I was trained within the tradition of French political philosophy and intellectual history, which places considerable emphasis on tracing the sociology of knowledge that makes the production of ideas possible. Unlike classical “history of ideas” approaches, I draw upon multidisciplinary approaches and perspectives. I find works in political philosophy, comparative politics, critical geopolitics, cultural studies and anthropology inspiring. I also employ multiple methodological approaches, ranging from content and discourse analysis to surveys and big-data databases, as well as in-depth fieldwork and interviews with actors.

My first master’s thesis was devoted to nostalgia for the idea of Mitteleuropa and the Habsburg Empire, which would later inform Central Europe’s first illiberal wave. I then moved to explore the ideological landscape in Russia and its ideational constellations, tracing how these impacted domestic and foreign policy. My PhD examined the 19^th-century Russian school of Slavophilism, comparing the way it used the concept of Aryan identity to the racialist interpretations emerging during the same period in Western Europe (especially Germany). My habilitation (2nd PhD) at Sciences Po Paris dealt with contemporary nationalism in Putin’s Russia. Since then, I have studied the different ideological ecosystems in today’s Russia.
My research operates along several axes that study: the ideological landscape in Eastern Europe and Russia; global illiberalism; and environmental and sustainability philosophies, especially Russia’s Arctic.

The first axis relates to contemporary critiques of liberalism, and especially the production of conservative and illiberal ideologies in post-socialist countries, particularly Russia. This research axis extends all the way back to my university years and since then, I have studied the different ideological ecosystems in today’s Russia. My latest book, Ideology and Meaning-Making under the Putin Regime (Stanford University Press, 2025), in this sense concludes two decades of research on this topic.

During this period of study, I gradually began exploring Russia’s soft power abroad and its reception by local audiences. I have suggested that—contrary to the usual definitions of soft power as universalist—Russia has developed a particularist, “niche,” soft power that allows it to speak to different audiences abroad with different ideological repertoires. As part of this project, I have studied the reception of Russian narratives by conservative constituencies in Europe and the United States and am now working on how Russia dialogues with the Global South using themes such as sovereignty, civilizationism, and anticolonialism.

Building off of this, another of my research axes centers the critique of liberalism more globally, rather than just in Eastern Europe. In this spirit, in 2020 I founded the Illiberalism Studies Program at the George Washington University (GW), and I have been its director since. The Illiberalism Studies Program studies the different faces of illiberal politics and thought in today’s world, taking into account the diversity of their cultural context, their intellectual genealogy, the sociology of their popular support, and their implications for international politics. Connected to this initiative is our Post-Liberalism platform, which serves as a stage for debating the future of the liberalism and the growth of post-liberal theories.

This global, conceptual, turn in my career materialized most recently in the Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism, which under my editorship collected 40+ chapters exploring the notion of illiberalism from different philosophical and social-scientific perspectives. My current research agenda investigates how grassroots mobilization underpins the popular support given to illiberal projects and how cultural products and social practices structure illiberal communities, with case studies mostly from the United States and Europe.

My third research axis concerns environmental philosophies and sustainability issues. I was privileged to conduct fieldwork in Russia’s Arctic cities over the course of 10 years and have worked alongside climatologists and geographers who specialize in permafrost, and how housing and energy infrastructure is impacted by climate change. I have published widely on Arctic urban regimes and cultures, as well as on Polar Islam and on the Russian High North’s multinational identity. I am now interested in Russia’s environmental-philosophical traditions, and more globally on right-wing and left-wing philosophies of the environment in Europe and the United States.

Previously, I worked on the political and cultural trajectories of the five Central Asian states, especially Kazakhstan. I studied the region’s nation-building projects, as well as their relationship with China and Russia and labor migrations in the Eurasian space.

I was Associate Director and then Director of the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (IERES) at GW between 2015 and 2022 and founded and led several programs there. I was also a Senior Research Fellow at the French Institute for International Relations (Ifri) in Paris and I am an advisor with Observo, the think tank of the French-Russian Chamber of Commerce.