Denis Shedov

Meritförteckning

Denis Shedov is a Doctoral Researcher at the University of Helsinki, where his dissertation focuses on civil society and human rights. Under the supervision of Professor Marianna Muravyeva and Dr Anna-Liisa Heusala, he is working on an article based dissertation project entitled Trauma and Transformation: Human Rights Groups’ Responses to Russia’s Exclusion from the European Court of Human Rights. This research is based on extensive fieldwork conducted between 2023 and 2025 within the framework of the research project Human Rights in Eastern Europe and Russia (HuRiEE, University of Oxford, PI Dr Agnieszka Kubal).

As a human rights activist, Denis serves as a board member of the Human Rights Defence Centre Memorial and works as an analyst at OVD-Info. His research primarily focuses on the OSCE region, with a particular emphasis on Russia.

In his academic career, Denis has contributed as a Research Assistant to the HuRiEE project at SSEES, UCL (2023 to 2024) and as a Research Collaborator at the University of Oxford (since 2025). From April 2025 to April 2026, Denis is also a Research Fellow in the project Network Plus Shifting Global Polarities: Russia, China, and Eurasia in Transition at the University of Birmingham. Previously, he was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute for East European Studies at the Free University of Berlin, as well as at the Law and Anthropology Department of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale), Germany.

Denis is also actively involved in human rights policymaking. From 2023 to 2026, he holds an international mandate as a member of the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) Panel of Experts on Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association. Additionally, from 2022 to 2023, he participated in the drafting committee for the Sunflower Declaration, a call to action to protect human rights defenders at risk, presented at the 2023 Nobel Peace Conference.