Mikhail Alexseev

Office: NH 127 | Phone: (619) 594-0190 | Email: [email protected]

Website | Curriculum Vitae | Russia-Ukraine War

Mikhail Alexseev (Ph.D., University of Washington, 1996) is Professor of political science at San Diego State University, where he has taught since 2000 and served as the Bruce E. Porteous Chair. His research has focused on threat assessment in interstate and internal wars, ethnic relations, nationalism, and immigration in Russia/Eurasia and is currently concentrated on Ukraine’s democratic resilience in the face of Russia’s military invasions since 2014. He has directed a multiyear opinion survey project in collaboration with Ukraine’s National Academy of Science, including a unique study of sociopolitical effects of war tracking a broadly representative sample of Ukraine’s residents from 2021 through 2024 in five survey waves, with the 2023-2024 phase funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation RAPID program. In his 2024 article published in Perspectives on Politics, one of the two flagship journals of the American Political Science Association, Alexseev (with co-author, Serhii Dembitskyi) pioneered a theoretical explanation of democracy support as “geosocietal,” with far-reaching implications for the analysis of variation in democratic futures globally. 

His prior work Mass Religious Ritual and Intergroup Tolerance: The Muslim Pilgrims’ Paradox (Cambridge 2017, co-authored with Sufian Zhemukhov) won acclaim as the best book on religion and international relations by the International Studies Association in 2019 and honorable mention for the David Rothschild’s Prize of the Association for the Study of Nationalities at the Columbia University. Alexseev is also the author of Immigration Phobia and the Security Dilemma: Russia, Europe, and the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Without Warning: Threat Assessment, Intelligence, and Global Struggle (St. Martin’s Press, 1997) and is the editor of A Federation Imperiled: Center-Periphery Conflict in Post-Soviet Russia (St. Martin’s Press, 1999). He has been the principal investigator of a multiyear international research project on migration and ethnoreligious violence in the Russian Federation funded by the National Science Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (Title VIII, U.S. Department of State) (see project summaries and data). His other projects have been funded by Reuters, NATO, the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, the U. S. Institute of Peace, the John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the Pacific Basin Research Center at Harvard University (see Russia in Asia webpage). Alexseev has published articles in Perspectives on Politics, Political Science Quarterly, Journal of Peace Research, Political Behavior, Political Communication, Europe-Asia Studies, Nationalities Papers, Post-Soviet Geography and Economics, The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, and Pacific Focus. His editorial opinion articles on Soviet and Post-Soviet affairs have appeared in The New York Times, Lost Angeles Times, Newsweek, Toronto Globe and Mail, USA Today, The Seattle Times, and in the Washington Post’s “Monkey Cage” academic blog. He is a member of the Carnegie/MacArthur sponsored Program on New Approaches to Russian Security (PONARS) – Eurasia, based at the George Washington University.