This dissertation investigates the Soviet raspredelenie system, the mandatory job assignment system for graduates of higher education and secondary specialised vocational training, which operated from 1933 to 1991. Conceived to smooth the transition from education to work and allocate specialists across the economy, raspredelenie also functioned as a mechanism of state-directed migration and social engineering. The study focuses on its implementation in the Baltic republics (Estonia and Latvia) from the 1958 educational reforms through the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The project has two main aims. First, it examines relations between Soviet central authorities and the occupied Baltics through the bureaucratic development of raspredelenie and the migration flows it produced, especially its role in sovietisation and russification. Second, it explores the lived experiences of graduates and administrators within the system, investigating how young specialists perceived mobility, how local societies received them, and the scope of individual agency within state assignment. Despite its significance for Soviet education, labour, and migration, raspredelenie remains understudied, particularly in the late Soviet context and its implications for state control. This dissertation addresses this gap by framing the system as a tool of state-building and socio-economic control in the Soviet western borderlands. It asks how the distribution of a highly skilled workforce shaped both the economic and social fabric of the Baltics and individual life stories. Methodologically, the project combines archival research, periodical analysis, and oral history. Sources include government documents, ministry correspondence, personnel files, and statistical reports in Estonia and Latvia. The focus will be on engineers, a cohort that expanded markedly after the 1960s and embodied Soviet professionalisation and bureaucratisation. Case studies of several enterprises will be used to trace both structural and personal developments over the years. By centring the Baltic experience, this dissertation contributes to the economic and social history of the late Soviet Union, highlighting the interplay of state power, planning, labour mobility, state-building, and individual lives under “mature socialism.” It will shed light on mechanisms of Sovietisation beyond overt repression and on the continuities and ruptures between Soviet and post-Soviet transformations, situating the Baltics within broader debates on education, migration, and labour in the socialist world.

Since its independence in 1991, Ukraine’s political trajectory has been defined by an oscillation between democratization and autocratization. While successive administrations have expressed varying degrees of democratic intent, the primary obstacle to institutionalization has remained a phenomenon pervading all levels of national politics: pervasive patronal ties. Utilizing Henry Hale’s taxonomy, Ukraine’s regime has historically fluctuated between """"single-pyramid"""" systems, where ties converge at a main patron (usually the chief of state), and """"multi-pyramid"""" systems, characterized by competing oligarchic verticals of power. The 2019 election of Volodymyr Zelenskyy initially appeared to disrupt these configurations. Despite early support from oligarchic figures, Zelenskyy’s administration moved to centralize power through technocratic appointments and """"de-oligarchization"""" initiatives. Scholars noted a gradual erosion of the traditional """"multi-pyramid"""" system during the early years of his presidency. However, the 2022 full-scale Russian invasion radically altered this trajectory. The necessity of streamlining decision-making led to the adoption of martial law, which serves as an ad-hoc wartime constitution. This has conferred sweeping powers upon the executive and the National Security and Defence Council (NSDC),an organ intended to be advisory that now holds significant de facto authority. The NSDC is presided by the president, whose powers also grew significantly due to the imposition of martial law. This research investigates how wartime imperatives have reshaped the """"type"""" and resilience of patronal ties among Ukraine’s most influential political elites. It specifically addresses the question: How have patronal ties evolved between the beginning of the Zelenskyy presidency and the full-scale invasion, particularly within the organs central to wartime governance? To address this, the study employs a mixed-methods design centered on Social Network Analysis (SNA). By mapping formal and informal ties (including career trajectories, business affiliations, and legislative co-operation) this research visualizes the shift in Ukraine’s power architecture. The analysis aims to determine whether the """"multi-pyramid"""" system has been replaced by a new, centralized wartime vertical, or if patronalism has merely adapted to the constraints of martial law. In the context of Ukraine’s EU candidacy, understanding these dynamics is vital, as the persistence of patronal structures poses a significant challenge to the rule of law and post-war democratic reconstruction.

Authoritarian leaders increasingly use digital tools to consolidate power by repressing political opponents. Scholarship suggests these leaders do not act in isolation; rather, they collaborate via transnational networks to share repressive “best practices”. Within this context, Russia is frequently cited as a primary exporter of restrictive internet governance in its neighborhood and a key driver of declining online freedoms. This study evaluates the magnitude of Russia’s influence through an empirical investigation of legal policy transfer across Eurasia from 2010 to 2025. It examines the mechanisms and conditions that facilitate the spread of Russian repressive innovations using a mixed-methods computational-qualitative approach. First, the study employs a Large Language Model (LLM) trained for Natural Language Inference (NLI) to analyze a dataset of 399 laws, identifying 7,650 authoritarian policy provisions across the post-Soviet space. By utilizing semantic similarity clustering, the research quantifies legal harmonization to distinguish between innovators and adopters. Second, these clusters serve as the evidential basis for qualitative process tracing, which causally analyzes transfer cases by weighing political, economic, and cultural variables. Preliminary findings challenge the assumption of Russian normative dominance. While the Commonwealth of Independent States has historically aligned states to Russian norms, this hierarchical diffusion is declining as states of all sizes begin to innovate. Furthermore, external factors are reshaping the region: European integration incentives are driving normative shifts in Armenia, Moldova, and Ukraine, while Chinese technical developments are empowering Central Asian states to adopt increasingly restrictive governance, in absence of Russian mediation.

My PhD project investigates the narratives and the discursive strategies through which political challenger parties in France, Germany, and Poland construct and contest the idea of Ukraine’s EU accession. It explores how identity, memory, ideology, geopolitics, and strategic political approaches intersect in these discourses, and how external influences in a wider context with significant others such as Russia, the United States, and Ukraine (in this case), are localized and recontextualized within domestic party politics. Ukraine‘s liminality, its in-between position with transitional dynamics, can produce uncertainty and ambiguity that is problematized by radical actors in the EU. The case of Ukraine’s potential EU accession is a defining question linking external geopolitical rupture with internal political transformations. Given these varying levels of public support and growing party-political contestation, enlargement can be seen as a symbolic battleground where challenger parties mobilize competing ideological, spatial, and temporal images and visions of Europe and diverse grievances related to the war. This project is guided by the research question: “Why, when, and how do challenger parties in France, Germany, and Poland construct and articulate skepticism or rejection toward Ukraine’s potential EU accession?” The project thereby addresses these gaps by conceptualising enlargement as a dynamic field of geopolitical meaning-making and aims to integrate why (causal), when (temporal), and how (discursive) perspectives. Answering it contributes to ongoing academic and political debates on EU enlargement after the critical juncture of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 by offering a critical lens on how war, external influences, spatial imaginations, and domestic party-political contestation may impact a central aspect of the EU’s future trajectory. Methodologically, the project proposes a mixed-methods design that combines an initial corpus linguistic text analysis, the discourse-historical approach, and semi-structured elite interviews. The comparative design offers analytical insights into different political cultures, historical experiences, and party systems. By linking debates on EU widening to meaning-making mechanisms, the project seeks to explain how radical-right and radical-left actors reinterpret a decisive element of European integration and its future trajectory under conditions of war, crisis, and uncertainty. Empirically, it provides a post-2022 comparative analysis of radical-right and radical-left discourses on Ukraine’s EU accession, covering ideological supply side, geographic imaginaries, mnemonic cues, and populist styled choices for party strategies.