Julia Vassileva

Dr. Julia Vassileva is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. She studies the evolving relationship between post-Soviet states and international structures of governance. Her first book manuscript, on the role of women in peace processes across post-Soviet Eastern Europe, is currently under consideration at Cambridge University Press.

In 2024–2025, Julia was a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York while completing her Ph.D. in Politics at Tallinn University, Estonia (2022–2025). She also holds degrees in International Relations and Law from the University of Oxford, the University of Vienna, and the College of Europe in Bruges.

In 2021–2022, Julia briefly left academia to work for EU institutions in Brussels, at the European Commission and the EU’s diplomatic service (EEAS). In summer 2022, a few months after the invasion of Ukraine, she relocated to Estonia to begin her field-based doctoral research on dynamics at the EU and NATO frontier with Russia and across the post-Soviet space. To gather first-hand data, she undertook visiting research stays throughout 2023–2024 in Georgia, Moldova, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Turkey. She collaborated with local scholars, civil society, public sector actors, international organizations, and embassies, and worked remotely with colleagues in Ukraine.

Alongside her current appointment at Harvard, Julia was recently a researcher at the UN’s International Law Commission in Geneva and New York, a visiting associate professor at Osaka Metropolitan University in Japan, and a visiting researcher at the National University of Singapore. She also served as an independent external (legal) expert at NATO’s Cyber Defense Center. Her academic work is published in journals by OUP, CUP, and others.