Areas of Expertise

• Russian domestic, foreign, and security policy; EU-Russia relations
• Russian energy, economic, and education policy
• Eastern Partnership, especially in the South Caucasus, Belarus, and Ukraine
• Russia’s relations with its post-Soviet neighbors and post-Soviet conflict areas
• Regional order with a focus on Eastern Europe, South Caucasus, and Central Asia
• Russian disinformation and hybrid warefare

Languages

German, Russian, English, Polish

Dr. Stefan Meister has been the head of DGAP’s program on international order and democracy since August 2021. From 2019 until then, he worked as director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s South Caucasus Office.

From 2017 to 2019, Meister was head of the Robert Bosch Center for Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia at DGAP, where he had previously headed its program for Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia. Before that, he was a senior policy fellow in the Wider Europe Team at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) in Berlin and London. In the 2015/16 term, Meister was a visiting fellow at the Transatlantic Academy in Washington, DC, where he wrote on Russian disinformation and propaganda. He has served as an election observer for the OSCE in post-Soviet countries several times and worked on conflict transformation and institution building in post-Soviet countries.

Meister is co-author of Geopolitics and Security: A New Strategy for the South Caucasus (KAS/DGAP/GIP, 2018), The Russia File (Brookings, 2018), Eastern Voices (Center for Transatlantic Relations/DGAP, 2017), and The Eastern Question (Brookings, 2016).

He studied international relations and East European history in Jena, Leipzig, and Nizhni Novgorod and holds a PhD from Friedrich Schiller University in Jena with a thesis on the transformation of the Russian higher education and research system.