Western Academia on Russia in 2026: War, Academia and Activism

This week on Russia Unfiltered, Jonny Tickle, Jeremy Morris and James Pearce take a closer look at the state of Russia-focused academia in the West.With Jeremy heading to the annual British Association for Slavic and Eastern European Studies (BASEES) conference, we use the moment to ask a bigger question: what has happened to the field since 2022? Four years into the war, access to Russia is limited, funding has shifted, and the balance between research and public commentary is changing.We discuss whether the discipline is now dominated by war-related topics, how trends like decolonisation and Ukrainian studies are reshaping the landscape, and what gets lost when fieldwork becomes difficult or impossible. The conversation also turns to the realities of academic conferences, who gets to attend, who gets excluded, and whether these spaces still reflect genuine scholarship or something closer to advocacy.Along the way, we explore how research trends move in cycles, from Soviet everyday life to cultural history, and why some of the most interesting work today is happening far away from headline politics.This podcast is an independent project and does not represent the views of our employers or affiliated institutions.