Dr. Karena Avedissian is a political scientist focused on social movements, new media, civil society, and security in the former Soviet Union, with an area focus on Russia and the Caucasus. She received her PhD from the University of Birmingham in 2015. Since then, she has worked as Research Fellow at the University of Southern California and the University of Birmingham on topics of comparative democracy and authoritarianism, state-building in Armenia, and state influence in the post-Soviet space. Her writing has been published in The Guardian, the Moscow Times, Open Democracy, Global Voices, Transitions Online, and Hetq. She is currently a lecturer at the American University of Armenia.