Marc Berenson

Prior to joining King’s Russia Institute in September 2013 as Senior Lecturer, Dr Marc P. Berenson was serving, since 2007, as a research fellow on the Governance Team at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex in Brighton. His projects on governance, public administration, state capacity and state-society relations in Russia, Ukraine and Poland have been empirically, conceptually and methodologically ground-breaking, with a particular (and particularly important) focus on the ways in which citizens’ interactions with the bureaucracy shapes and is shaped by their perceptions of the state and the meaning of their own citizenship. His book – Taxes and Trust: Transitioning from Coercion to Compliance in Poland, Russia and Ukraine – was published in 2018 by Cambridge University Press, and his articles have appeared in Comparative Political Studies, the Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics and elsewhere. Previously, Dr Berenson worked as a research analyst for the American Bar Association, the EastWest Institute, The Carter Center and the Strengthening Democratic Institutions Project at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He also has undertaken several consultancies, for, among others, the World Bank in Russia and the OECD’s Tax and Development Programme.

After receiving his BA from Harvard University, Dr Berenson founded and directed from 1996 to 1998 the 'Law in Action' program for Freedom House in Kyiv, Ukraine, before receiving his PhD in Political Science from Princeton University in 2006. A recipient of more than a dozen academic grants and fellowships, he is fluent in Russian, Polish and English, reads Ukrainian and speaks Italian.