Keith Darden is an Associate Professor in the School of International Service at American University specializing in comparative politics, international relations, and the politics of Eurasia. His first book, Economic Liberalism and Its Rivals: The Formation of International Institutions among the Post-Soviet States, was published in 2009 by Cambridge University Press and won the 2010 Hewett award from ASEEES and an honorable mention for the Shulman prize. The book explored the why post-Soviet states chose to support the Eurasian Customs Union, the WTO, or to eschew membership in either institution. His current research focuses on the sources of national loyalties and their effects on patterns of insurgent violence, secession, and voting, particularly in Ukraine. His second book, Resisting Occupation: Mass Literacy and the Creation of Durable National Loyalties, to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2014, explores how the national identities initially introduced to a community through schools account for subsequent patterns of voting, secession, and armed resistance to foreign occupation. He previously taught for eleven years at Yale University and served on the inaugural faculty of Yale-NUS (Singapore). Darden is co-editor of the Cambridge University Press Series on Problems of International Politics and has been a Fellow at the Wissenschaftszentrum in Berlin, the Davis Center for Russian Studies, and the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. In 2007 he was awarded the Lex Hixon ’63 Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Social Sciences, an annual endowed award given to a single faculty member across all fields of the social sciences at Yale University. And, in 2008 he was awarded the Gregory M. Luebbert Prize for Best Article in Comparative Politics Published in 2006 or 2007 by the American Political Science Association (APSA) for the article I co-authored with Anna Grzymala-Busse, “The Great Divide: Literacy, Nationalism, and the Communist Collapse.”
Over the past twenty years, Professor Darden has conducted field research in Ukraine on a variety of projects, most recently on Ukraine’s cultural divides and the historical sources of the pro-Russian or pro-Western orientations of Ukraine’s regions. In the past four months, his analyses and interviews concerning events in Ukraine have been published in Foreign Affairs, Survival, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, LeMonde, National Geographic, Russia in Global Affairs (in Russian), the AP and Reuters. He has been interviewed on CNN, Washington Public Radio’s Kojo Nnamdi Show, Sirius XM radio, CBS, Voice of America, Echo Moscow (in Russian), and Ukrainian television (Channel 5).