The Center for Eurasian Studies opened at the European University last September. We spoke with its director, Igor Khodachek, about what has been achieved in just over a year, why the center was created, and what educational initiatives it is already implementing (and planning for the near future).
— Why was the center initially created? Why Eurasia specifically?
— The center emerged from our collaboration with East China Normal University (ECNU) in Shanghai. It's a strong university by Chinese standards—a participant in three generations of academic excellence programs—and internationally, it's ranked in the top 300 institutional rankings and top 100 subject rankings for pedagogy, geography, biology, and chemistry. We decided to create a joint institution to exchange students and carry out research projects together.
Within EUSP's strategy, opening the Center for Eurasian Studies was a step towards reviving international programs.
Why Eurasia? Following the mission chosen at EUSP's founding and focusing on cooperation with European and American universities, EUSP traditionally paid little attention to Eastern countries. We studied Russia through the lens of global social sciences and humanities, rooted mainly in theoretical models from Western scholars. Recent events—the shift of economic activity to Asia and the formation of a multipolar world—clearly show the importance of theoretical pluralism. This allows us to view social, political, and economic processes impartially, flexibly selecting our research perspective. It also became important for EUSP to step beyond our traditional field and try to cover the world's most dynamically developing regions: Eastern China, Turkey, and Central Asia.
Eurasia is a very difficult concept to define. For some former Soviet studies centers, Eurasia means Central Asia, and sometimes they say "Russia and Central Asia" to avoid confusion. For Chinese centers, Eurasia means the entire post-Soviet space, including Belarus and the South Caucasus (or, as we are more accustomed to saying, Transcaucasia).
Within our center, we are not engaged with Eurasian ideology, but with the study of Eurasia itself. How to define Eurasia—beyond the purely geographical concept of the "Eurasian continent"—is something we still need to figure out.
Understanding the futility of trying to embrace the unembraceable, we focus on specific processes of continental scale.
— What research methods do you plan to develop to study connectivity processes?
— We want to base our work on computational methods and working with spatial data—essentially, the foundation upon which disciplines like computational regional studies or computational geography are being built today. I completed my Master's and PhD in geography, but defended my dissertation in economics, and I have an unrealized ambition to return to geographical research… Physical geography is, of course, not relevant for our center, and that sub-discipline isn't where the most interesting methodological developments are happening today. The most dynamic changes are in human geography, which studies human-space interactions based on data people leave in their daily lives—when they move around a city or travel between cities, consume or create digital content on social networks. Almost all this data has a spatial reference and can be analyzed with fairly simple algorithms that we can not only apply in research but also teach to students. Consequently, we can look at spatial patterns we didn't know about before in new ways.
And if you look at how and where computational human geography is developing in the world today, 8 out of the top 10 centers are Chinese. That's understandable: in China, we see rapid urbanization, the planned creation of million-plus cities on former agricultural land, the development of high-speed trains, the construction of world-class ports from scratch—all these tasks require data-driven geographical expertise. Over the last 5-7 years, we've seen a wave of publications in China on research at the intersection of urban studies, geography, and computational sciences.
— What expertise can we, in turn, share with our partners?
— China invests heavily in science and has identified this promising area related to cities and urban studies. But formulating new creative research questions, identifying spatial patterns—in short, everything that requires deep interdisciplinary foundations, strong philosophical training, and fundamental theoretical grounding in the social sciences and humanities—is precisely what we could offer our Chinese partners. In these matters, EUSP is stronger than many Russian universities and can compete with Western universities that are expanding their presence in the Chinese education market and have long and fruitful collaborations with Chinese geographers.
In this sense, we interested ECNU as an independent center of competence, as a university open to new research projects and partnerships.
— Are you already implementing any projects, or is everything still in development?
— We had a major project that launched the center's activities: a project related to Chinese business culture. We conducted this research commissioned by the ILIM company in 2024. We covered a wide range of issues: from geography, economics, and socio-economic development to business ethics, communication specifics, and how to negotiate effectively to achieve mutual understanding with Chinese partners.
We built a strong Russian-Chinese team for the project, and we've already invited some of its members to work or study at the center. For example, a former ECNU student joined us as a PhD candidate. Thanks to our partnership with the ECNU Center for Russian Studies, we were able to conduct a series of interviews with business representatives, government officials, party figures, and academic experts. Anyone who knows how difficult it is to conduct an official interview with a government official in China will confirm how challenging this was.
Thanks to the partnership with ECNU, we obtained valuable results, based on which we developed a continuing education program. So now we are translating the research findings into educational programs.
— Speaking of which, the center's webpage mentions both research projects and educational activities. Let's talk about the educational ones.
— This year, we are launching our PhD program for the first time and have already completed admissions. It's an English-language doctoral program in the scientific field of "International Relations," focusing on Eurasia as the center's specialization region. We didn't expect such high competition—eight applications for two places! We took the two strongest candidates.
I already mentioned the first PhD student. The second, a female student, has already built a career in urban consulting and, after gaining practical experience, decided to conceptualize it in her dissertation. The topic she came with relates to the competition among Asia's global cities for talent. Within the framework of our doctoral program's specialization, this issue is framed as the migration of highly qualified labor.
— And you also have plans for a Master's program, right?
— The Master's program will open next year. In the field we have licensed and accredited, we will launch an English-language program aimed at the international market called "Eurasian Connectivity: Data-Driven Regional Studies." It will have a fairly flexible model—specializations in energy, urbanization processes, or technological development in Eurasia, as well as two tracks oriented towards different types of data.
The program will be entirely in English, and by agreement with ECNU, five students will have the opportunity to study in Shanghai for a semester or two to three months as part of their thesis work. Admissions will open in 2026, but we are already in contact with prospective applicants, and interest in the program is high.
— I also know there was a Summer School in August. Tell us a bit about it.
— The Summer School was discussed at the very first meeting between the rectors of EUSP and ECNU. Four students came from China, one joined us here (they came specifically through ECNU). There was also one student from Kazakhstan, one from Italy, and five from Armenia.
The Summer School program was essentially a showcase of EUSP's achievements in Russian studies. We presented how we study Russia from various perspectives within the context of Eurasia. This included history, international relations, and issues related to public administration reforms in Russia.
— Is it expected that partners in China will also invite students from EUSP?
— Yes, they have already invited our students to participate in their Summer School, or more precisely, their Summer Courses. They have been running these courses for several years now, called the SCO School, i.e., the Shanghai Cooperation Organization School. The agenda is usually quite mixed—not just lectures, but also various creative activities, like pottery workshops. Students study culture, folk crafts... At the same time, all the SCO countries whose representatives attend the school are meant to be discussed.
— So East China Normal University is our main partner? Does the center have any other partners?
— Not yet. We are in dialogue with several organizations. For example, we have agreed on the possibility of exchanges and internships with Yerevan State University. We are also in dialogue with the Center for Asian Studies at Seoul National University in Korea, and with another university in Turkey. Of course, we want to cooperate with Kazakhstani universities. Plus, we submitted an application to the Russian Science Foundation with an Indian university specializing in transport routes and transport models, but we don't have an official relationship with them yet.
Even within ECNU itself, our main dialogue is with the Center for Russian Studies, but they also have a Center for World Geography and a Center for the Study of Modern Cities. We plan to build joint projects with them too, and have already outlined several research ideas.
— Structurally speaking about the center itself, when it was first created, did you look at any other examples? In America, Europe? Are there such centers in Russia?
— It's hard to say... In the field of Oriental or Chinese studies, Russia traditionally has strong research centers in Moscow, the Far East, and Siberia. There's the Department of Oriental Studies at St. Petersburg State University, and there's the Institute of Oriental and African Studies that HSE opened in St. Petersburg.
But the direction we're talking about—computational geography applied to Eurasian studies—is new. So far, only HSE Moscow is doing something similar within its Department of Geography and Geoinformation Technologies. They even opened a Master's program in spatial data and applied geoanalytics. But it's very specialized, and we want to make our program more flexible, aimed at a broader range of students, at least initially. HSE in St. Petersburg has a Master's program in Eurasian studies within the "Political Science" field, so its focus is on socio-political processes. It seems our Master's program doesn't have direct competitors.
The story of geography itself is quite interesting. Traditionally, geography was engaged in describing and delineating regions and was, to some extent, integrated with military sciences. But starting in the 1920s, geographers began to argue that it was not enough to simply identify and classify regions; a more serious computational apparatus was needed. From the 1930s until the mid-1960s and 70s, geography experienced what we call the quantitative revolution. After the 70s, outside the USSR, there was a period of disillusionment with quantitative methods, a shift towards postmodern philosophy and leftist ideology. It was at this point that geography descended to the urban level—it began to study emotions, feelings of attachment, city marketing, everything related to people's personal impressions of being in space. The transition from space to place became one of the main themes of geography.
And now, in the era of big data and advanced research methods, geography is undergoing a second quantitative revolution. In a sense, we can finish what was left unfinished in the 70s.
— If you, as the head of the center, had an unlimited budget, what project would you invest it in?
— I would hire one professor and two postdoctoral researchers, and also select three or four PhD students who could create the best school of computational geography in Russia.
— And what specific projects would this school of computational geography work on?
— We are interested in everything related to the development of global cities on the eastern coast of China. For example, how they carry out renovation projects, how information technologies and social networks are used to organize the process of gaining approval for historical building reconstruction projects. That's one direction.
Next is the creation of digital twins or virtual models of transport corridors, the formation of databases that can be used to build research—not only for publication in journals but also applied projects for Russian or international business. Data should serve practical tasks related to trade, investment, and socio-economic development.
But for me today, probably the main task is still assembling a team that can replicate and develop the methodology, enabling us to work with different types of data, identify and describe new spatial patterns, and share the knowledge gained with our students and PhD candidates.
Interviewed by Svetlana Abrosimova