YUVAL WEBER, PH.D

Yuval Weber, Ph.D, is the Kennan Institute Associate Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies and was the inaugural DMGS-Kennan Institute fellow. He has taught courses at Daniel Morgan Graduate School on Russian politics and statecraft, International Relations theory, and research methods.

Dr. Weber has an exceptional grasp of issues related to international security and foreign policy. In the classroom, he offers insight into many topics including the origins and practices of Russian statecraft. As a former researcher at the Carnegie Moscow Center and the New Economic School in Moscow, he has gathered extensive in-country experience which has deepened his understanding of the dynamics of the region.

He previously taught at Harvard University as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department on Government and a Kathryn W. and Shelby Cullom Davis Research Fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. Dr. Weber’s first academic position was as an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of World Economy and International Affairs at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.

Dr. Weber is a frequent guest on US and international media, including CTV (Canada) and CGTN (China) and publishes regularly to American and Russian newspapers.

Dr. Weber is currently working on a project that examines the sources of liberal and anti-liberal dissatisfaction for powers in the international system and the strategies they employ to stake their claims for revising the international order. The first manuscript from that project is about the tension between demands of economic modernization and the security state in Russian political economy. It asks why pro-market economic reform efforts in Russia follow similar trajectories even among very different types of government like monarchy, communism, and “sovereign democracy.” It argues that Russian leaders pursue economic reform primarily not to improve economic performance for its own sake, but to avoid falling behind peer competitors internationally. The manuscript shows that when the security rationale behind reforms changes or disappears, so does the enthusiasm for reform itself. It is scheduled for publication in 2019 (Agenda/Columbia UP).