2026 Bendix-Sharlin Fellows
Antonia Alksnis
Antonia Alksnis studies early modern political thought, particularly eighteenth-century thinking about inequality and political psychology—especially self-esteem and arrogance. Her research on these themes has been published in Political Theory. Her dissertation, Egalitarian and Elitist: Rousseau’s Inequality Paradox, draws out Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s idealistic yet hard-headed provocation to scholarly discussions on equality and hierarchy: what should we do if it’s impossible for us to be satisfied with equal status? This work deploys literary and historical methods including archival work with engraved illustrations.
Igor Kolesnikov
Billions of people worldwide live on land governed not by individual title but by village chiefs, communal elders, and customary authorities. Conventional wisdom treats these arrangements as relics of underdevelopment. Igor’s research argues otherwise: communal land tenure is a deliberate fiscal strategy. By making entire communities collectively liable for taxes and delegating enforcement to local leaders who know their neighbors, weak states can extract revenue they could never collect on their own. But the bargain carries a hidden danger — the same local authority that enables extraction can also organize resistance. When central governments try to cut local leaders out, the machinery of compliance becomes a vehicle for rebellion. Igor studies this through Russia's 1861 abolition of serfdom, which placed over 40 million people under communal governance — and whose communes ultimately helped organize the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. Using archival data on over 110,000 communes and crime records spanning fifty years, he trace how communal property shifted from a pillar of autocratic control to an engine of regime collapse. The findings reframe debates over land reform across Africa, Latin America, and Asia today: dismantling communal tenure is not simply a question of economic efficiency, but a political gamble over who controls the countryside.
Yasyn Abdullaev
Yasyn’s research project, "Between Three Black Eagles," examines the cooperative transnational security regime in mid-nineteenth-century Central Europe. It focuses on the inter-imperial system of policing, surveillance, and border control established by the Habsburg Monarchy, Prussia, and the Russian Empire on the territories of the partitioned Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He introduces the concept of "autocratic securitization" to demonstrate how personal relationships among key policymakers in neighboring authoritarian regimes led to significant political innovation and the construction of modern borders. With the support provided by the IIS, Yasyn will conduct archival research in Austria and Poland and turn his findings into a stand-alone scholarly article.
