Sanjar Akayev

Year of Enrollment: 
2023
Departmental Affiliation: 
Political Science

I'm a PhD candidate in Political Theory at the DSPS. My research interests are currently centered around relational approaches to key concepts in liberal political theory, such as personal autonomy, reciprocity, equality, and respect. I also have a strong interest in the ethics of personal relationships (in particular, friendship), seeking to investigate how the central normative features of such relationships may influence and enrich our pursuit of distributive and relational justice. Finally, I sometimes like to write about more applied and pressing issues related to rectificatory/remedial justice, responsibility and liability for state action, and the ethics of non-democratic citizenship.
My dissertation is supervised by Andres Moles (primary), Anca Gheaus, and Cathy Mason.

Before coming to CEU, I received a bachelor's degree in political science and a master's degree in philosophy at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. While at HSE, I worked as a teaching fellow at the School of Politics and Governance, teaching undergraduate courses in political theory, history of political thought, and political science. I was also a research assistant at HSE's Poletayev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities, investigating how virtue ethics and virtue epistemology can be applied in historical studies of academic communities. My early interests were in continental political philosophy (Foucault, Strauss) and Early Modern philosophy & political thought (Spinoza, Shakespeare). I still consider myself a Spinozist, albeit of a wandering kind.

If you'd like to discuss some of the topics mentioned above or exchange drafts, feel free to get in touch!

Dissertation Topic