Dr. Maria Shagina is the Diamond-Brown Senior Fellow for Economic Sanctions, Standards and Strategy at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). 

Prior to joining the IISS, Maria was a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center on US Politics and Power at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. From 2017 and 2021, she worked as research fellow at the Center for Eastern European Studies at the University of Zurich, as senior political analyst at Global Risk Insights, and as executive assistant at the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. Maria has held numerous prestigious fellowships, including from the Swiss Government, Swiss National Science Foundation, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Open Society Institute and DAAD. In 2020, she was selected as a GLOBSEC Young Leader and as a member of the European Leadership Network.

She has briefed extensively governments and the private sector on Western sanctions against Russia, economic and energy security and Russia’s political economy and foreign policy. Maria’s research has been cited in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Financial Times, BBC, CNN, Bloomberg, Foreign Policy and The Guardian. 

Maria holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Lucerne (Switzerland).