Research grant awarded

9.12.2015

Research grant for Viacheslav Morozov to research Russian national identity in comparative perspective

Viacheslav Morozov, Professor of EU-Russia Studies, has been awarded a Personal Research Grant (PUT) by the Estonian Research Council (ETAg). The four-year grant is intended to support the research project “Russian National Identity in a Comparative Context: Towards an Intersubjective Identity Database”.

Professor Morozov’s research will contribute to a larger project “Making Identity Count” (MIC), based at the National University of Singapore and directed by Professor Ted Hopf (NUS) and Dr. Bentley Allan (Johns Hopkins University). MIC’s aim is to create a cumulative long-term interpretivist dataset on Russian national identity by empirically recovering the central categories of national identity for a number of years, starting with the period between 1950 and 2010 and eventually extending the time-frame back to 1810.

The data will then be integrated into the MIC database covering all major great powers, to be used in comparative research at the juncture of constructivist and quantitative approaches. The project will also advance dialogue between qualitative and quantitative scholars by explicitly delineating interpretivist methods in a way consistent with mainstream social scientific analysis.

Personal research funding application rounds are highly competitive. The overall budget for funding in 2016 was 3.2 million Euros. According to preliminary decisions of the Estonian Research Council, altogether 284 funding applications were submitted, of these 84 were in the research field of “Culture and Society”, and only 11 received funding.

CEURUS-affiliated scholars have also been successful in the previous application rounds for research funding. In 2013, the grant was awarded to Dr Elena Pavlova for the project “Towards an alternative theory of normative power: A comparative analysis of discourse and foreign policy of the European Union, Russian Federation and Latin America”, and in 2014 to Professor Vello Pettai for the project “Varieties of Democracy: measuring democracy in the Baltic states, Eastern Europe and Russia”.

For more information, please contact: Viacheslav Morozov, Professor of EU-Russia Studies, morozov@ut.ee