Igor Kolesnikov

Greetings!

My interests are centered around the interplay between organized violence and the process of state building, development, and identity formation.

In my recent work, I utilized historical data on the spread of the Bolshevik insurgency in 1917  and quasi-experimental methods to study how local economic grievances and exposure to information coming from the central government affect the fight for territorial control in post-revolutionary contexts.  My interests also include interactions between the central state and local actors and how they influence the well-being of communities, and efficiency in implementing reforms.

Methodologically, I am interested in Causal Inference and text-as-data. To build a theory of my own, I aspire to use formal theory.

I received a B.A. in Politics (with Honors) from the National Research University Higher School of Economics (2022), where I worked as a research assistant at the International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development, as well as for faculty in the Department of Economics and Politics. I was a junior data analyst at the Center for Advanced Governance (https://cpur.ru/en)