CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C236
Stanford, CA 94305-6165

lapidus@stanford.edu
(650) 723-2435 (voice)
(650) 723-0089 (fax)

Expertise
ethnic conflict in the former Soviet Union; the Russian-Chechen war; Soviet society, politics and foreign policy

Languages
English, Russian

Gail Lapidus is a Senior Fellow at FSI, where she heads the CISAC Project on Ethnic Conflict in the Former Soviet Union. She is also a professor emeritus of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. She has authored and edited a number of books on Soviet and post-Soviet affairs, including The New Russia: Troubled Transformation (Westview Press, 1995) and From Union to Commonwealth: Nationalism and Separatism in the Soviet Republics, with Victor Zaslavsky and Philip Goldman (Cambridge University Press, 1992). Lapidus is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations, as well as several scholarly associations. She has held a variety of scholarly and administrative appointments, serving as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, chair of the Social Science Research Council's Joint Committee on Soviet Studies, and member of the Advisory Council of the Woodrow Wilson Center's Kennan Institute, the Committee on International Political Science of the American Political Science Association, and the board of trustees of the World Affairs Council of Northern California. A frequent visitor to the USSR and its successor states, she is currently working on a book on the impact of the Soviet legacy on patterns of conflict in the post-Soviet states.