
Exclusionary Regimes, Autocratization and Democracy
Francesca Chiarvesio
Contact: francesca.chiarvesio(at)gmail.com
Post-doctoral Fellow, Social Scientists Association, Colombo, Sri Lanka
Francesca Chiarvesio completed a PhD in Sociology in 2023 (Higher School of Economics, Moscow). At SSA, she investigates authoritarian legitimation and disability representative service-oriented civil society organizations in Russia since the beginning of Ukraine’s full-scale aggression. By challenging the dichotomy of good/bad civil society based on Western ideal types, the project aims to contribute to understanding civil society agency in authoritarian contexts and its interlink with exclusionary regimes’ resilience.
She worked at the International Laboratory for Social Integration research where she studied civil society’s anti-corruption discourses in Russia, and she was a post-doctoral fellow at Jyväskylä University. The results of her previous research projects appeared in Globalizations, Post-Communist Studies, and the Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe.
Research project
Untying the Autocratic Legitimacy and ‘Apolitical’ Civil Society Knot: Russia’s Social Contract and Disability-representative Organizations
This project investigates the interlink between autocratic resilience, the social contract, and service-providing civil society organizations. In particular, it focuses on Russia’s government legitimation strategies and disability-representative civil society organizations since the beginning of the full-scale aggression against Ukraine. The project analyzes which inclusive and exclusive (non-)material elements constitute the reconfiguration of the social contract and the legitimation strategies of the government, the way the ‘apolitical’ civil society actors engage with such elements, and how welfare is reshaped. The study is relevant to the question of how Russia’s exclusionary regime maintains legitimacy through social policies.