Irina Busygina is a political scientist who leads the Davis Center's Initiative for Analyzing Post-Soviet Reform Proposals, known for short as the Post-Soviet Reforms Initiative, begun in 2024.
She has worked as a professor of comparative politics at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg, Russia. Her research interests include comparative federalism and regionalization, Russian domestic and foreign policy, and Russia-EU relations. Her book Non-Democratic Federalism and Decentralization in Post-Soviet States, coauthored with Mikhail Filippov, was published by Routledge in 2024, during her time as a visiting scholar with the Davis Center. She is also co-editor, with Svetlana Krivokhizh, of Regional Leadership in Post-Soviet Eurasia: The Strategies of Russia, China, and the European Union (Routledge, 2023).
Other publications include: "Center-Regional Relations in Russia During the War: Are There Signs of Model Erosion?" PONARS Policy Memo No. 872 (2024); "Regional Governors, Moscow, and the War," Russian Analytical Digest, No 295 (2023); "Russia’s Regional Governors: Backing the War, Upholding the Status Quo," PONARS, with Mikhail Filippov (2023); "Center-Regional Relations in Russia," Chapter 14 in Routledge Handbook of Russian Politics and Society, also with Mikhail Filippov (2023); "Ready to Protest? Explaining Protest Potential in Russian Regional Capitals," Regional and Federal Studies, with Ekaterina Paustyan (2023); "Pandemic Decentralization: COVID-19 and Principal-Agent Relations in Russia," Problems of Post-Communism, with Stanislav Klimovich (2022); “Russia, Post-Soviet Integration, and the EAEU: The Balance Between Domination and Cooperation” in Problems of Post-Communism (2020); "Russian Federalism: Informal Elite Games Against Formal Democratic Institutions," PONARS Memo No 656 (2020); and Russia-EU Relations and the Common Neighborhood: Coercion Versus Authority, also with Routledge (2018).
Irina has been a visiting scholar with the Davis Center since fall 2022.
