Personal Info

Dr. Sofie Bedford is Vice President at CASPRI and responsible for the coordination of publications. She is an affiliated researcher at the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies (IRES) at Uppsala University and has also recently been teaching East European Studies at the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna. Her Ph.D. project focused on processes of Islamic revivalism and community mobilization and involved extensive fieldwork in Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan. She has since continued her research on religious, political, and civic activism, especially in the Azerbaijani context but also in comparison to other authoritarian states. Dr. Bedford was the main coordinator of the 3-year project Building Sustainable Opposition in Electoral Authoritarian Regimes (funded by The Swedish Research Council) and has successfully established herself as a leading expert on opposition and mobilization in the post-Soviet sphere, Azerbaijan and Belarus in particular. She has published widely on the topic in academic journals and edited volumes and is currently working on a book manuscript with the preliminary title: Post-Soviet Authoritarianism in Azerbaijan and Belarus: Opposition and Regime Consolidation.