Dr Maxim Alyukov is a political sociologist interested in media, political communication, and political cognition in autocracies, with a specific focus on Russia. Currently, he is a Leverhulme Early Career Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Russian and East-European Studies at the University of Manchester. Before joining the University of Manchester, Maxim was a postdoctoral fellow at King’s Russia Institute (2021 - 2023), where he remains a research associate. Maxim holds a PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Helsinki and an MA in Sociology from the European University at Saint-Petersburg. Maxim is also a member of the Public Sociology Laboratory, a research group analysing politics and society in Russia and the post-Soviet region in comparative perspective, and an affiliate of the International Panel on the Information Environment, an organisation dedicated to providing actionable scientific knowledge on threats to the global information landscape.

Research interests

Maxim’s research relies on qualitative and quantitative methods to explore how citizens make sense of the political world in authoritarian environments and in new hybrid media systems. In his PhD dissertation, Maxim used qualitative methods and the conceptual apparatus of cognitive and political psychology to understand media news reception under Russia’s authoritarian regime. The dissertation explored how political engagement affects the ways citizens evaluate the credibility of regime propaganda and interpret political information in a hybrid media system in which the regime attempts to spread similar narratives simultaneously across different types of media, including television, news aggregators, online news media, and social media.

Currently, Maxim works on the project Reflexive Propaganda: Authoritarian Political Communication in a Hybrid Information Environment at the University of Manchester supported by the Leverhulme Trust. The project relies on a combination of a series of online experiments and computational analysis of social media data to explore how authoritarian propaganda adapts to contemporary saturated media environments by exploiting citizens' reflexivity and awareness of manipulation.

Maxim’s research has been published in a variety of disciplinary and area studies journals, including Political Communication, Nature Human Behaviour, Politics, Qualitative Psychology, and Europe-Asia Studies. Maxim also uses my expertise to contribute to public discussion by writing for non-academic media and commenting on current affairs. He has made multiple appearances on TV and radio, including BBC, Al Jazeera, CBC, Voice of America, Deutsche Welle. His commentary, analysis, and research have been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME Magazine, The Times, Al Jazeera, Foreign Affairs, Newsweek, France 24, The Moscow Times, Open Democracy, and other outlets.