Russia 2030 Futures Enhanced
Mentor
Pavel Havlicek is a Research Fellow at the Association for International Affairs (AMO). His research focus is on Eastern Europe, especially Ukraine and Russia, and the Eastern Partnership. He also deals with questions of security, disinformation, and strategic communication as well as democratization and civil society support in the CEE and post-Soviet space
Project Description
The project idea for the mentorship program would continue and further develop the work on the Russia 2030 Futures scenario-making exercise, which is an initiative that is currently being finished within a limited scope of time by the Association for International Affairs (AMO) in Prague, the German Marshall Fund (GMF) of the US, and the College of Eastern Europe (KEW) in Wroclaw, and should be presented in the course of the next several weeks. The project has been consulted with the team of Ideas for Russia and its experts took part in individual steps of the project, while also contributing to the final result.
The idea originally emerged out of the need to look at Russia’s future after the war in Ukraine and foresee different ways things might develop inside of Russia in the future. Many of the futures, based on the above-elaborated scenario options, include unexpected events (black swans) or fastened developments of existing trends (grey rhinos).
In terms of methodology, the project is based on the method of strategic foresight and from that stemming scenario-building exercise, originally coming from the private sector and the risk analysis environment. The methodology itself has been widely described in the literature and used on a number of occasions by EU institutions, including the European Commission and other policy, research, and the think tank community.
The work of the lab would be focused on the elaboration of individual scenarios, determining the plausibility of each of the policy courses, establishing realistic conditions (backsighting) and consequences of those options, looking for strengths and weaknesses of those, and finally also sharpening the policy recommendations to the policy- and decision-making community in individual scenarios’ cases, which should also be the main recipient of the final product.
One of the main goals of the project is thus to let the young people think creatively, give them the opportunity for their professional growth, and join the policy discussion on the topic, which is already today occupying the mind of most relevant stakeholders working on Russia and the post-Soviet space, including Ukraine, Belarus, or the rest of the Eastern Partnership countries, while having profound implications also for the rest of the world.
To do that and facilitate the whole process of mentees’ involvement in the existing project, the previously gained experience and policy-relevant expertise would be put in place based on the past nine months of policy research and focus that included dozens of experts and researchers in the field across the wider European continent as well as the Russian Federation itself. At the same time, the existing project platform and outreach would serve as the baseline for further work and enhanced experience of the group of mentees that would benefit from their own work and contribution to make the most of the up-to-date knowledge and state of the art on one of the most crucial topics of today.
Intern Workload
32–50 hours per month
Intern Requirements
Level: Master’s or PhD students.
Language requirements: English C1 or higher; Russian B2 or higher will be an advantage.
Internship applications to this laboratory are accepted in English only.