Biography
I am a political sociologist interested in political communication, authoritarianism, and international relations, with a specific focus on Russia.
Currently, I am a Lecturer at the School of International Relations, University of St 糖心logo. Before joining the School, I was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Department of Russian and East-European Studies at the University of Manchester (2023-2026) and a postdoctoral fellow (2021-2023) at King鈥檚 Russia Institute, King鈥檚 College London. I hold a PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Helsinki and an MA in Sociology from the European University at Saint-Petersburg.
I am also a member of the , a research group analysing politics and society in Russia and the post-Soviet region in comparative perspective, an affiliate of the听, an organisation dedicated to providing actionable scientific knowledge on threats to the global information landscape, and a Fellow at , the successor to The Washington Post鈥檚 The Monkey Cage, bringing political science research to a broader audience.
Teaching
IR1005 Concepts in Global Politics
IR3101 Russian Politics and Foreign Policy
Research areas
I am broadly interested in how authoritarian regimes construct and circulate foreign policy narratives, and how citizens interpret them in environments where truth claims are contested and platforms structure access to news.
My PhD dissertation relied on qualitative methods and focused on news reception under Russia鈥檚 authoritarian regime, exploring the ways citizens evaluate the credibility of official narratives and interpret political information in a hybrid media system in which the regime attempts to spread similar messaging simultaneously across different types of media, including television, news aggregators, online news media, and social media. My Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, Reflexive Propaganda: Authoritarian Political Communication in a Hybrid Information Environment, relied on 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.
My research has been published in a variety of disciplinary and area studies journals, including Perspectives on Politics, Political Communication, Nature Human Behaviour, Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, Politics, Qualitative Psychology, Europe-Asia Studies, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, and others.
I also use my expertise to contribute to public discussion by writing for non-academic media and commenting on current affairs. My writing appeared in The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The Moscow Times, openDemocracy, and other outlets. I have made multiple appearances on TV and radio, including BBC, Sky News, Al Jazeera, CBC, Voice of America, Deutsche Welle, Times Radio. My commentary, analysis, and research have been featured in Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Financial Times, TIME Magazine, The Times, Al Jazeera, Newsweek, France 24, CBC, The Guardian, The Independent, The i Newspaper, The Moscow Times, The Daily Beast, and many others.
Selected publications
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Open access
Alyukov, M. & Zavadskaya, M., 6 May 2026, (E-pub ahead of print) In: Perspectives on Politics. First View, 25 p.
Research output: Contribution to journal 鈥� Article 鈥� peer-review
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Open access
Alyukov, M., Makhortykh, M., Voronovici, A. & Sydorova, M., 15 Oct 2025, In: Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review. 6, 5, p. 1-24 24 p.
Research output: Contribution to journal 鈥� Article 鈥� peer-review
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Open access
Alyukov, M., 9 Apr 2023, In: Political Communication. 40, 5, p. 527-554 28 p.
Research output: Contribution to journal 鈥� Article 鈥� peer-review
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Alyukov, M., Jun 2022, In: Nature Human Behaviour. 6, p. 763-765 3 p.
Research output: Contribution to journal 鈥� Comment/debate 鈥� peer-review
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Alyukov, M., 2022, In: Europe-Asia Studies. 74, 3, p. 337-359 23 p.
Research output: Contribution to journal 鈥� Article 鈥� peer-review
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