Biography
Renata Mustafina is a CIVICA post-doctoral fellow at the European University Institute and a research associate at the Center for International Studies at Sciences Po, Paris, where she previously defended her PhD thesis (July 2023). Renata's research interests include legal repression, politicized justice, legal mobilization, and human rights advocacy in both democratic and authoritarian contexts. In her thesis and book project, she explores the forms of legal resistance to repression and the inventiveness of actors with little room for maneuver, focusing on the legal aftermaths of opposition protests in pre-war Russia. She has done extensive fieldwork among lawyers, lay legal intermediaries as well as defendants (interviews, court ethnography, legal archives). As a post-doctoral fellow, she is starting a new research project dealing with the global governance of political prisoners and the rise of legal expertise in the field of human rights.
Renata received her M.A. in social sciences from Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris (2016) and holds an undergraduate degree in international relations from Moscow State University (2013). Before coming to EUI, she was a visiting scholar and lecturer at the MacMillan Center at Yale University (2019-2022). She has taught classes at Sciences Po and Yale University in Russian politics, comparative law and society, and ethnography at the undergraduate and MA levels. Her work has been published in Law & Society Review (English), Politix, and Critique Internationale (French).