Vassily Klimentov is a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Postdoctoral researcher/ Visiting Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre at the European University Institute. He has received grants from the SNSF for his projects ‘Nationalism, Pan-Islamism, and Jihadism: At the Origins of the De-Territorialisation of the Grievances in the North Caucasus’ and ‘The Securitisation of Islamism and Separatism in Russia’s Domestic and Foreign Policy’.

He received his PhD in International History, with a minor in International Relations/ Political Science, from the Graduate Institute in Geneva. He also holds a Master in General History from the University of Geneva and a Master in Asian Studies from the Graduate Institute and the University of Geneva.

Between his Master and PhD, Vassily Klimentov has worked for six years with humanitarian NGOs in Geneva and in the field as an analyst and a needs and security assessment coordinator. He has notably been posted for two years in the Middle East on the Syrian Crisis.

Academic Publications

• A Slow Reckoning: The USSR, the Afghan Communists, and Islam, Cornell University Press/ Northern Illinois University Press (forthcoming, 2023/ early 2024).
• ‘Coping with Defeat: The Russian State Duma’s Views of Chechnya After the First Chechen War’. In State-building, Civil Society, and the Role of Historical Memories in Chechnya, ed. by C. Druey, M. Shogenov, and V. Tanailova (Bern: Peter Lang, forthcoming, 2023).
• ‘The Tajik Civil War and Russia’s Islamist Moment’, Central Asian Survey (forthcoming, 2022).
• ‘In Search of Islamic Legitimacy: The USSR, the Afghan communists, and the Muslim world’, Cold War History (2022).
• ‘“Communist Muslims”: The USSR and the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan’s Conversion to Islam, 1978- 1988’, Journal of Cold War Studies, 24: 1 (2022): 4-38.
• ‘Bringing the war home: the strategic logic of ‘North Caucasian terrorism’ in Russia’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 32:2 (2021): 374-408.
• ‘The Allure of Jihad: the de-territorialization of the war in the North Caucasus’, Caucasus Survey, 8:3 (2020): 239-257. (With Dr Grazvydas Jasutis as second author)
• ‘A Common Cause: Russia, the United States, and the Fate of “American” Afghanistan, 2001-2019’, The Stanford US-Russia Forum Research Journal, 10 (2019): 23-34. (With Thomas Schueman as co-author)
• Stoddard, Abby, Shoaib Jillani, John Caccavale, Peyton Cooke, David Guillemois, and Vassily A. Klimentov, ‘Out of Reach: How Insecurity Prevents Humanitarian Aid from Accessing the Neediest’, Stability: International Journal of Security and Development, 6:1 (2017): 1-25.
   

Other Publications
 

• ‘A World on the Fence. The International Community and the War in Ukraine’, Fondation Pierre du Bois/ Current Affairs in Perspective, September 2022.
• ‘La nouvelle guerre froide’, Heidi.News, March 2022.
• ‘A Resurgent Threat? Islamism in Central Asia Since the Taliban Takeover’, Russian Analytical Digest 279 (2022): 7-10.
• ‘Wachsende Bedrohung? Die Taliban und der Islamismus in Zentralasien’, Ökumenisches Forum für Glauben, Religion und Gesellschaft in Ost und West, February 2022
• ‘Invasion. How Russia Has Lost Ukraine and Itself’, Fondation Pierre du Bois/ Current Affairs in Perspective, Feb 2022
• ‘From Saigon to the Mujahideen: the many historical echoes of the fall of Kabul’, The Conversation, Sept 2021.