Gaziza Shakhanova from FIR won the prestigious international Ted Jelen Best Journal Article Award for her article

Gaziza Shakhanova, Ph.D., a Ph.D. graduate and researcher at the Department of International Studies and Diplomacy, received the prestigious “Ted Jelen Best Journal Article Award of the Religion & Politics Section” from the American Political Science Association as a co-author for her article.

This is a very prestigious international award in the field of science and research with a focus on political science. The formal award ceremony will take place on September 1 in Los Angeles, USA, followed by a reception.

The article titled “The Patriotic Turn in Russia: Political Convergence of the Russian Orthodox Church and the State” was published in the scholarly journal Politics & Religion in 2022.

Shakhanova and Kratochvil’s piece engages with big concepts in substantive and innovative ways, linking the politics of the Russian Orthodox Church to salient questions about the state, the rise of religious nationalism, post-secularism, and the militarization of religious discourse. The article deftly employs a mix of qualitative and quantitative data to develop concepts about the political theology and actions of the ROC. In doing so, they take on one of the most important but difficult research questions in the subfield and rise to the occasion in their analysis.

Gaziza Shakhanova, Ph.D.

Gaziza Shakhanova obtained her Ph.D. in 2020 from the Prague University of Economics and Business. Before that, she worked for a number of Kazakh ministries and state-owned organizations. Her research interests include the Russia-Central Asian region and the postcolonial studies of Russia and Kazakhstan. Her publications include papers in the prestigious peer-reviewed journals Politics and Religion, Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, and Problems of Post-Communism.