(In alphabetical order)

Camilla Callessen

Camilla is a PhD Candidate in International Relations at Brussels School of International Studies. Her PhD dissertation focuses on the intractable conflicts in the post-soviet space, their social-psychological developments and consequences, and the relation between the conflicts and Russia’s foreign policy behavior and decision-making. Camilla’s research is supervised by Dr Tom Casier.

CONTACT:

Email address: ce259@kent.ac.uk

Rabekah Everett

Rabekah is a PhD candidate at the School of Politics and IR at the University of Kent, supervised by Professor Richard Sakwa. She commenced her PhD research in 2013. Her research interests are the development of Russia’s economic institutions and the impact of economic crises on Russia’s economic transition.

CONTACT:

Web profile: https://www.kent.ac.uk/politics/staff/assistant-lecturers/everett.html

Hendrik Huelss

Dr Hendrik Huelss is a Postdoctoral researcher at the Global Europe Centre, University of Kent, and Post-Doctoral Fellow at the School of Politics and IR, University of Kent. His expertise is on the EU’s external relations, especially on the southern dimension of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) and on the normative power Europe debate, using governmentality concepts as a theoretical approach to study the EU’s governing. In this regard, Hendrik’s main research interest is the role of foreign policy instruments in implementing normative objectives. He is currently engaged in research on the ENP’s post-Arab Spring gender politics, on the normativity of EU sanctions towards Russia and on the relation between instruments and norms. Moreover, he currently develops a project on the agency of security technologies.

Having spent almost two years in Japan from 2013 to 2015, inter alia as Visiting Fellow at the EU Studies Institute in Tokyo (EUSI), Keio University Tokyo, Hendrik is also interested in EU-Japan relations and recent initiatives for a strategic normative-political partnership between both actors. Hendrik Huelss is also Associated Researcher at the Centre for Advanced Security Theory (CAST), University of Copenhagen.

CONTACT:  H.C.Huelss@kent.ac.u

Web profile: http://www.kent.ac.uk/politics/gec/research-associates/hendrik-huelss.html

Łukasz Janulewicz

Łukasz is a PhD Candidate in International relations, at the School of Politics and IR at the University of Kent. He also is a member of the Global Europe Centre at Kent. His thesis investigates the origins and development of Poland’s foreign aid policy. His broader research interests are Polish foreign policy, policy transfer and foreign aid provision (particularly in the post-Soviet region).

Łukasz’s PhD was supervised by Professor Richard Whitman and Professor Richard Sakwa.

CONTACT:  laj30@kent.ac.uk

Twitter: https://twitter.com/la_janulewicz

Oybek Madiyev

Oybek joined the School of Politics and IR at the University of Kent in 2013 to pursue a PhD in International Relations. Oybek’s PhD research title is ‘The Great Power rivalries in post-Soviet Central Asia: Can Russia compete with China’s growing economic prowess in the region?’. Oybek is supervised by Dr Adrian Pabst, Professor Richard Sakwa, and Dr Pak Lee.

His research interests include International and Comparative Political Economy, International Relations, economic policy of Russia, China, US, Japan and the EU in Central Asia. Oybek holds a Diploma in English Philology from the University of World Languages (Tashkent, Uzbekistan), an LLM in Comparative Studies of Politics and Administration in Asia from Kyushu University (Fukuoka, Japan) and an MPhil from the University of Sheffield. His MPhil research topic was ‘The Political Economy of Japan’s External Energy Dependence: Foreign Direct Investment and Economic Diplomacy in Central Asia’. This project was supervised by Professor Tony Heron.

CONTACT:  om84@kent.ac.uk

Web profile: https://www.kent.ac.uk/politics/staff/assistant-lecturers/madiyev.html

Igor Merheim-Eyre

Igor is a PhD Candidate at the School of Politics and IR at the University of Kent, supervised by Professors Elena Korosteleva and Richard Whitman. He is a member of the Global Europe Centre, and teaching assistant at POLIR. Igor’s research focuses on the consular sphere of diplomacy, particularly the protection of EU Member States’ citizens in third countries, and the EU’s ‘visa diplomacy’ in its eastern neighbourhood. In particular, Igor is interested in the transformations that have taken place in consular affairs, including, the impact of European integration, development of new technology and the ‘externalisation’ of EU internal security concerns beyond the borders of the Union. He is also a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines on issues of European defence and security, the EU’s relations with its eastern neighbours and the Visegrad Group.

CONTACT:  im507@kent.ac.uk

Twitter: @MerheimEyre

Webpage: https://www.kent.ac.uk/politics/staff/assistant-lecturers/merheim-eyre.html

Camille Merlen

Camille Merlen is a PhD Candidate in International Relations at the School of Politics and IR at the University of Kent. His research project studies Russian conceptions of sovereignty and questions characterisations of Russia as a classic, ‘Westphalian’ power by analysing tensions between sovereignism on the one hand, and engagement with international institutions on the other hand. Camille previously studied History, Russian, French, and European Affairs at the University of Amsterdam, Sciences Po, and Moscow State University.

Camille is supervised by Professor Richard Sakwa and Dr Adrian Pabst.

CONTACT:  C.Merlen@kent.ac.uk

Web profile: https://www.kent.ac.uk/politics/staff/assistant-lecturers/merlen.html

Adrian Pabst

Dr Adrian Pabst is Senior Lecturer in Politics in the School of Politics & IR at the University of Kent where he also directs the Centre for Federal Studies, His research is an interface of political theory, political economy and European politics – with a focus on critiques of liberalism and post-liberal alternatives. In relation to Europe, he has published a number of articles and book chapters on the crisis of EU integration, possible pathways for the Eurozone, and ideas of Greater Europe to foster cooperation between the EU and other European powers such as Russia and Ukraine. One of his future projects is a book provisionally entitled ‘European Commonwealth: Greater Europe in a world of resurgent empires’.

CONTACT:  A.Pabst@kent.ac.uk

Webpage: https://www.kent.ac.uk/politics/staff/canterbury/pabst.html

Zachary Paikin

Zachary Paikin is a PhD candidate at the School of Politics and IR at the University of Kent, supervised by Professor Richard Sakwa and ??. Zachary holds a Bachelor of Arts in Middle East Studies from McGill University and a Master of Global Affairs degree from the University of Toronto’s Munk School. He is a regular columnist and political commentator in the Canadian media, and has contributed published analysis on international affairs for institutes in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. He is currently pursuing a PhD in international relations, researching Russian and Chinese perspectives on the liberal international conception of state sovereignty and R2P.

CONTACT:  zap4@kent.ac.uk

Tanya Radchuk

Tanya is a PhD candidate at the School of Politics and IR at the University of Kent, supervised by Elena Korosteleva. She is Teaching Assistant at POLIR.

Tanya’s interest focuses on the EU-Russia relations in the context of their parallel region-building projects – the European Neighbourhood Policy/ Eastern Partnership and the Eurasian Economic Union – and the countries that they target in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus.

Before starting her PhD, Tanya worked as a Research Assistant in EU-funded project ‘Europeanising or Securitising the ‘Outsiders’: assessing the EU’s partnership-building approach with Eastern Europe’ at the Aberystwyth University. She is contributor to Special Issue ‘Eastern Partnership: a New Opportunity for Eastern Neighbours?’ (Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, March 2011).

Tanya holds a MSc degree in Politics and Government in the EU from the London School of Economics, UK. She is from Minsk, Belarus.

CONTACT:

Email address: tr279@kent.ac.uk

Richard Sakwa

Richard Sakwa is Professor of Russian and European Politics at the School of Politics and IR at the University of Kent and an Associate Fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House. He has published widely on Soviet, Russian and post-communist affairs.

Currently Professor Sakwa is working on a book called Russia against the Rest: Problematizing the Post-Cold War Crisis of World Order (contracted for Cambridge University Press). When George Orwell coined the term ‘cold war’ in an article in Tribune in October 1945, he could hardly have imagined that 70 years later one of the most active debates would be whether the term ‘new cold war’ was the right one to describe the renewed period of confrontation between Russia and the West. The first part of the book traces the crisis in world order up to 2014, and the second part examines the theoretical and empirical dynamics of the crisis today.

CONTACT:  R.Sakwa@kent.ac.uk

Web profile: http://www.kent.ac.uk/politics/staff/canterbury/sakwa.html

Veronika Stoyanova

Veronika Stoyanova is a PhD candidate at the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research at the University of Kent. Her PhD research focuses on Bulgaria’s recent waves of protest mobilisation in the context of the country’s post-1989 ‘transition’ to liberal democracy and free market economy. The research employs a Gramscian framework to study the ideological articulations of different social groups whose interests clashed during the mass protests of 2013.

Veronika’s research interests more generally include critical approaches to the postcommunist transitions of Eastern Europe; the roles of power, ideology, and utopia in the region’s struggles for social change; democratic participation and class and racial exclusion (particularly of Roma minorities in Eastern Europe); critical language studies.

Before starting her PhD, Veronika coordinated a charity programme and undertook a research internship at the BBC World Service Trust (now BBC Media Action). She has a Master’s degree in Social Psychology from the London School of Economics (where her dissertation studied racist political speech against the Roma minority in France) and a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Canterbury Christ Church University.

CONTACT:  vs230@kent.ac.uk

Susanne Szkola

Susanne Szkola started reading for her PhD in International Relations in September 2015 at the Brussels School for International Studies at the University of Kent.

Susanne’s PhD dissertation focuses on security identities and their construction in the EU’s Eastern Partnership Countries based on cognitive/affective-emotional/utilitarian resources of motivation in order to move beyond and cut across the values-vs.-interest debate, to integrate an in-depth analysis of potentially conflicting patterns of norm internalization, and – in doing so – to elaborate on more nuanced transnational perspectives from the shared neighborhood. Thus, to substantiate the understanding of conflict formation in the EU Eastern Partnership countries vis-à-vis the EU and Russia. Her supervisors are Dr. Tom Casier and Dr. Elena Korosteleva.

Her research interests include IR theory, Security and Conflict Studies, Political and Social Psychology, Foreign Policy Analysis (EU/Eastern Europe and Central Asia/Russia) and the European Union (especially CSDP/ENP/Enlargement). She is also very interested in interdisciplinary research.

Prior to her PhD Susanne obtained a MA in European Interdisciplinary Studies at the College of Europe, Warsaw, and a Bachelor in Political Science, Economics, Law and Eastern European Studies at the University of Heidelberg.

CONTACT:  sses2@kent.ac.uk

Web profile: http://www.kent.ac.uk/brussels/staff/profiles/research/szkola.html