Oxana Shevel is an Associate Professor of comparative politics at the Department of Political Science at Tufts University and Director of Tufts International Relations program. Her research and teaching focus on the post-Soviet region, especially Ukraine and Russia, and issues such as nation-building and identity politics, citizenship policies, memory politics, church-state relations, and the democratization process in the post-Soviet region. She's the author (with Maria Popova) of a recent book on the root causes of the Russo-Ukrainian war: "Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States" (Polity 2023). Her earlier book, "Migration, Refugee Policy, and State Building in Postcommunist Europe" (Cambridge, 2011) won the American Association of Ukrainian Studies (AAUS) prize for best book in the fields of Ukrainian history, politics, language, literature and culture.