seit 10/2018: wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter in der Abteilung Politik des Osteuropa-Instituts der Freien Universität Berlin

seit 3/2018: Doktorand am Lehrstuhl für Internationale Beziehungen des Instituts für Politikwissenschaft der Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena

9-11/2018: Visiting PhD Research Fellow am Department of International Relations und dem Centre for Advanced International Theory (CAIT) der University of Sussex (GB)

7/2016-9/2018: wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Lehrstuhl für Internationale Beziehungen des Instituts für Politikwissenschaft der Universität Leipzig

2/2016-4/2016: Praktikant im Auslandsbüro der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Moskau (RU)

8/2015-2/2016: Staatliches Moskauer Institut für Internationale Beziehungen (MGIMO), Moskau (RU)

10/2013-6/2016: MA Politikwissenschaft an der Universität Leipzig

10/2010-9/2013: BA Geschichte, Politikwissenschaft und Bildungswissenschaft an der Universität Leipzig

Mitgliedschaften

European International Studies Association (EISA)

Deutsche Vereinigung für Politikwissenschaft (DVPW)

Mitglied der Sektion Entwicklungstheorie und Entwicklungspolitik der DVPW

Deutsche Gesellschaft für Osteuropakunde (DGO)

Association for Slavic, East European, & Eurasian Studies (ASEEES)

Wintersemester 2020/21

FU Berlin – MA-Seminar: Staat und Staatlichkeit im post-sowjetischen Raum

Vergangene Lehrveranstaltungen

Sommersemester 2020

FU Berlin – MA-Projektseminar II: The Nation Strikes Back? Neue und alte Nationalismen in Osteuropa

FU Berlin – MA-Seminar: Global Populism and Eastern Europe

Wintersemester 2019/20

FU Berlin – MA-Projektseminar I: The Nation Strikes Back? Neue und alte Nationalismen in Osteuropa

Sommersemester 2019

FU Berlin – MA-Seminar: Die Außenpolitik des modernen Russlands (1999-2019)

Wintersemester 2018/19

FU Berlin – MA-Seminar: Die Politische Ökonomie des modernen Russlands seit dem Zerfall der Sowjetunion

Sommersemester 2018

U Leipzig – BA-Seminar: Die Politische Ökonomie des Ressourcenreichtums

Wintersemester 2017/18

U Leipzig – MA-Seminar: Geschichte und Politische Ökonomie der Außenpolitik. Theoretische Ansätze und methodologische Herausforderungen

U Leipzig – extracurriculares Lektüre-Seminar: Kritische Politische Ökonomie und Internationale Beziehungen

Sommersemester 2017

U Leipzig – BA-Seminar: Gesellschaft und Außenpolitik

Wintersemester 2016/17

U Leipzig – BA-Seminar: Ist Außen- Außenpolitik? Theoretische Ansätze und neue Debatten

Sommersemester 2016

U Leipzig – BA-Übung: Einführung in die Internationale Politik

Sommersemester 2015

U Leipzig – BA-Übung: Einführung in die Internationale Politik

Wintersemester 2014/15

U Leipzig – MA-Übung: Marx, Keynes, Neoklassik: Die Krisen des Kapitalismus

Sommersemester 2014

U Leipzig – MA-Übung: Die Politische Ökonomie des kapitalistischen Weltsystems

PhD project (2018-2022): State strategy making under patronal authoritarianism. The International Political Economy of Russia’s ‘turn to the East’, 2009-2019

Russia’s ‘turn to the East’ (povorot na Vostok) constitutes a set of intertwined developmental and foreign economic policies aimed at fostering the infrastructural, socio-economic and institutional modernisation of the Russian Far East (RFE) and integrating the region more comprehensively into the Asia-Pacific region (APR). Focusing on this set of state strategies, the PhD project is interested in answering three interrelated questions: (1) How have the strategies comprising the povorot been implemented since 2009? (2) Which actors have benefitted from the initiated strategies, and does their involvement in the povorot reproduce or alter the structures of Russia's political economy? (3) What explains the variance in the hitherto observable outcomes of the povorot? Embedding the discussion of the Russian case in scholarship on state-driven developmental attempts of non-Western societies, the study explores the implementation processes of large-scale strategies in the RFE against the economic and geopolitical context in the APR. The study holds that the variance in the outcomes of Russia’s ‘turn’ is explicable in terms of differently structured and integrated patronal networks, reaching from vertically integrated state agencies to regional machine politics in the RFE. These networks, it is argued, manage the circulation of rents in the country’s political economy and interact with dynamics in the regional and global economy. Therefore, they tend to determine the capacity of the Russian state to implement specific state projects. Methodologically, the study conducts three in-depth case studies, analysing the establishment and commissioning of so-called special economic zones in the RFE, the modernisation of Vladivostok and the promotion of Russia’s energy industry as three strategic sets aimed at uplifting the integration of Russia in the Asia-Pacific. The study builds on qualitative research methods, such as process-tracing, descriptive statistics and qualitative content analysis, to reconstruct the implementation processes of these state projects through patronal networks as well as the macroeconomic and geopolitical context of the projects.

The PhD study seeks to make a twofold contribution to scholarly literature. Empirically, it illustrates and disaggregates the mechanics behind the povorot as a large-scale set of state strategies and weighs the relation between its reproducing or altering consequences for Russia's political economy. Theoretically, it adds to studies focusing on the varied consequences of different types of patron-client relationships for political, economic, and foreign economic policies in countries characterised by rent-driven social relations and non-democratic political regimes. Finally, the project's findings will speak to the rich literature on global attempts of new and reinvigorated statisms (developmental statism, authoritarian state capitalism, economic nationalism) after the global financial crisis in 2008/9.

Capitalism and Socialism in Russia. Concept Formation and the (Post-)Soviet Experience

Together with Friedrich Asschenfeldt (Princeton University, Department of History) and OEI’s Department of Sociology, I have been discussing the relationship between capitalist and socialist trajectories in Russia’s Soviet and post-Soviet history from a historical-sociological and politico-economic perspective. By doing so, we seek to historicise and rethink how Russia’s Soviet and post-Soviet development has contributed to the formation of both concepts that remain foundational to much of the social sciences. We will conduct an international and interdisciplinary workshop on that issue in Berlin from 22 to 24 September 2021 (https://www.oei.fu-berlin.de/politik/news/20201103_CfP_capitalism.html).

Moreover, I have an interest in re-connecting the vibrant anglophone discussion on an International Historical Sociology (IHS) with the marginalised yet rich German scholarship on a historically informed social science of international politics that constituted an essential pillar of critical IR teaching and research in Germany up until the end of the 1980s. Reviewing the converging and diverging trajectories of this “parallel debate” between both strands of scholarship, I seek to explore their methodological consequences for a Historical Sociology of international politics.

Patterns of populist mobilisation across the post-Soviet space

I have been working on two papers exploring patterns of populist mobilisation across the post-Soviet space. I am particularly interested in the ambivalent and variegated consequences of the diffusion of populist strategies into the post-Soviet space. While the first paper puts forward a comparative perspective on patterns of populist mobilisations in Russia, Ukraine and Armenia, the second paper zooms into the Russian case to make sense of the recent challenge posed by the populist mobilisations by Alexei Navalny’s movement to the stability of the current Russian regime. Both papers draw on sociological and politico-economic registers to capture the social embeddedness of modern populisms beyond Western societies.

Artikel in Fachzeitschriften

Hoppe, Sebastian (in Vorbereitung): Sovereigntism vs. anti-corruption messianism. A salient cleavage of populist mobilisation across the post-Soviet space.

Hoppe, Sebastian (angenommen, i.E.): Internationale Historische Soziologie und historische Sozialwissenschaft in den deutschen und anglo-amerikanischen IB. Zur Relevanz einer Paralleldebatte für die Außenpolitikforschung. In: Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen.

Hoppe, Sebastian/Rogova, Vera (2020): Russlands ‚Wende Nach Osten‘. Kleine Schritte Statt Umfassende Neuorientierung. In: Zeitschrift für Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik 13, no. 3 (2020): 247–58. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12399-020-00813-w.

Online-Artikel

Hoppe, Sebastian (2020): Russia's Far East in the shadow of the Asian pivot. In: Riddle, 21.04.2020. Online verfügbar unter https://www.ridl.io/en/russia-s-far-east-in-the-shadow-of-the-asian-pivot/.

russ.: Хоппе, Себастьян (2020): Что российский «поворот на Восток» значит для ДВ. In: Riddle, 21.04.2020. Online verfügbar unter https://www.ridl.io/ru/chto-rossijskij-povorot-na-vostok-znachit-dlja-dv/.

Rezensionen & Konferenzberichte

Hoppe, Sebastian (2018): Rezension. Trenin, Dmitri (2016): Should We Fear Russia? Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. & Trenin, Dmitri (2018): What Is Russia Up To In The Middle East? Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. In: Zeitschrift für Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik Online First (06.08.2018).

Hoppe, Sebastian (2016): Review. Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists by Hartmut Elsenhans and Hartmut Elsenhans and a Critique of Capitalism by Neil Wilcock and Corina Scholz. In: Indian Journal of Asian Affairs 29 (1-2), 115–118.

Hoppe, Sebastian (2014): Konferenzbericht. The First World War and the Balkans – Historic Event, Experience and Memory. In: Südosteuropa-Mitteilungen 05-06, 145–149.