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Professor Anastasia Shesterinina
Chair in Comparative Politics

Biography

I joined the Department in January 2023 as Chair in Comparative Politics. I currently hold a £1.2m UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship and direct the Centre for the Comparative Study of Civil War established as part of this Fellowship. Previously, I was a Lecturer and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sheffield and a Canada Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University, affiliated with the Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. I obtained my PhD in Political Science from the University of British Columbia.

My fieldwork-intensive research explores the internal dynamics of and international intervention in contemporary armed conflict, with a focus on social mobilisation, ex-combatant reintegration and civilian protection norms and practices. In 2021, I launched a 7-year UKRI-funded Civil War Paths project “Understanding Civil War from Pre- to Post-War Stages: A Comparative Approach,” which views civil war as a social process that connects dynamics of conflict from pre- to post-war periods through evolving interactions between non-state, state, civilian, and external actors involved, and compares different paths civil wars follow through coordinated fieldwork and analysis with a team of interdisciplinary researchers. 

My book Mobilizing in Uncertainty: Collective Identities and War in Abkhazia (Cornell University Press, 2021) was awarded the APSA Interpretive Methodologies and Methods Charles Taylor Book Award and the ASEEES Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies in 2022. The book asks how ordinary people navigate the uncertainty of the war’s onset to arrive at different mobilisation decisions. Based on nearly 200 life history interviews with participants and non-participants in the Georgian-Abkhaz war of 1992-1993, it shows that individuals come to perceive risk in different ways, affected by earlier experiences of conflict and by social networks at the time of mobilisation, and act differently based on whom they understand to be threatened and mobilise to protect.

My work has been published in American Political Science Review, Journal of Peace Research, Perspectives on Politics, European Journal of International Relations, Cambridge Review of International Affairs and International Peacekeeping, among other journals.

I have been actively involved in the debates on data access and research transparency in Political Science as a working group lead on Evidence from Researcher Interactions with Human Participants at the Qualitative Transparency Deliberations of the APSA Qualitative and Multi-Method Research Section and have written on ethics and openness in sensitive field-based research.

I have also contributed to policy discussions on conflict and peace processes, including at the Geneva Peace Week and the Chatham House panels on the implementation of the 2016 peace agreement in Colombia, as well as by acting as an expert on the Principles for Peace Stakeholder Platform.

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Contact details

Anastasia Shesterinina
Department of Politics and International Relations
University of York
YORK
YO10 5DD

anastasia.shesterinina@york.ac.uk