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I am a computational political scientist, currently serving as an Advanced Quantitative Fellow in the Department of Methodology and as a Guest Lecturer in the Department of International Relations at the LSE.
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Text-as-Data Methods to Study Mass-Media Manipulations in Autocracies 🔗
Communist and Post-Communist Studies
Solo-authored. 2025.
This article explores how text-as-data methodologies can be used to reveal patterns of mass-media manipulation strategies employed in modern autocracies. First, it explains the importance of studying media strategies by reviewing literature on autocratic resilience, with a particular focus on scholarship addressing state-controlled mass-media tactics. Next, it outlines the computational methods currently used to study mass-media management, highlighting key academic contributions in the field of political communication, especially those focused on present-day autocracies. Finally, the article discusses the challenges of using text-as-data methods to study mass-media management strategies in autocracies.
Key words: text as data, text analysis, media, autocracies, Russia
Vicarious Denial: War Crimes and Online Deliberation in Serbia for and against Ukraine 🔗
East European Politics
with Denisa Kostovicova. 2025.
Violence in distant conflicts can foster solidarity across borders, mediated by partisanship, identities, and ideology. But, attitudes towards a society’s own war legacies may also shape reactions to war crimes endured by others. We analyse Serbian news outlet readers’ comments responding to reports of Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine. We observe vicarious denial, as some readers denied Russian atrocities, evoking a sense of exclusive Serbian victimhood related to the Yugoslav wars and blame of the West. Yet, other readers challenged them, expressing solidarity with Ukrainian victims. Our research highlights transnational dynamics of war crimes denial and its contention, complementing domestically oriented explanations.
Key words: transitional justice, deliberation, denial, Serbia, Ukraine, genocide
Enemy of Justice? Secrecy in Domestic War Crimes Trials in Serbia 🔗
Journal of Genocide Research
with Denisa Kostovicova and Timothy Waters. 2025.
Secrecy is an essential element in war crimes trials, as it protects vulnerable individuals and sensitive information, ensuring trials can proceed effectively. However, secrecy often conflicts with principles of public justice, undermining the legitimacy and societal acceptance of trial processes and judgements. This, in turn, can limit the transformative potential of war crimes trials for post-conflict societies. We examine this tension between secrecy and publicity in the war crimes jurisprudence of Serbian courts. Drawing on an analysis of 164 final judgements issued between 1999 and 2019, we show that courts employ anonymization excessively and inconsistently. We document a typology of redaction techniques – including electronic patches, manual redactions, and coded substitutions – that are applied inconsistently not only across courts but also within individual documents. Similar types of information (such as names of defendants and victims, addresses, or crime locations) are sometimes redacted and sometimes left visible, reflecting the absence of harmonized standards. To assess the broader impact of these practices, we supplement our analysis with fieldwork, including interviews with legal practitioners and civil society actors. We reveal how excessive and erratic redactions of judgements obstruct transparency, impair the capacity of civil society to analyze trials, and constrain efforts to foster critical engagement with war crimes. Our study also reveals the limits of empirical methods when applied to irregularly redacted materials. The inconsistent anonymization precluded the use of advanced statistical techniques and constrained the scope of analysis. This has broader implications for research design in transitional justice, particularly when relying on digital data sources in environments with weak information governance. We conclude that reform is needed to standardize redaction practices, and that digitization alone cannot substitute for transparency. War crimes trials can only fulfil their social and historical function if protective secrecy is balanced with meaningful public access to court records.
Key words: war crime trials, secrecy, Serbia, optical recognition
Are Domestic War Crimes Trials Biased? 🔗
Journal of Peace Research
with Denisa Kostovicova, Ivor Sokolić, and Sanja Vico. 2024.
Fairness of domestic war crimes trials matters for promoting justice and peace. Scholars have studied public perceptions of war crimes trials to assess their fairness, but little is known about whether post-conflict states conduct them fairly. Bias, as a matter of procedural fairness, can manifest as a tendency to favour certain groups over others. Leveraging the theories of judicial decisionmaking, this article investigates two types of bias. The first is in-group bias, which is associated with protection of in-group members and punishment of out-group members. The second is conflict actor bias, which is associated with deflecting responsibility for wrongdoing from state agents to non-state agents of violence. We test for bias in domestic war crimes trials in Serbia with statistical modelling and quantitative text analysis of judicial decisions delivered to Serb and non-Serb defendants (1999–2019). While we do not find evidence of ethnic bias, our results indicate conflict actor bias. Serb paramilitaries received harsher sentences than Serb state agents of violence. Furthermore, we observe bias in the textual content of judgements. Judges depict violence committed by paramilitaries more extensively and graphically than violence by state actors. By revealing these judicial strategies, we demonstrate how a state can use domestic war crimes trials to diminish state wrongdoing and attribute the responsibility for violence to paramilitaries. The conflict actor bias we identify shows how deniability of accountability operates after conflict, complementing existing explanations of states’ collusion with paramilitaries before and during conflict.
Keywords: domestic war crimes trials, ethnic bias, paramilitaries, Serbia, deniability, human rights violations
Drawing on transcripts from the television network Channel One, a popular news source in Russia, this article addresses the question: “How was Vladimir Putin covered by state-controlled media while the regime became increasingly centralized?” The literature on the subjectis scarce and inconclusive. Dictators create different images of them-selves, and the portrayals of present-day spin dictators — those whoprimarily rely on the power of propaganda to persuade rather thandominate — are understudied. While some analysts point to Putin’s omnipresence in mass media, others uncover the lack of media personalization and relatively neutral coverage. Using 385,981 news transcripts from 2000–2022 and relying on techniques from natural language processing, I examine how a present-day autocrat attempts to optimize the intensity of state-controlled propaganda. I uncoverthree main tendencies. First, during all the years in power, the ruler hasbeen more frequently referred to through positive stories. Second,there is only partial evidence that the relative references to Putin onChannel One have significantly increased over time. Third, during allhis years in power, Putin has been more frequently mentioned indomestic news rather than in stories about foreign affairs. However,I also demonstrate that the share of news about foreign affairs andevents abroad that mentions the ruler has been increasing every yearsince 2013. By focusing on the supply side of propaganda, this articlecontributes to the literature on autocratic resilience and spin dictators.
Keywords: Putin, Russia, television, autocracy, autocratic resilience
Grandstanding Instead of Deliberative Policy-making: Parliamentary Questions, Publicness, and Transitional Justice in the Croatian Parliament 🔗
Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding
with Denisa Kostovicova. 2024.
Addressing the legacy of human rights violations in public can benefit victims, post-conflict societies and democracy building. But publicness of transitional justice (TJ) processes can also have opposite effects. We assess the relationship between publicness and TJ by leveraging the democratic deliberation theory concerned with the impact of publicness on the quality of policy-making. A comparative analysis of oral and written questions about TJ in the Croatian parliament (2004–20) shows that members of parliament use oral questions for nationalist grandstanding and written questions for substantive TJ policy deliberation. We demonstrate how publicness afforded by parliaments stymies TJ’s normative goals.
Key words: parliamentary questions, Croatia, transitional justice, grandstanding, publicness
Legislative Debates and Transitional Justice in the Western Balkans 🔗
Policy Article. Aspen Institute
with Denisa Kostovicova and Ivor Sokolić. 2024.
National parliaments play an important role in the public discourse on the contentious past and in implementing transitional justice through legislative activity. Rather than fostering meaningful discussions about transitional justice, which are critical for deliberation of policy, the parliaments in the Western Balkans (WB) have often modelled and legitimized polarizing discourses. Members of Parliament (MPs) commonly use parliaments for nationalist grandstanding that relies on ethno-centric discourse. This has impacted transitional justice laws, often resulting in laws that provide inadequate redress for past wrongs. Consequently, rifts between communities – both within countries and across borders – have deepened. At the same time, victims on all sides remain dissatisfied, feeling exploited by politicians. Moreover, efforts by liberal civil society and its human-rights-oriented discourse are marginalized and suppressed. Nonetheless, respectful and empathetic dialogue about transitional justice between former antagonists in the WB is possible. Sustained support from external actors, such as the European Union, during democratization and peacebuilding is crucial for fostering a deliberative culture in parliaments and supporting constructive exchanges in the regions’ civil society.
Methods in Russian Studies: Overview of Top Political Science, Economics, and Area Studies Journals 🔗
Post-Soviet Affairs
Solo-authored. 2023.
How has Russia been studied by political scientists, economists, and scholars in cognate fields who publish in specialized area-specific journals studied Russia? To systematically analyze the approaches employed in Russian studies over the last decade, I collected all publications (1,097 articles) on the country from the top five area studies journals covering the territories of the former USSR, the top 10 journals in political science, and the top five journals in economics from January 2010 to January 2022 and classified them based on the methods they utilized, empirical focus, and sub-fields within method. In this article, I discuss the results of this classification and the pitfalls associated with over-reliance on some methods over others, notably those that include self-reported data, in the context of Russia’s war against Ukraine and the increasingly repressive domestic environment under Putin’s autocracy. I also propose some ways of addressing the new realities of diminished access to data and fieldwork.
Keywords: Russia, Russian Studies, methods, surveys, survey bias, economics, political science
Protests in Russia Raise Questions about the Role of New Media in Democratisation 🔗
Media@LSE
Solo-authored. 2021.
A blog post about Telegram and its role in social mobilization.
Textual Corpus from Channel One
Book chapter in Autocracy, Influence, War: Russian Propaganda Today, edited by Paul Goode, University of Michigan Press
Solo-authored. Forthcoming
Key words: Russia, television, news
Ukraine on Russian Domestic Television: Media Agenda-setting and Distraction, 2009–2019
Solo-authored. R&R
Key words: autocratic resilience, Russia, Ukraine, television, news
Who's Asking Whom? Gendering in Parliamentary Interactions
with Denisa Kostovicova, Tolga Sinmazdemir, and Vesna Popovski. R&R
Key words: gender, legislature, content analysis, Croatia, interactions
Ingroup and Intergroup Effects of Djokovic's Exclusion from the 2022 Australian Open
with Denisa Kostovicova, Tolga Sinmazdemir, and Sanja Vico. Work in progress
Key words: athletes, national pride, ethnic identity, unexpected event during survey, text as data, Serbia
Book Project
I Say, You Say: Transitional Justice as Conversational Practice
with Denisa Kostovicova and Ivor Sokolić. Work in progress
Key words: transitional justice, interactions
Sustaining Dissent: Emotional Shifts and the Persistence of #НетВойне Activism
solo-authored. Work in progress
Key words: digital activism, Russia, war
Islamic Solidarity or Strategic Nostalgia? Neo-Ottomanism in Turkish Reactions to Srebrenica on Twitter
with Denisa Kostovicova and Ivor Sokolić. Work in progress
Key words: Neo-Ottomanism, memory politics, Srebrenica, genocide
When Genocide Trends: Peaks of Online Attention to Mass Violence, 2021–2024
with Denisa Kostovicova and Ivor Sokolić. Work in progress
Key words: genocide
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