I am a political philosopher and historian of ideas specializing in the ideological transformations reshaping Russia, Europe, and the United States. Trained in the French tradition of political philosophy and intellectual history, my work is guided by a sociology of knowledge approach that investigates how ideas are produced, circulated, and institutionalized within specific political and cultural contexts. Drawing on political theory, comparative politics, critical geopolitics, cultural studies, and anthropology, I combine discourse analysis, fieldwork, surveys, and large-scale data to examine how political meaning is made and remade.

Over my career, I have founded, co-founded and/or led several major initiatives, including the Central Asia Program, PONARS Eurasia, the Arctic Sustainability Initiative and the Illiberalism Studies Program at The George Washington University. Built through sustained external funding and long-term institutional partnerships, these platforms reflect a commitment to agenda-setting, intellectual entrepreneurship, and the creation of transnational research communities that shape scholarly and policy debates.

At the beginning of my career, I focused on Central Asia, analyzing regional geopolitics vis-à-vis Russia and China, the dynamics of labor migration, and competing models of nation-building in the five post-Soviet states. 

Since my student years, I have been deeply engaged with the ideological landscape of contemporary Russia. This trajectory began with my PhD on nineteenth-century Slavophilism and Aryan identity and continued with my habilitation at Sciences Po on nationalism under Putin. Over two decades, this research has examined how illiberal and conservative ideas shape Russia’s domestic governance and foreign policy strategy, and how Russia’s trajectory illuminates broader transformations within the Western social order. 

Parallel to this work, I developed a sustained research program on environmental thought and the Russian Arctic. Through fieldwork in multiple Arctic cities and collaboration with climatologists and geographers, I studied the intersection of infrastructure, climate change, and urban governance. This Arctic research deepened my interest in how material environments, territorial imaginaries, and sovereignty narratives interact in shaping political worldviews.
Over time, the center of gravity of my scholarship has shifted from area studies toward conceptual history and global comparative analysis. My work now focuses on the diverse intellectual and political challenges confronting liberalism and on the emergence of competing normative alternatives to the liberal order. 

In 2020, I founded the Illiberalism Studies Program, a pioneering research initiative devoted to conceptualizing illiberalism as a global ideological phenomenon and analyzing its implications for democratic governance and the international order. Complementing this work, I launched post-liberalism.org, an editorial platform that curates and commissions scholarship exploring how postliberal thought engages the crises of liberal modernity and articulates new visions of community, moral order, and the common good, while remaining attentive to the risks and contradictions embedded in postliberal projects.

I argue that politics today is not only strained by institutional fatigue, polarization, or democratic backsliding. It is also facing a deeper challenge: a crisis of imagination. The old scripts no longer persuade; new ones are still emerging. Traditional left–right distinctions blur, while new fault lines—especially around technology and the human condition—reshape political debate. If democracy is to be renewed, it requires moving beyond institutional tinkering and reclaiming political imagination itself. This conviction guides my exploration of how culture informs our understanding of social order and how new political imaginaries take shape in times of systemic transformation.