Anna Dobrovolskaya

Anna Dobrovolskaya is a human rights defender, researcher, and educator, and the former executive director of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Memorial Human Rights Center in Russia. Anna's current work focuses on providing mentoring and strategic counseling for NGOs in Eastern Europe, and on researching decolonisation and imperial patterns in Russian history, with an emphasis on the causes of the 2022 war in Ukraine. She has been involved in peace-promoting projects since 2008 and has worked with Ukrainian peace and human rights NGOs since 2016, working on building peace processes, dialogue, and understanding among young people from Ukraine and Russia.

As a SCI fellow, Anna will be researching the traumas and unresolved collective memory issues that drive Russian people towards imperial values and the "power of force" instead of transitioning into a more democratic and human rights-based society. Her goal is to understand why these tendencies persist and use the research findings to encourage  societal transformation.