My research focuses on the connections between nationalism, political development, and security, with a regional focus on Russia and the former Soviet Union. My work can be grouped into the three categories below.
Nationalism and ethnic politics in Russia
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Abstract: Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 radically changed the way many viewed the nature of the Russian state. The centrality of resentment and imperial nostalgia in Russian narratives led many to argue that Russian imperialism was a key force behind the invasion. By extension, this led to the idea that decolonization – largely in scholarship, but also among some policy circles – offered a way to better understanding Russia in this new context. To this end, this Element examines the debates over decolonization in the Russian case. It begins by contextualizing these debates through an examination of Russia's historical development as an empire. It then identifies and disentangles three key focal points: decolonization as domestic Russian politics, the transnational politics of decolonization, and decolonization as a scholarly endeavor. By doing so, this Element shows where decolonization has merit, but also where it is contested or limited.
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Abstract: Russian nation-building policy has often been described as ambiguous, blending a rhetorical commitment to the state’s multinational character together with more exclusionary rhetoric and policies. Drawing from original survey questions on national identity commissioned in December 2022, I find that Russian citizens continue to endorse a multinational vision of the Russian state during wartime. Respondents are simultaneously likely to exclude minorities from being fully considered as “true Rossians” [istinnye rossiiane], while socioeconomic and political factors are meaningfully associated with these patterns. In line with previous scholarship, these findings underscore the blurriness of the russkii/rossiiskii distinction in practice: just as russkii should not always be interpreted as an exclusively ethnic term, rossiiskii should not be seen as a non-ethnic category, either. The findings in the Russian case carry implications for understanding how nation-builders in multiethnic contexts may seek to cater to ethnic majorities while simultaneously signaling commitments to ethnic diversity.
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Abstract: This article explores developments in center-region relations between the Russian federal government and the Republic of Tatarstan, a federal subject of the Russian Federation. I argue that instrumentalist accounts are unable to satisfactorily explain several key moments in Tatarstan’s relations with the federal center, and that a focus on symbolic politics provides important analytical leverage. I examine three such episodes: aborted plans to introduce a Latin script for the Tatar language in 1999, the expiration of treaty-based relations and the assault on the region’s Tatar-language education policy in 2017, and the institution of the presidency – which exists to this day. In all three cases, interest-based explanations alone fail to account for what actually happened, whereas ideational explanations can help explain and interpret regional leaders’ actions. This has important implications for how we understand regional political dynamics in Russia amidst conditions of centralization.
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Security, conflict, and regime dynamics in Eurasia
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Abstract: Conventional thinking suggests that autocrats need enemies and thus have incentives to create them. Russia's Vladimir Putin is often thought to reap domestic legitimacy from belligerence. We examine multiple public opinion datasets collected in Russia that span Putin's presidency to confirm that he gains popularity from a sense of Western threat. But findings indicate that until 2021, these gains came primarily from a carefully cultivated domestic reputation for responding to threats with moderation instead of bellicosity. Our survey experiment further suggests that Putin wins as much support when he is prudent and cooperative as when he is hostile and aggressive. These findings add to evidence that Russia's full-scale 2022 invasion of Ukraine was not a war of domestic political necessity. They also help explain why Putin felt that he had to promote the invasion at home as a careful, limited, defensive act rather than something glorious for which the Russian population should fully mobilize. Even the most aggressive autocrats may still cater to public preferences for moderate foreign policy.
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Abstract: While the Russian decision to annex Crimea has been widely explored and debated, scholarship has largely overlooked the Ukrainian response. Why did the Ukrainian side refrain from escalating? I address this gap, leveraging recently declassified primary-source materials from Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council to provide an original explanation for the Ukrainian decision not to fight for the peninsula. I find evidence in favor of realist explanations, while domestic politics was largely absent in decision-makers’ discussions. Additionally, I find prospect theory to offer a compelling account for the Ukrainian decision. This article therefore explains why decision-makers were risk-averse despite the loss of Ukrainian territory.
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Working paper: Soft Power in Hard Times: Strategic Narratives and Public Opinion on the Russia-Ukraine War, with Raushan Zhandayeva
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Abstract: What shapes public attitudes towards foreign wars? While international relations scholarship has acknowledged the importance of narratives in shaping states’ strategic communications and behavior, we know less about how strategic narratives can influence domestic audiences’ attitudes towards foreign affairs, a gap which is especially relevant during major crises such as wars, when sharply diverging narratives compete for support and sympathy of foreign audiences. To address this gap, we consider public opinion towards the Russia-Ukraine War in India, presenting results from an original survey and survey-embedded experiment. Results suggest that different narrative content can influence attitudes towards interstate conflicts. Specifically, framing the conflict as an imperial war of conquest is associated with greater blame of Russia and less blame towards Ukraine, with these effects amplified when the narrative is communicated by an Indian messenger
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Nation-building in multiethnic societies
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Abstract: This article offers a comparative analysis of post-Soviet leaders’ new year addresses to the nation. As highly prominent, programmatic speeches, such texts provide a unique and valuable basis for examining insights from literatures on authoritarian political communication and regime legitimation. Collecting 152 new year addresses from across the region (Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan), we find systematic differences in leaders’ political communication depending on the openness of the regime, both in ordinary times and during global crises such as COVID-19. Autocrats’ acknowledgment of mass unrest, however, is less consistent, which we argue reflects broader uncertainties in the political as seen in our case comparisons of Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Uzbekistan. Across all our cases we find leaders increasingly using new year addresses to articulate claims about the identity of the state and the nation, (re)interpreting its history, past achievements, as well as defining a vision of the future. Moreover, these visions coalesce around unitary understandings of the nation, replacing multiethnic narratives of the immediate post-Soviet period. The unique status of the new year as one of the most enduring “invented traditions” of the Soviet Union provides an important lens to assess continuity and change across the region.
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Abstract: Although a large literature has examined the effects of exposure to state symbols on political attitudes, voting behavior, and in/outgroup bias, there has been little work examining symbols’ effects on nationalist attitudes themselves, with existing studies offering contradictory findings. Leveraging conceptual insights from scholarship on nationalism and ethnic politics, I employ original data from a survey experiment conducted in the US in November 2020 to ask how exposure to state symbols influences individuals’ attitudes towards the nation relative to other identity categories. I find evidence that exposure to the US flag makes individuals significantly more likely to express pride in being American whilst simultaneously dampening attachment to other identity categories. At the same time, an almost identical effect is found when respondents are asked to reflect upon the meaning of the symbol.
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