Experts on countries of origin by country

Dr. Christian is a psychoanalytical anthropologist with a doctorate in violent ethnic & cultural conflict. He has spent the past 36-years researching and practicing in Eurasia, Southwest Asia, Middle East, Central and South America, West Africa, North Africa and the Horn of Africa. His field work was in support of military, diplomatic, and humanitarian interventions in violent intra-state conflicts. He is a member of the American Anthropological Association’s Society for Psychological Anthropology and the American Psychological Association’s Society for the Psychological Study of Culture, Ethnicity, Race, Conflict, & Violence.

Dr. Christian’s expertise is derived through a combination of academic training and extensive field work and is best described as the ‘application of psychoanalytical sociological analysis using anthropological methodology to curate the science to a specific subject community’s emic or lived/living experiences both mentally and emotionally.’ This level of analytical research allows him to illuminate the underlying psychosocial-emotional motivations of individual and collective behaviour post-mortem to, and predictive of, violent conflict.

Rico Isaacs is a Professor of International Politics at the University of Lincoln and non-resident visiting professor at Riga Stradinš University. His research concerns the relationship between culture and politics with a focus on how this appears in authoritarian, nationalist and populist politics with a specific focus on the post-communist space, especially Central Asia. He is the author Political Opposition in Authoritarianism (Palgrave 2022), Film and Identity in Kazakhstan (Bloomsbury 2018) and Party System Formation in Kazakhstan: Between Formal and Informal Politics (Routledge 2011), as well as authoring several edited volumes, including the Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Central Asia (Routledge 2021) and a Critical Reader in Central Asian Studies (Routledge 2022). He also co-authored an introduction to Politics textbook and has published widely in leading peer-reviewed journals. He is also currently serving as editor of the leading peer-reviewed journal within the field of Central Asian Studies, Central Asian Survey.

Dr. Kiryl Kascian is a head of the Centre for Communication Influences and Propaganda Research, Vilnius University. He holds a doctoral degree in law from the University of Bremen. His research interests include interethnic relations, electoral behavior, minority rights, constitutionalism, communication influences, and political communication, and he has extensively published and provided his expertise internationally on these topics.

Dr. Hanna Vasilevich is a researcher and academic currently based at the International Centre for Ethnic and Linguistic Diversity Studies in Prague, where she serves as Board Chair. Dr. Vasilevich has been a Visiting Research Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast, UK, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Law & Anthropology Department of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany. Before she worked at the European Centre for Minority Studies (Germany) and taught in a number of Universities in Czechia and Germany.