About
Meet our project members
Alar Kilp (PhD in political science from 2012) has been a lecturer in Comparative Politics at the University of Tartu since 2004. His research focuses on religion and politics, comparative politics, contested and controversial issues, and scholarship of teaching and learning in political science. He has published in Religion, State and Society, Religions, Society Register, Studies in Church History, Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe, and Estonian Journal of Military Studies. His recent articles on religious nationalism, extremism, European normative power, religion and soft power, religious authority, Euro-secularism, and legal regulation of same-sex relations have appeared in volumes published by Bloomsbury, Brill, Routledge, and Central European University Press.
Martin Mölder is a researcher in Comparative Politics at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies. He holds a PhD in political science from Central European University, where he researched methods for measuring political differences between parties. In addition to parties and party systems, his research interests include public opinion and political behaviour, as well as various applications of quantitative text analysis in political science. He has published in journals like Party Politics, Electoral Studies, Nations and Nationalism, and most recently in Perspectives on Politics.
Elena Pavlova, PhD (St Petersburg State University, 2000), MA in International Relations (University Complutense, Madrid, Spain), works as a researcher at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Science, University of Tartu. Her research interests include theory of international relations, cultural studies, postcolonial approach. Some recent publications: “Русское зарубежье: взгляд в зеркало”. In Новый мир, 1, pp. 172–180; “Popular Culture and Authoritarianism in Russia: A Study of Common Sense Through the Prism of Women’s Fiction”. In Europe Asia Studies (2021), 73 (2), pp. 318−339 (co-authored by V. Morozov); “The EU–Russia relationship through the lens of postcolonial theory”. In The Routledge Handbook of EU-Russia Relations: Structures, Actors, Issues London: Routledge (2021, pp. 139−148); „Uraan“ vene lugeja silmade läbi. Vikerkaar, (2021, pp. 4−5).
Heiko Pääbo is a lecturer in Politics of the Baltic Sea Countries and the director of the master’s programme in Central and Eastern European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies. His research interests include memory and identity politics, with a focus on changing national narratives. His most comprehensive study on this topic is Potential of Collective Memory Based International Identity Conflicts in Post-Imperial Space (2011). He is a member of the Association for the Study of Collective Memory. He has published in Journal of Baltic Studies, Journal on Baltic Security, Religion und Gesellschaft in Ost und West.
Maili Vilson is PhD researcher working with Estonian sources in this project. She is also the Deputy Head for Academic Affairs at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies, University of Tartu, and Executive Director of the Research and Competence Centre CEURUS (Centre for Eurasian and Russian Studies). Her PhD dissertation focuses on the Europeanisation of national foreign policy of EU member states. She has taught, among others, courses on the EU foreign policy, regime transitions, and history of Estonian foreign policy. She has published in international peer-reviewed journals as well as served as an expert for several studies commissioned by international think tanks, Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Parliament of Estonia. Her research interests include EU foreign policy, democratisation studies, regime transitions, and Estonian foreign policy.
Azniv Tadevosyan is a PhD student in political science at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies at the University of Tartu, where she also completed her MA in International Relations and Regional Studies programme in 2021. Her research interests include international relations, politics and aesthetics, identities and discourses, Russia studies. In the scope of her PhD dissertation, she is researching Russian dissident popular music as a case of interaction between popular art and politics. Her research focuses on studying hegemonic discourses in Russia, the agency and strategies of dissident artists in challenging these discourses, along with their transformation since 2012.
Aigerim Nurseitova is an analyst at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies at the University of Tartu. Her research interests center around Russian politics, society, and culture as well as their effects on the identities of the Russophone communities in Estonia and Kazakhstan. She holds a master’s degree in International Relations and Regional Studies from the University of Tartu.
Oksana Belova-Dalton, PhD, is a research fellow in international relations at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies, University of Tartu. Her research interests include Russia Studies as well as issues and structures of terrorism. She currently focuses on the far-right opposition to the Putin’s government during Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine. She has published in the Journal of Language and Politics, Border and Security Management, as well as Proceedings of Estonian Academy of Security Sciences. She studies terrorism and political violence at the University of St Andrews.
