Marlene Laruelle is a Full Professor in the Department of Political Science at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome. From 2011 to 2025, she served at The George Washington University as Research Professor at the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (IERES), where she was Associate Director and later Director (2015–2022). She holds a Ph.D. in History from the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Cultures (INALCO, Paris) and a habilitation in Political Science from Sciences Po Paris. She now leads the Illiberalism Studies Program, a pioneering transatlantic platform for research and dialogue on illiberalism and postliberalism as global ideological phenomena.

She has held numerous international fellowships and visiting appointments, including at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (Vienna), the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI), the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and SAIS–Johns Hopkins University. She is the author or editor of more than twenty books published with major academic presses including Oxford, Cornell, Stanford, Cambridge, Johns Hopkins, and Bloomsbury. Among her most recent monographs are Ideology and Meaning-Making under Putin Regime (Stanford University Press, 2025) and Russia’s Arctic: A Changing Geopolitical and Environmental Context (Bloomsbury, 2026). Her articles have appeared in leading journals such as Journal of Democracy, Survival, Nationalities Papers, Post-Soviet Affairs, Europe-Asia Studies, and East European Politics, as well as in prominent policy outlets including The Washington Quarterly, Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, Le Monde, Le Grand Continent, and Le Monde diplomatique.

Trained as a historian of ideas, her early research focused on post-Soviet Central Asia and Russia, examining nation-building processes, regional geopolitics vis-à-vis Russia and China, labor migration dynamics, and the intellectual foundations of Putin’s regime, including nationalism, conservatism, and evolving state narratives of sovereignty and identity. She has also examined environmental thought and the Russian Arctic, exploring how infrastructure, climate change, and territorial imaginaries shape political worldviews. Over time, her scholarship has expanded toward conceptual history and global comparative analysis, focusing on the intellectual and political challenges confronting liberalism and the emergence of competing normative alternatives to the liberal international order.