Speakers:
Oleksandr Fisun is a Professor of Political Science and Department Chair at the V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University in Ukraine. His primary research interests are comparative politics and democratic theory. He has held visiting fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute, the National Endowment for Democracy (Washington, DC), the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Toronto, the Ellison Center for Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies at the University of Washington (Seattle), Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta (Edmonton), and Aleksanteri Institute at the University of Helsinki.
Alexander Iskandaryan is a political scientist and the Director of the Yerevan-based Caucasus Institute. His areas of study are ethnopolitical conflicts, post-Communist transformations and nation-building in the former USSR in general and in the Caucasus in particular. He has published and spoken on the emergence of post-Soviet institutions, elites and identities; he has also conducted and supervised research on conflicts, migrations, discourses, media development and cross-border integration. Alexander lectures on Political Science at the Caucasus Institute and other universities in Armenia. He is also a popular political commentator on television and other types of media.
Azamat K. Junisbai is a Professor of Sociology at Pitzer College in Claremont, California. A native of Almaty, Kazakhstan, he got his PhD in Sociology from Indiana University in 2009. His research interests include social stratification, welfare state attitudes, and public opinion about political and economic inequality in post-Soviet Central Asia. Azamat’s work has received generous support from a wide range of sources, including the National Science Foundation, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, the Social Science Research Council, American Councils, and IREX.
Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili is the director of the Center for Governance and Markets and an Associate Professor of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh as well as a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and President of the Central Eurasian Studies Society. Her research focuses on political economy, foreign policy, and the challenges of building effective governance, with a focus on Central Asia and Afghanistan. Murtazashvili has extensive experience in the policy world, having served with the United States Agency for International Development in Uzbekistan and an advisor to the World Bank, the U.S. Department of Defense, the United Nations Developme