Duncan Allan
Duncan Allan is an associate fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House, and the director of Octant Research & Analysis Ltd, an independent consultancy. For more than 28 years he was a member of the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office’s cadre of research analysts, working on the countries of the former Soviet Union, particularly Russia and Ukraine. He served at the British embassies in Moscow and Kyiv.
Annette Bohr
Annette Bohr is an associate fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House. With over 30 years’ experience as an analyst of Central Asian foreign, domestic and energy policies, she has authored dozens of works on regional politics, informal governance, energy issues and ethnic and language polices in Eurasia, including a monograph on petro-authoritarianism in Turkmenistan.
Annette regularly prepares briefings and reports for a range of corporate investors, government departments and international financial institutions. She was previously a fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University and an analyst at Manchester University and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Munich.
Annette holds degrees from the University of California at Berkeley, Harvard University and the University of Cambridge.
Mathieu Boulègue
Mathieu Boulègue is a research fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House. In his research, Mathieu focuses on Eurasian security and defence issues as well as on Russia’s foreign policy and military affairs. Part of his research addresses Russia–NATO relations, Russia–China defence and security affairs, and Arctic military security issues. Having trained as a policy and security analyst in the field of post-Soviet affairs, Mathieu regularly publishes articles and papers on Eurasian security and foreign policy questions.
Before joining Chatham House, Mathieu was a partner at a risk management and strategic research consultancy in France, working as director of Eurasian affairs. He graduated from Sciences Po Toulouse in France and King’s College London (MA in international conflict studies).
Keir Giles
Keir Giles is a senior consulting fellow with the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House. He also works with the Conflict Studies Research Centre (CSRC), a group of subject matter experts in Eurasian security.
Keir’s career began in aviation in the early 1990s, working with Soviet military and paramilitary aircraft in Crimea. With the BBC Monitoring Service, he specialized in military and economic issues in the former Soviet space, and in 2005–10 he was seconded to the UK Defence Academy, where he researched Russian military, defence and security challenges.
Keir is widely published on the topic of Russian cyber and information warfare. He is the author of Moscow Rules: What Drives Russia to Confront the West (Brookings Institution Press/Chatham House, 2019), which examines the long-term causes of conflict with Russia.
Nigel Gould-Davies
Nigel Gould-Davies is a senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), and the editor of Strategic Survey: The Annual Assessment of Geopolitics.
Prior to joining the IISS, Nigel was an associate fellow of Chatham House’s Russia and Eurasia Programme, while teaching and conducting research in Asia. From 2010 to 2014 he held senior government relations roles in the energy industry in Central and Southeast Asia. From 2000 to 2010 he served in the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, where his roles included head of the economics department in Moscow, ambassador to Belarus and project director in the Strategy Unit. From 1996 to 2000 he taught politics and international relations at Oxford University. He is the author of Tectonic Politics: Global Political Risk in an Age of Transformation (Brookings Institution Press/Chatham House, 2019). Nigel holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Oxford University and a PhD from Harvard University.
Philip Hanson
Philip Hanson is emeritus professor of the political economy of Russia and Eastern Europe at the University of Birmingham. He has worked in the Treasury, the Foreign & Commonwealth Office and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, as well as at a number of universities: Exeter, Michigan, Harvard, Kyoto, Sodertorn and Uppsala. He has acted as an analyst or consultant for Oxford Analytica and several banks and companies. His books include The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy: An Economic History of the USSR 1945 - 1991 (Routledge, 2003).
John Lough
John Lough is an associate fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House. He began his career as an analyst at the Soviet Studies (later Conflict Studies) Research Centre, focusing on Soviet/Russian security policy. He spent six years with NATO, and was the first Alliance representative to be based in Moscow (1995–98).
He gained direct experience of the Russian oil and gas industry at TNK-BP as a manager in the company’s international affairs team (2003–08). From 2008 to 2016, he ran the Russia and CIS practice at BGR Gabara, a public affairs and strategy consulting company.
Alongside his work with Chatham House, John is a consultant with Highgate, a strategic advisory firm.
Orysia Lutsevych
Orysia Lutsevych is a research fellow and head of the Ukraine Forum in the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House. She focuses on social change and the role of civil society in democratic transition in the post-Soviet region. Her recent research has analysed Russia’s use of proxy NGOs in achieving its foreign policy objectives. Prior to joining Chatham House, she led the start-up of Europe House Georgia and was executive director of the Open Ukraine Foundation. She has an MS in international relations from Lviv State University and an MS in public administration from the University of Missouri.
Kate Mallinson
Kate Mallinson is an associate fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House. An acknowledged independent political risk expert, she advises foreign companies, multinationals and international financial institutions on the impact of regulatory, security, domestic and geopolitical developments in the former Soviet Union.
Kate also researches informal networks and governance in Central Asia, and travels frequently to the region as an election observer for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). She has previously worked in advocacy in Uzbekistan (1999–2001), Ukraine (2001) and Russia (1996–97) for Médécins Sans Frontières.
She is a frequent panellist at conferences and events around the world, and often comments on developments for the media.
Anaïs Marin
Anaïs Marin is an independent Belarus expert and an associate fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House. In 2018 she was appointed UN special rapporteur on the human rights situation in Belarus, having previously been involved in policy expert and advocacy networks on the country. She also participated in several OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) election observation missions in the region.
Anaïs has published for various think-tanks, notably the Finnish Institute of International Affairs (FIIA, Helsinki), the EU Institute for Security Studies (EUISS, Paris) and most recently the Vilnius Institute for Policy Analysis. In her academic capacity, she has investigated the foreign policy of authoritarian regimes (‘dictaplomacy’), first as a Marie Curie Fellow (Collegium Civitas, Warsaw) and since 2019 with a grant from the Polish National Centre for Science (University of Warsaw). Her current research focuses on how Russian ‘sharp power’ impacts European democracy and regional security.
She received her PhD and MA from Sciences Po Paris/CERI.
James Nixey
James Nixey joined Chatham House in 2000 and has been director of the institute’s Russia and Eurasia Programme since 2013. He is also an associate fellow with the Geneva Centre for Security Policy and serves on the board of the journal UA: Ukraine Analytica.
His principal research interests concern Russia’s relationships with the other post-Soviet states and key international actors. James has also written for the Guardian, The Times, the Telegraph, the Independent, Newsweek, USA Today, BBC.co.uk and CNN.com. He holds degrees in modern languages and international relations, and has previous experience in journalism (as a reporter in Moscow in the late 1990s).
Ben Noble
Dr Ben Noble became an associate fellow of Chatham House in December 2020, joining the Russia and Eurasia Programme. An expert on Russian domestic politics, he is a lecturer in Russian politics at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, and a senior research fellow at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow.
Dr Noble frequently provides commentary and analysis on Russian domestic politics for academic, policy and general audiences in public events, as well as for the media.
In 2019, he was awarded a Rising Star Engagement Award by the British Academy for a project on the closure of legislatures in non-democracies. Before joining UCL, he was Herbert Nicholas Junior Research Fellow at New College, University of Oxford.
Nikolai Petrov
Nikolai Petrov is a senior research fellow with the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House in London, and a professor in the political science department at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. His research at Chatham House deconstructs the hidden decision-making process in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. He has authored dozens of analyses of Russia’s politics, post-Soviet transformation, the socio-economic and political development of Russia’s regions, democratization, federalism and elections.
Nikolai is a member of the Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia (PONARS Eurasia), the Scientific Advisory Council and the European Dialogue group. He holds a PhD in geography from Moscow State University.
Ekaterina Schulmann
Ekaterina is an associate fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House. She is also an associate professor at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences (MSSES), and senior lecturer at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA). From December 2018 to October 2019, she was a member of the Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights.
With a PhD in political science, she specializes in modern Russia’s legislative process, parliamentarism and decision-making mechanisms in hybrid political regimes. She authored the books Law-making as a political process (Moscow School of Political Studies, 2014) and Practical Politology: a guide to the contact with reality (collection of articles, ACT, 2018, 2020), and was one of the co-authors of The New Autocracy: Information, Politics, and Policy in Putin’s Russia (Brookings Institution Press, 2018), edited by Daniel Treisman.
She has a weekly programme on Echo Moscow radio station dedicated to popularizing political science terminology and concepts, and has a sizeable audience on her YouTube channel. Previously, she worked as a civil servant in a local administration, as a State Duma deputy’s assistant, as a political faction analyst, as an expert at the analytical department of the Russian State Duma, and as the legislative affairs director of a consulting company.
James Sherr
James Sherr OBE has been a senior fellow of the Estonian Foreign Policy Institute at the International Centre for Defence & Security in Tallinn since 2019. He also is an associate fellow and former head (2008–11) of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House.
He was a member of the social studies faculty of Oxford University from 1993 to 2012; a fellow of the Conflict Studies Research Centre of the UK Ministry of Defence from 1995 to 2008; and director of studies of the Royal United Services Institute (1983–85).
He has published extensively on Soviet and Russian military, security and foreign policy, as well as on energy security, the Black Sea region and Ukraine’s efforts to deal with Russia, the West and its own domestic problems.
He was awarded an OBE in the 2020 New Year’s Honours List for his services to British interests overseas.
Kataryna Wolczuk
Kataryna Wolczuk is an associate fellow of Chatham House’s Russia and Eurasia Programme and a professor of East European politics at the Centre for Russian, European and Eurasian Studies (CREES), University of Birmingham.
She has long experience of working with international organizations, think-tanks, governments and international media, and has extensively researched the post-Soviet countries. She frequently contributes to publications, conferences and events on the Eastern Partnership and Eurasian integration, as well as on the domestic and foreign policies of Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus.
Andrew Wood
Sir Andrew Wood is an associate fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House, where he focuses on Russia’s domestic and foreign policies. He was British ambassador to Yugoslavia from 1985 to 1989, and ambassador to Russia from 1995 to 2000, having earlier served in Moscow in 1964–66 and 1979–82. After his retirement from the Diplomatic Service in 2000, he acted on behalf of a number of firms with interests in Russia and other formerly Soviet countries.
