Krzysztof joined King’s Russia Institute in 2023 to pursue a doctoral degree. His research is supported by the London Interdisciplinary Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership (LISS DTP) studentship funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Krzysztof holds a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the University of Oxford (2018) and an MSc in Democracy and Comparative Politics from University College London (2021, Distinction).

Research interests

• Russian and Eurasian politics
• Comparative authoritarianism
• Comparative politics
• Personalist autocracies
• Authoritarian legitimation

Teaching

Understanding Russia

Doctoral research

Krzysztof is working on a project under a working title “The Politics of Succession in Post-Soviet Personalised Autocracies”. Recognising that the disruptive potential of leadership succession is particularly acute in highly personalised autocracies, where formal institutions are weak and political influence is concentrated in the hands of a single leader, the project purports to explore why are some succession strategies chosen over others, how do the elites ensure an orderly transfer of power and why do some strategies generate more stable outcomes than others. These questions will be addressed drawing upon evidence from the post-Soviet space, where personalised autocracy has become the dominant regime type. The differences between the approaches taken by selected Eurasian polities towards managing leadership succession will be leveraged analytically to investigate the underlying social and political dynamics.

PhD supervisors

Professor Samuel Greene and Professor Gulnaz Sharafutdinova