Wiktor Babinski

Wiktor Babinski is an Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a PhD candidate in History at Yale University. He is a historian of modern Central and Eastern Europe, focusing on the politics and strategy of the region's twentieth-century transition from empires to independent nation-states.

His dissertation is an intellectual history of a Polish grand strategy that assumed that if Poland was to regain the independence it lost in 1795 and then defend it, it needed to recognize the national movements of Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belarus, and turn them from enemies into allies. Wiktor tells its story through four generations of thinkers and doers who pursued this grand strategy and adjusted it to their own times – from socialist revolutionaries in the 1890s, through statesmen and scholars of interwar Poland, Cold War-era émigrés, to activists of the Solidarity movement who led Poland out of communism in 1989. His work explores how local strategists and statesmen reacted to and shaped the birth of mass politics and the fall of empires in Eastern Europe and helped build the contemporary system of independent nation-states.

From 2024 to 2025 he served as an advisor at the Chancellery of the Prime Minister of Poland, focusing on Ukraine. There, he authored Poland’s official report on aid provided to Ukraine in the first years of full-scale war, titled Polish Aid to Ukraine 2022-2023. Concurrently, he advised the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Polish Sejm, Paweł Kowal, focusing on transatlantic affairs and leading programming for “Polish Security Week” in July 2025, the largest Polish parliamentary delegation to Washington, DC in a decade.

Wiktor graduated with First Class Honours in International Relations from the London School of Economics. From 2018 to 2021 he worked at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, as a senior researcher to Niall Ferguson, assisting in research for the second volume of his biography of Henry Kissinger. His writing on politics and global affairs has appeared in POLITICO, National Review, Newsweek, New Eastern Europe, The National Interest, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and American Purpose, among others.