Natalia Mamonova is an Associate Research Fellow at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs (Utrikespolitiska institutet) and a Research Consultant at the Department of Political Science of the University of Notre Dame. Natalia’s research interests primarily focus on contemporary grassroots (rural) politics in post-socialist settings. She studies rural social movements, food sovereignty, everyday (hidden) resistance, right-wing populism and state-society relations in Russia, Ukraine, and some other countries of Eastern Europe.
Natalia received her PhD degree in 2016 from the Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University in the Netherlands. Her PhD dissertation, entitled “Rethinking rural politics in post-socialist settings”, challenged the dominant assumptions in agrarian studies and post-socialist literature. Two of her articles (‘Resistance or adaptation? Ukrainian peasants’ responses to land grabbing’ and ‘Naive monarchism and rural resistance in contemporary Russia’) received ‘best article’ awards from Erasmus University in 2016 and 2017.
After completing her PhD, Natalia was a visiting researcher and lecturer at the University of Oxford, the New Europe College in Bucharest, and the University of Helsinki.
As part of her postdoctoral project at the Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies, she initiated and carried out a collective research project ‘Right-wing populism in rural Europe’, which became a journal special issue, published in Sociologia Ruralis in 2020 with Natalia Mamonova and Jaume Franquesa as guest editors.
Currently, Natalia, together with Brian Kuns, is working on the research projects ‘Food security, food sovereignty and solidarity initiatives during the war in Ukraine’ and, with Susanne Wengle, ‘Ukrainian corn’. Natalia Mamonova is the principal coordinator of the European team of the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI Europe), which is a scholar-activist community that aims at understanding, challenging and building alternatives to globalized neoliberal agriculture in rural Europe.
