Liudmila Listrovaya

Authoritarian Military Conflict and the Extraterritorial Spillover of Authoritarianism

My current research investigates the experiences of relokanti—new Russian migrants who fled the war—highlighting how emotional entanglements with authoritarianism suppress political engagement even after migration. This work sheds light on the demographic, emotional, and political consequences of authoritarian warfare and displacement. An article based on the fieldwork in Georgia was recently published in Social Forces.
Another related project examines the human costs and social transformations triggered by Russia’s war against Ukraine by evaluating unequal distribution of male mortality rates across Russian regions. I find that male mortality is distributed unequally across Russian regions, disproportionately burdening impoverished and indigenous regions.

READ MY LATEST ARTICLE ABOUT RUSSIAN POLITICAL MIGRANTS

Book Project

Using the Social Forces article as a theoretical anchor, I am currently developing the book project on Russian political migrants and the role of the host-states' socio-political environments in shaping migrants' opportunities for activism and voice.
Through fieldwork in Georgia and Serbia, this book shows how Russian migrants weigh safety against solidarity, how states extend power across borders, and how host-communities navigate the influx of liberal, young, and well educated Russian migrants. The book maps how host-country institutions, media ecologies, and transnational surveillance shape civic activism, identity, and everyday decision-making in exile.
In the Fall 2025 I conducted fieldwork in Serbia in continuation of this project.
In the future, I will be adding Germany as my third site.

Environmental Inequality and Internal Colonialism

My research on environmental inequality and politics in Russia examines how natural resource extraction disproportionately affects ethnically diverse and Indigenous regions, reinforcing long-standing patterns of marginalization and internal colonialism. Using regional-level data and statistical modeling, I investigate the relationship between extractive industry activity, atmospheric pollution, and demographic indicators such as poverty, ethnic diversity, and indigeneity. I argue that environmental harms in Russia are not randomly distributed but are shaped by historical legacies of colonialism, state extractivism, and authoritarian governance that suppress local resistance and obscure accountability. This work contributes to broader debates in environmental sociology and political ecology by highlighting how environmental injustice operates in non-democratic contexts and how it intersects with ethnic hierarchies and territorial governance in the Russian Federation.

One of the articles resulting from this research was published in Environmental Sociology journal in March 2025.
One more research article is currently under review.

READ MY LATEST ARTICLE ON ENVIRONMENTAL INEQUALITY IN RUSSIA

Dissertation Project

My dissertation titled "In a Dark, Dark Wood: Morality, Politics and Ecological Inaction in Russia" studies environmental discourses, inequality, deforestation, and the construction of alternative environmental knowledge.

In the first two chapters, I evaluate how modern Russia's authoritarian populist regime shapes and promulgates the discourse on deforestation. I study this problem on two levels. First, the macro, federal level, explains the role of resource nationalism, authoritarian populism, and state agenda in the formation of the blame for the forest loss. Second, the micro, interpersonal, level helps understand the role of culture, ideology, and science-based knowledge in the construction of alternative environmental knowledge. In this project, I evaluate logging and deforestation and analyze their underlying cultural and socio-economic rationale through field research focused on logging industry workers, as well as through critical discourse analysis focused on federal newspaper publications.

One of dissertation chapters was published in Society and Natural Resources in August 2024.

Photos from my Dissertation fieldwork

Corruption and Informal Exchange

Previously I published a research article on informal exchanges and reciprocity in Russia. Research Article "What Does a “Thank you” Cost? Informal Exchange and the Case of “Brift” in Contemporary Russia", was published in Qualitative Sociology in 2021.

This article addresses the complex nature of informal exchange in contemporary Russia. I borrow the term “brift” from Abel Polese in order to analyze a hybrid nature of informal transactions that have a ternary nature embodying bribery, gift-giving, and a mechanism of building social capital. While there exists a wealth of studies on informal exchange in Post-Soviet states and modern Russia, the question of how participants of the exchange make sense of the transactions and conditions of the exchange, how they morally and mentally estimate the value and price of the favors, and how they choose appropriate items for reciprocating for the favors still remains understudied. The study addresses this theoretical dilemma and provides a detailed investigation of the meaning-making process intrinsic to this type of informal transaction. The article provides an analysis of the in-depth interviews with citizens of St. Petersburg and demonstrates the complexity of the cognitive work of calculating the right price and estimating the proper value and fitness of the items to be used in the brift transactions. This research generally points to the need for greater sensitivity to intricacies of meaning, practice, and cognitive work that saturate informal exchange, and further calls for a wider acceptance of the concept of brift.