Draft:Alexander Libman

Alexander Libman (born September 18, 1981) is a political scientist and political economist specializing in the study of authoritarian regimes with a focus on post-Soviet Eurasia and Russia.

He is a Professor of Russian and East European Politics, Institute for East European Studies, Freie Universität Berlin and serves on the editorial boards of Post-Communist Economies, Economic Systems, and Humanities and Social Science Communications.

Biography

Alexander Libman received his PhD from the University of Mannheim in 2009 with the dissertation 'Essays on Asymmetric Federalism'. Earlier, in 2005, he earned a Candidate of Science (Economics) degree from the Institute of International Economic and Political Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He received his first academic qualification in 2003 with a Diploma in International Economics from the Finance Academy under the Government of the Russian Federation in Moscow.

From 2009 to 2014, he served as Assistant Professor of International Political Economy at the Department of Economics of the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management. Between 2014 and 2016, he worked as a Research Associate in the Eastern Europe and Eurasia Division at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. From 2016 to 2020, he held the position of Associate Professor of Social Sciences and East European Studies at the Institute of Sociology of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Since 2020, he has been a Full Professor and Chair of Russian and East European Politics at the Institute for East European Studies at Freie Universität Berlin.

Research

Alexander Libman’s articles have been published in journals such as the American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science, World Politics, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Perspectives on Politics, European Journal of Political Research and Journal of Democracy.

His main research interests include the political economy of authoritarian regimes, regional integration in non-democratic contexts, subnational variation within Post-Soviet states, and the effects of historical legacies.

Regional integration and authoritarian regionalism. The main aspects studied in this field are regional economic integration and international organisations in the post-Soviet space, with a particular focus on the Commonwealth of Independent States and the Eurasian Economic Union. His work examines how authoritarian and semi-authoritarian states design and use regional organisations, including the role of informal governance, integration rhetoric and external economic and security ties in sustaining non-democratic regimes.

Authoritarianism, regime dynamics, and subnational variation. Alexander Libman's works on comparative politics of authoritarian regimes, focusing on how external influences, economic ties, domestic elites and institutional constraints shape processes of autocratisation and democratisation, diffusion of authoritarian practices, and patterns of repression and co-optation. A distinctive part of his research examines subnational politics in Post-Soviet states, especially Russia. He analyses how authoritarian logic of decision-making, regional differences in institutions and incentives, bureaucracy, and economic structures generate variation in governance, corruption, economic performance and democratic competition across regions.

Historical legacies and long-term persistence. Together with co-authors, he explores how pre-communist imperial social structures, communist party penetration and Soviet-era economic development shape contemporary corruption, inequality, middle-class formation and it's impact on democratic outcomes, attitudes towards redistribution and democracy, and regional variations in political competition and liberal voting. This research contributed to the book Historical Legacies of Communism: Modern Politics, Society, and Economic Development, published by Cambridge University Press in 2021. This research agenda is further developed in his work on the resilience of educated strata in adverse repressive environments under Stalinism, and more broadly in the project “The Hidden Resilience of the Liberal Tradition in the Long-Term Perspective: Russian and Ukrainian Experience”, supported by the Einstein Foundation Berlin and undertaken in collaboration with Tomila Lankina since 2025..