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—investigating how ideas are produced, circulated, and institutionalized in 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 study how political meaning is made and remade.

My research operates across three main axes. First, I study the ideological landscape of contemporary Russia, with a particular focus on how illiberal and conservative ideas shape both domestic policy and foreign policy strategy. This long-standing interest began with my PhD on 19th-century Slavophilism and Aryan identity and my habilitation (2^ndPhD) at Sciences Po on nationalism in Putin’s Russia. My most recent book, Ideology and Meaning-Making under the Putin Regime (Stanford University Press, 2025), synthesizes two decades of research on Russia’s ideological ecosystems.

A second axis of my work explores the global rise of illiberalism and the emergence of postliberalism as a normative alternative to the liberal order. In 2020, I founded the Illiberalism Studies Program at The George Washington University, which I continue to direct. The program investigates the ideological, cultural, and sociological dimensions of illiberal politics around the world—from state-driven authoritarianism to grassroots conservative mobilizations—and their implications for democratic governance and the global order.

As Chief Editor of post-liberalism.org, I curate and commission scholarship and commentary that explores how postliberal thought engages the crises of liberal modernity—technological acceleration, ecological collapse, economic fragmentation, and the erosion of social trust. The platform serves as an intellectual forum for scholars, practitioners, and public thinkers seeking to articulate new visions of community, moral order, and the common good. It highlights the constructive dimensions of postliberal theory while remaining attentive to its tensions, risks, and political diversity.

My third area of research focuses on environmental thought and the Russian Arctic. Over the past decade, I have conducted fieldwork in Arctic cities and collaborated with climatologists and geographers to study the intersection of infrastructure, climate change, and urban governance. I have published widely on Arctic urban regimes, indigenous and Muslim identities in the High North, and circumpolar urban culture. I am now expanding this work to examine right- and left-wing environmental philosophies in Russia, Europe, and the United States.

Earlier in my career, I focused on Central Asia, particularly Kazakhstan’s nation-building, labor migration, and regional geopolitics vis-à-vis Russia and China. I served as Associate Director and then Director of the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (IERES) at GWU from 2015 to 2022, and have held positions at the French Institute for International Relations (Ifri) and Observo, the think tank of the French-Russian Chamber of Commerce.