Matthew Blackburn
Matthew Blackburn is a Senior Researcher in NUPI's Research Group on Russia, Asia and International Trade. His main research agenda addresses the politics of contemporary autocracies in Russia and Eurasia, including both domestic politics and interstate relations. He has researched contemporary autocratic legitimation and popular responses to state discourses, with a particular focus on how regimes mobilise on the ideational level and cope with the challenges of nationalist and populist opposition. He also researches subnational variation in Russian society and regional politics, and studies how contemporary authoritarian regimes evolve, alternating between periods of stabilisation, normalisation and mobilisation.
He is currently developing project proposals on comparative authoritarian politics, displacement and emigration, and new competition for influence among the former-Soviet states in light of the war in Ukraine.
He is also an affiliated researcher at the Institute of Russian and Eurasian Studies at Uppsala University.
Education
2018 PhD, (Russian and East European Studies Programme) University of Glasgow.
2013 International Masters in Russian and Eastern European Studies and International Relations, Glasgow University and KIMEP University (Almaty
Work Experience
2023- Senior Researcher, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI)
2021-2023 Ulam Research Fellow, University of Warsaw
2018-2021 Postdoctoral researcher, Institute of Russian and Eurasian Studies at Uppsala University
Publications All publications
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Cheering and Jeering on the Escalator to Hell: One Year of UK Media Coverage on the War in Ukraine
Publication | 2023While there is a common awareness of wartime media censorship in both Ukraine and Russia, there has been less research on Western media coverage and1
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Covid-19 and the Russian Regional Response: Blame Diffusion and Attitudes to Pandemic Governance
Publication | 2023As was the case with other federal states, Russia’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic was decentralized and devolved responsibility to regional gover1
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Discourses of Russian-speaking youth in Nazarbayev’s Kazakhstan: Soviet Legacies and Responses to Nation-building
Publication | 2019Research into post-independence identity shifts among Kazakhstan’s Russian-speaking minorities has outlined a number of possible pathways, such as di1
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Ekspert etter Wagner-retretten: Tror forsvarstopper kan miste jobben
Publication : Interview | 2023
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Escaping the Long Shadow of Homo Sovieticus: Reassessing Stalin’s Popularity and Communist Legacies in Post-Soviet Russia
Publication | 2023It is often asserted that the values and attitudes of Homo Sovieticus, marked in the rising “popularity” of Stalin, live on in contemporary Russia, a1
Articles All articles
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Russia, Asia and International Trade
3 Jan 2022What is the role of Russia, the Arctic and Asia in global politics? How are these societies developing? How do international trade, innovation and po1
