Natalia Forrat

Natalia Forrat is a social scientist at the University of Michigan and Freedom House. Her research focuses on the state, state-society relations, political regimes, and social movements. She is the author of a book manuscript The Social Roots of Authoritarian Power, which is based on her fieldwork in Russian regions, and a chapter on Russian civil society in Russian Politics Today (edited by Susanne Wengle, forthcoming at Oxford University Press). Her earlier research includes a study of the political economy of Russian higher education, which argues it was influenced by the color revolutions in the neighboring states, and a study of schoolteachers’ role in electoral manipulations in Russia. Recently, she has been a co-PI of a research project, Civic Mobilizations in Authoritarian Contexts, at Freedom House. She is also a Research Affiliate at CDDRL’s Governance Project. In the past, she was a pre- and postdoctoral fellow at Stanford’s CDDRL, Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame, and Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies at the University of Michigan.