As Russia’s war against Ukraine grinds on and debate intensifies over how to end it, what could push the conflict into a more dangerous phase of escalation? This talk examines how the Putin regime’s domestic political imperatives shape when Moscow absorbs setbacks and when it escalates. It argues that Russian behavior reflects a “pressure-cooker” dynamic: external geopolitical constraints favor restraint, while battlefield failures, war weariness, and pressure from hardliners can gradually raise the domestic costs of inaction. The result is prolonged restraint punctuated by abrupt escalation across conventional, gray-zone, and nuclear domains. Counterintuitively, the greatest danger may arise before a domestic crisis fully materializes — when wartime exhaustion or the political and economic strains of a ceasefire loom, but the Putin regime still retains the capacity to act coherently. This argument has direct implications for Western efforts to manage escalation and negotiate an end to the war without inadvertently increasing Moscow’s incentives for risk-taking.

Aleksandar Matovski is an Associate Professor in the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School. His research focuses on the impact of domestic politics on the durability and strategic behavior of authoritarian regimes, with a regional emphasis on Europe and the former Soviet Union. Matovski holds a PhD and MA in Government from Cornell University, an MA in War Studies from King’s College London, and a BA in Law from Saints Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje. Prior to his academic career, he was National Security Advisor in the Government of North Macedonia and Political and Military Advisor in the North Macedonian Ministry of Defense. 

Roberta Metsola was elected President of the European Parliament in January 2022, becoming the youngest ever person to occupy this role. In July 2024, she was re-elected to lead the institution for another term, as only the second person and first woman to serve as President for two terms.
 

Leading the only directly elected European institution, President Metsola has been very vocal and firm in Europe’s support to Ukraine, following Russia’s brutal invasion. On 1st April 2022, she became the first President of an institution of the European Union to visit Ukraine since the start of the war. As President of the European Parliament, she has led reforms towards a Parliament, which is more modern, efficient and accountable.
 
Since the start of her mandate, President Metsola has also made it a priority to reach beyond Brussels and Strasbourg, by visiting European Union Member States and candidate countries, meeting with people, visiting schools and taking the message of Europe to the various cities, towns and villages. She has also invited EU Heads of State or Government to the European Parliament to discuss current challenges and opportunities for the Union, under the “This is Europe” debates. 

She was first elected to the European Parliament in 2013, becoming one of Malta's first female Members of the European Parliament. President Metsola was re-elected in 2014 and then again in 2019 and 2024.


In 2020, she was elected as the First Vice-President of the European Parliament, becoming the first Maltese national to hold the post. She was responsible for the European Parliament's relations with national parliaments and for the Parliament's participation in the interreligious and non-confessional dialogue (Article 17 TFEU).

Within the European Parliament, President Metsola was the European People’s Party Group's Coordinator in the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, between January 2017 and 2020. President Metsola was the Parliament's rapporteur on the European Border and Coastguard Regulation (FRONTEX) in 2019. She also co-authored the Parliament's own-initiative report on the need to protect journalists in the European Union from Strategic Lawsuits against Public Participation (SLAPP).


Prior to her election as a Member of the European Parliament, President Metsola served within the Permanent Representation of Malta to the European Union and later as the legal advisor to the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. In her student years, she campaigned actively for Malta's European Union membership, and was active in various organisations, acting as the Secretary-General for the European Democrat Student organisation between 2002 and 2003. President Metsola credits the referendum on Malta’s accession to the European Union as the catalyst for her political career at such a young age.


Professionally she is a lawyer who has specialised in European law and politics. She completed an Erasmus exchange in France and graduated from the University of Malta and the College of Europe in Bruges.


Born in 1979, Roberta Metsola is married to Ukko Metsola and is the mother of four boys.

We collected monthly data on individual employees over 200 years to understand how wars shaped the evolution of modern bureaucracy.

A large literature has examined the “rise of the state” in early modern Europe, focusing on the increase in the capacity of states due to war. However, state institutions were increasing not only in size but also in their quality, through the creation of “modern” or “Weberian” bureaucracies. To illustrate these distinct processes, our project examines the state in early modern Britain, often cited as the ideal type of a bureaucratic transformation. To do so, we are building a dataset of every central government employee in Britain between 1660 and 1870, capturing not just their numbers but several measures of bureaucratic rationalization: structured career progression, functional specialization, remuneration through salaries rather than user fees, higher salaries, increased time in office, the de-linking of bureaucratic and political careers, and reduced nepotism.

Anil Menon is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Merced. His research focuses on the legacies of political violence and political responses to conditions of vulnerability more broadly. Dr. Menon’s work is published or forthcoming at journals including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, the Economic Journal, and Lancet Regional Health Europe.

Dr. Menon’s work on Europe concerns both historical and contemporary topics. For instance, he has investigated the long-term electoral legacies of forced migration at the end of World War 2 in Germany. In more recent work, he examines whether citizens are willing to trade off civil liberties for decisive policy action in the domain of immigration.

The 2026 Hungarian parliamentary election marked a historic turning point in European politics, as the Péter Magyar-led Tisza Party secured a landslide victory and a two-thirds supermajority, ending Viktor Orbán’s 16-year tenure. Dan Kelemen will analyze the significant implications for the European Union, focusing on how this shift from illiberalism to a pro-European stance may unfreeze crucial EU funds and reshape the balance of power within the European Council. Hanna Folsz will delve into the domestic political landscape, examining the structural factors and rapid mobilization that allowed the Tisza Party to overcome a skewed electoral system and the long-standing dominance of Fidesz. Together, the speakers will evaluate whether this result represents a restoration of liberal democracy in Hungary or a complex transition within a deeply entrenched political and economic framework.

R. Daniel Kelemen is McCourt Chair at the McCourt School of Public Policy. He is also Professor of Law (by courtesy) at Georgetown Law. Kelemen has published widely on the politics and law of the European Union, comparative politics and law, and comparative public policy. Prior to joining Georgetown University, Kelemen was Professor of Political Science and Law at Rutgers University. He also served as Chair of the Department of Political Science and Director of the Center for European Studies at Rutgers. Prior to Rutgers, Kelemen was Fellow in Politics at Lincoln College, University of Oxford. Kelemen is a Senior Associate (Non-Resident), in the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a member of the Executive Committee of the European Union Studies Association. Kelemen comments regularly on EU affairs for European and American media. He was educated at UC Berkeley (A.B. in Sociology) and Stanford (M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science).

Hanna Folsz is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Stanford University. Her research focuses on opposition parties in authoritarian dominant-party regimes, with a particular focus on the challenges and opportunities they face in countering autocratization. More broadly, her work examines the causes and consequences of democratic backsliding, populism, media capture, and political favoritism — primarily in East-Central Europe and, secondarily, in Latin America. She uses a multi-method approach, including modern causal inference and text analysis techniques.

Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the American Political Science Association, among others. She is the co-founder and co-organizer of EEPGW, a monthly online graduate student workshop on East European politics, and a co-founder and regular contributor to The Hungarian Observer, the most widely read online newsletter on Hungarian politics and culture. At Stanford, she is an active member of  CDDRL's Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab (PovGov).

Russia's shift from informational autocracy toward overt repression has made understanding public sentiment more urgent yet increasingly difficult. One channel remains: appeals systems, through which hundreds of thousands of citizens each year bring grievances directly to the state. What concerns do citizens raise, and how does the regime respond? Drawing on original data from Russia's presidential appeals system, this talk examines what appeals reveal about everyday citizen-state relations, governance challenges, and how autocratic institutions that promise responsiveness actually function under pressure. Appeals offer a unique behavioral measure of citizen concerns, capturing the experiences of those most affected by governance failures—offering insight into a regime that has become increasingly opaque.

Hannah S. Chapman is the Theodore Romanoff Assistant Professor of Russian Studies and an Assistant Professor of International and Area Studies. Previously, she was a George F. Kennan Fellow at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Her research, teaching, and service are in the fields of comparative political behavior with a substantive focus on public opinion, political participation, and political communication in non-democracies and a regional focus on Russian and post-Soviet politics. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in authoritarianism, Russian domestic and international politics, and comparative politics.

Her book project, Dialogue with the Dictator: Information Manipulation and Authoritarian Legitimation in Putin's Russia, examines the role of quasi-democratic participation mechanisms in reinforcing authoritarian regimes. Her work has been published in Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics,  Democratization, International Studies Quarterly, and the Washington Post.