Ben's current research focuses on the law-making process during the legislative stage of policy-making in authoritarian regimes. His empirical work is centred on states of the former Soviet Union. He has a secondary research interest in the politics of criminal law policy-making.
He has been an Associate Fellow of Chatham House since 2020.
Ben completed his doctorate at the University of Oxford in 2016, with a dissertation on the politics of lawmaking in contemporary Russia, which won the Political Studies Association's Walter Bagehot Prize. From 2015 to 2017, he held a Junior Research Fellowship at New College, Oxford.
Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts