a BA degree in philosophy and sociology, as well as from the HfMT Köln/Aachen with a BM degree in vocal studies.
Sebastian Lentz is the Director of the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography (IFL), the only non-university research institute for Geography in Germany. He holds a professorship in Regional Geography at the University of Leipzig. His research focuses on aspects of regional, social, cultural and urban geography as well as transformation studies in Eastern Europe and post-socialist countries. At present, Lentz acts as one of the two speakers of the Leibniz ScienceCampus “Eastern Europe, Global Area”. Since 2016, he has also conducted research within the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 1199: “Processes of Spatialization under the Global Condition” where he is involved in the project "Maps of Globalization: The Production and the Visualization of Spatial Knowledge".
Pavlo Myronov is an analyst working for the Civic Movement Chesno, Ukraine. His research focuses on the political careers of Ukrainian politicians, the voting patterns in the Ukrainian parliament, and the submission of legislative bills and asset declarations. His research has been published on chesno.org and pravda.com.ua. He has also designed an app called “Groups of interests” (groups.chesho.org) that visualises connections of Members of Parliaments based on their joint submission of bills. Currently, he works on the ZOiS project on local politics in Ukraine.
British artist Mark Neville works at the intersection of art and documentary. He makes lens-based works which have been realised and disseminated in a large array of contexts, as both still and moving image pieces, slideshows, films, and giveaway books. Often working with closely knit communities, in a collaborative process intended to be of direct, practical benefit to the subject, his photographic projects to date have frequently made the towns he portrays the primary audience for the work. He has presented solo exhibitions of his projects at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the Photographers' Gallery in London, the Imperial War Museum in London, and he was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for his New York Times Magazine commission on wealth inequality "Here is London". His collaboration with ZOiS has resulted in the exhibition “The Displaced in Ukraine and Russia”, which opens at ZOiS on 28 March 2017, a photo-text essay on the topic on the ZOiS website, and several events.
Magdalena Nowicka is Professor for Migration and Transnationalism at the Humboldt University in Berlin where she also leads the project TRANSFORmIG funded by the European Research Council. She holds a doctoral degree in Sociology from the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich (2005), a Master of Arts degree in Cultural Studies from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland (2001) and a Bachelor of Arts degree in International Relations from the University of Warsaw, Poland (1999). She worked previously at the Institute of Sociology at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich (2006-2013) and Max-Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen (2010-2013). Among her most recent publications is Migration and Social Remittances in a Global Europe, co-edited with Vojin Šerbedžija (Palgrave 2016).
Olga Onuch is a Lecturer in Politics at the University of Manchester and an Associate Fellow at Nuffield College of the University of Oxford. She specializes in the comparative study of protest politics and elections in democratising states in Latin America and Eastern Europe. Onuch is an expert on protests and activism in Ukraine and is co-investigator of a 2014 Ukrainian Electoral Survey (with Henry Hale as P-I) funded by the National Science Foundation. She was a member of the Strategic Advisory Group tasked with advising the government and president of Ukraine. Her book Mapping Mass Mobilizations (Palgrave 2014) investigates mass mobilisation in Ukraine and Argentina.
Dimitriy Ostapchuk has been manager of the DataVox project at VoxUkraine since 2015. He defended his thesis on the question of national security at The National Institute for Strategic Studies in 2015. Ostapchuk was an intern for the OSCE in Ukraine in 2014, working as a Project Assistant to the Project Co-ordinator. During the 2015-2016 academic year, he taught Microeconomics at the Kyiv National University of Trade and Economics. His project, DataVox, studies the functioning of the Ukrainian parliament, media outlets, and social networks using mathematical methods and numerical data. He is currently involved in the ZOiS project on local politics in Ukraine.
Viktor Pashchenko is an Associate Professor of the Nizhyn Gogol State University since 2015. He defended his thesis on civil society in Ukraine at I.F. Kuras Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in 2005. His research interests include the transformation of the party system and development of civil society in Ukraine. He cooperates with political parties as political consultant, and is engaged in strategic planning, public opinion research, and media monitoring. In 2016, he co-founded the non-governmental organisation “Pridneprovsk International Research and Cooperation Centre” and is currently serving as vice president being responsible for research of the current political process and public opinion. At ZOiS he belongs to the team of Ukrainian researchers collaborating on the project on local politics in Ukraine.
Yevgen Popov has a PhD in Political Science; the subject of his dissertation was Think Tanks in Ukraine: developmental experience and evolution prospects. He has worked as Head of the International Renaissance Foundation regional office in Southern Ukraine since 2014. During 2010-2014 he was Head of the regional think tank Institute for Political Information. He has also collaborated with analytical organisations and movements such as Chesno, Democracy Study Centre, “Ya hochu” (I want…), Campus 3.0, and many others. In addition, he has experience with involvement in election campaigns at regional and national levels. He is also a member of the ZOiS research team analysing local politics in Ukraine.
Maryia Rohava is a doctoral candidate at the University of Oslo and a Marie Curie fellow in the project “Post-Soviet Tensions”. Rohava completed a research Master’s degree in European Studies at Maastricht University and a Bachelos's degree in Political Science from the European Humanities University in Lithuania. She was awarded a ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius PhD grant “Trajectories of Change” and a Civil Society Scholar Award from the Open Society Foundations for her fieldwork in Belarus. Rohava's doctoral thesis focuses on the aspects of everyday nationalism in authoritarian societies. Before joining the University of Oslo, she worked as a research assistant on multilevel governance of the European Union at the European Institute of Public Administration in Barcelona and participated in election observation missions in Lithuania, Georgia and Belarus.
Radka Rubilina is a researcher and Human Rights Officer at the OSCE Office in Yerevan, Armenia. She has a PhD from the University of Konstanz, and has always combined cultural and political phenomena in her research. She is an expert on the genre of memoires, especially from political prisoners of Soviet labour camps (GULAG). She worked as Head of the Democratisation Department of the biggest Czech non-governmental organisation “People in Need” where she supported civil society development in Eastern Europe, Russia and Central Asia. Nowadays she works on the implementation of human rights related reforms in Armenia as a diplomat seconded by the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Gwendolyn Sasse is the Director of ZOiS. She is also Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Oxford and a Professorial Fellow at Nuffield College. Her research interests include post-communist transitions, ethnic conflict, and migration. At ZOiS she is conducting research on the effects of the war on political identities in Ukraine, local politics in Ukraine, and East European migrants in Berlin. She is also completing a project funded by the Leverhulme Trust on "Political Remittances: The Political Impacts of Migration". Her book The Crimea Question: Identity, Transition, and Conflict (Harvard University Press 2007, 2014) won the Alexander Nove Prize.
Natalia Savelyeva is a researcher at the Public Sociology Laboratory, Russia. She graduated from Moscow State University in 2007. Subsequently, she completed two Master’s degrees at the French University College in Moscow and at the European University in St. Petersburg. She defended her PhD dissertation in 2016 at the Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of Science. Her thesis provides an analysis of current transformations of labour and capitalism in Russia based on the case of direct sales organisations. Currently, she is working on projects dedicated to protest movements in Russia and Ukraine and the war in Eastern Ukraine.
Daniel Schulz is an editor at the German nationwide daily taz.die tageszeitung. He writes and edits cover stories for the weekend issue. At the taz, he has worked as an editor for inner security topics and as Head of the Society Department. His main subjects are data protection, right-wing extremism and, since 2015, Ukraine. He is a co-producer of the Berlinale award winning documentary Shkola nomer 3.
Elke Steiner is a Berlin-based comics creator and illustrator. She has held many comics workshops in Russia, Germany and Finland, and does live drawing gigs. The subjects of her work are human rights, German-Jewish history and LGBTI themes. Steiner has published several comic books, the latest being Die anderen Mendelssohns – Karl Mendelssohn Bartholdy (Reprodukt 2015). Short comics have been published internationally.
Dirk Uffelmann is Professor of Slavic Literatures and Cultures at the University of Passau. His research interests are Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian, and Central Asian literature, philosophy, religion, migration, masculinity, and internet studies. He has authored two monographs and co-edited twelve volumes, including Contemporary Polish Migrant Culture and Literature in Germany, Ireland, and the UK (Peter Lang Verlag 2011), Tam, vnutri. Praktiki vnutrennei kolonizatsii v kul’turnoi istorii Rossii [There within: Practices of Internal Colonization in Russia’s Cultural History] (Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 2012), Vladimir Sorokin’s Languages (University of Bergen 2013), and Postcolonial Slavic Literatures After Communism (Peter Lang Verlag 2016).
Adrian Wanner is Liberal Arts Research Professor of Slavic Languages and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Baudelaire in Russia (University Press of Florida 1996), Russian Minimalism: From the Prose Poem to the Anti-Story (Northwestern University Press 2003), and Out of Russia: Fictions of a New Translingual Diaspora (Northwestern University Press 2011). This last book is an investigation of contemporary Russian migrant literature written in French, German, English, and Hebrew. Born and raised in Switzerland, he has published six editions of Russian, Romanian, and Ukrainian poetry in his German verse translation. He is currently living in Berlin and writing a book on multilingualism and self-translation among Russian poets.
Stefan Wolff is Professor of International Security at the University of Birmingham. An expert on international crisis management and post-conflict state-building, he has published extensively, including the books Ethnic Conflict: A Global Perspective (Oxford University Press 2007), The European Union as a Conflict Manager (Routledge 2012, with Richard G. Whitman), and The European Neighbourhood Policy in Perspective: Context, Implementation, and Impact (Palgrave 2010, with Richard G. Whitman). Bridging the gap between academia and policy-making, he frequently advises governments and international organisations and has been involved in various stages of peace negotiations, including in Iraq, Moldova, Sudan, and Yemen. Wolff graduated from the Leipzig University, and holds an M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Susann Worschech is a Post-Doc Research Associate at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder. Her research interests include the political sociology of Central and Eastern Europe, civil society and social movements, democratisation, as well as methods of empirical research, in particular social network analysis. She graduated from the Humboldt University of Berlin with a diploma in Social Sciences. Her doctorate at the European University Viadrina focused on networks of external democracy promotion and the structuring of civil society in Ukraine.
Oleg Zhuravlev is a researcher at the Public Sociology Laboratory (Russia) and a PhD-candidate at the European University Institute (Italy). He received a Specialist degree from the Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of Science, and a Master's degree from the European University at St. Petersburg. Oleg studied at the European University Institute (Italy) in 2012-2016. His Master's thesis was on the social and political history of Soviet physics and the protest movement by the students of the Department of Physics of the Moscow State University in the 1950s. His PhD thesis is a comparative study of two research movements: the Ukrainian Euromaidan and the Russian “For fair elections”.
Aleksandar Zograf is the pseudonym of Saša Rakezić, a cartoonist from Serbia. In the early 1990s he produced self-published mini comics that depicted everyday life during the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia. He collaborated with Fantagraphics Books, a leading American independent comics publisher, which published Zograf’s collections of comics that addressed both the reality of life in the Balkans and the author’s inner visions, dreams and musings. In the past 20 years, his comic books were published in many countries, including Italy, France, Portugal, Germany, Poland, Hungary or Japan. Since 2003, his weekly comics have been published in the Serbian political magazine Vreme. Zograf's latest project is "Migrants' Stories", a six-page comic based on migrants' testimonies published in magazines in Serbia, Canada, Portugal, Spain and Sweden.