Liliya Khasanova Joins the Fletcher Russia and Eurasia Program as a Visiting Scholar

By Natasha Wood, MALD 2024 Candidate, The Fletcher School

Liliya Khasanova recently joined The Fletcher School as a visiting scholar. She will conduct research on Russia’s approach to digital governance. Khasanova previously served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Berlin-Potsdam Research Group “International Rule of Law: Rise or Decline?”, where she focused on public international law, international law of cyberspace, and comparative international law.

Khasanova has worked on international public law at a range of institutions, observing the ways that different countries and stakeholders approach international public law. She completed her Ph.D. in international public law from Kazan Federal University in Russia, during which she was also a graduate research fellow at the Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation and a visiting fellow at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. She also spent time at Stockholm University in Sweden.

Khasanova’s Ph.D. research was on the diplomatic negotiation process surrounding international trade disputes. Her work interrogates which cases get brought to the World Trade Organization (WTO), how politically sensitive cases are handled at the WTO, and how cases are solved diplomatically. 

Over the last two years, her postdoctoral work has analyzed the perspectives that countries, including Russia and the United States, use to regulate cyberspace and the information space. At Fletcher, Khasanova will study Russia’s use of civilizational and cultural relativism in implementing regulations in cyberspace and the information space. 

“This field is so fragmented in a regulatory way,” Khasanova points out. “There’s a lot of power playing happening right now in cyber, with different actors trying to push for their own vision of normative regulations in cyberspace.”