Sophie Claire Pauline Gueudet

Dr. Sophie Gueudet works as a post-doctoral researcher on the Horizon Project RE-ENGAGE with Pr. Francesco Strazzari, for which she will be analysing the engagement of the European Union with the Western Balkans and the former Eastern neighbourhood in the context of the war against Ukraine and global geopolitical tensions. More specifically, she will use her expertise on territorial conflicts and de facto statehood to unpack the need for the EU to rethink its current political and diplomatic framework for engaging with separatisms and breakaway entities in Southeastern and Eastern Europe.

An historian of war and conflict, Sophie Gueudet has specialised on separatism and secession, contested states and unresolved territorial conflicts, patron-client politics and civil-military relations in intra-state wars in Southeastern and Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. She has conducted several fieldworks in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia, and her research at the crossroads of war and conflict studies, international relations and contemporary history combines the analysis archival sources with political ethnography.

In January 2020, she defended her PhD entitled "Bridges over the Drina: history, modality and outcomes of the bilateral cooperation between Serbia and Republika Srpska (1995-2016)”, and co-supervised between Sciences Po Aix and the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. As an assistant lecturer at Sciences Po Aix (2019-2021), she taught military history, history of international relations and research methodology in the MA Geostrategy, Defense and Security.

In January 2021, Dr. Sophie Gueudet joined the DeFacto research project for a two-years post-doctoral fellowship, based successively at the Norwegian Institute for International Affairs and the University of York. Her project dealt with the international engagement, representative networks, and diplomatic practices of Eurasian de facto states, as well as with patron-client politics in contexts of disputed territories and de facto statehood, with a special focus on Russia. 

In February 2023, she was selected as an Eisenhower Research Fellow at the NATO Defense College in Rome with a research project on “Russia’s patron politics and bids for secession in Republika Srpska”. 

In August 2023, she became the Research Officer of the PeaceRep Ukraine program at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where she researched the effects of the war against Ukraine on Russia's constellation of client de facto states.

She remains associated with the research centre “Contemporary violence, crises and conflicts” (Sciences Po Aix) and with the “War Losses and Casualties” (University of Oxford and Sciences Po Aix) and is a former member of the editorial board of the Revue Historique des Armées.