Alek Epstein

Epstein (born April 18, 1975) is an acknowledged Russian-Israeli sociologist and political scientist.¹ He divides his time between Jerusalem and Moscow , taking part in a number of academic, educational, social change and civil rights activism projects in both countries. An expert in Israeli history and politics, as well as in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict , he has written extensively on intellectuals' influence on the emergence of civil society, on the development of conscientious disobedience as an indicator of the changing patterns of civil-military relations, on the development of Israel studies as a research field in various countries, on the emergence of the Palestinian refugee problem and unsuccessful attempts to solve it, on various aspects of immigrant scientists’ and teachers’ professional and social integration in Israel, and on several additional topics.² Epstein published more than 160 manuscripts in various scientific journals and collections and authored fourteen books on Israel and the Middle East, published in Russian.³ He is active in Russian public and intellectual life as well as in civil rights activism. His books The Thought Police: Authorities, Experts and Anti-Extremism Campaign in Contemporary Russia , co-authored with Oleg Vasiliev, and Defending the Authorities against Criticism from Society: Ten Years of Anti-Extremism Campaign in Contemporary Russia were named among the most important ones dedicated to an intellectual dissent in Russia’s current public life. His books Total ‘War’: Art Activism in the Age of Tandemocracy , Art on the Barricades: ‘ Pussy Riot ’, the ‘Bus Exhibition’ and the Protest Art Activism and Victor Bondarenko and Evgeniya Maltceva’s Project ‘Spiritual Combat’ and the Struggle for the Christian Sacred Images’ New Life in Art has gained him even more credit within the civil activism and sociology of contemporary culture fields. He also chairs the Jury of An Alternative Prize for the Russian Activist Art .⁴