Gwendolyn Sasse

Gwendolyn Sasse is a nonresident senior fellow at Carnegie Europe. Her research focuses on Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, EU enlargement, and comparative democratization.

Sasse is the director of the newly founded Centre for East European Research and International Studies (Zentrum für Osteuropa- und internationale Studien, ZOiS) in Berlin.

She is also professor of comparative politics in the Department of Politics and International Relations and the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies at the University of Oxford, where she also works on ethnic conflict, minority issues, migration, and diaspora politics.

Prior to her 2007 arrival in Oxford, Sasse was a senior lecturer in the European Institute and the Department of Government at the London School of Economics.

Her most recent books include The Crimea Question: Identity, Transition, and Conflict (Harvard University Press, 2007), which won the Alexander Nove Prize awarded by the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies; Europeanization and Regionalization in the EU’s Enlargement to Central and Eastern Europe: the Myth of Conditionality (Palgrave, 2004; co-authored with James Hughes and Claire Gordon); and Ethnicity and Territory in the Former Soviet Union: Regions in Conflict (Frank Cass, 2001; co-edited with James Hughes). She has also published extensively in academic journals.

Sasse is a member of the Advisory Council of the European Centre for Minority Issues in Flensburg, Germany. She comments regularly on East European politics, in particular Ukraine, in U.S., British, and European media outlets.