Anastasia Piliavsky is an anthropologist and political analyst, who teaches at King's College London, where she also looks after educational programmes at the Global Institutes. Having spent over two decades of research in India, and recent years in Ukraine, she offers a grounded, unflinchingly non-partisan perspective on their domestic and foreign affairs.
Anastasia has written extensively on Indian politics and society, showing how cultural norms shape the country's political processes. She is author of Nobody’s People: Hierarchy as Hope in a Society of Thieves (Stanford UP, 2020) and editor of Patronage as Politics in South Asia (Cambridge UP, 2014). She holds a doctorate in anthropology from Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar, and is currently leading a major European Research Council-funded study of India's political concepts and languages. In parallel, as part of the same project, she's been working on language politics in Odessa, Ukraine.
Anastasia appears frequently on radio and TV and writes regularly for broadsheets, including The Spectator, the Financial Times, Kyiv Post, The Economist, Indian Express and the Times of India, India's biggest Anglophone daily, where she edits a column on Indian politics.
She is founder of the Ukrainian Cosmopolis, Odessa's international intellectual collective dedicated to upholding cultural and civic freedoms and resisting chauvinism, censorship, and the culture wars.
She is currently writing a book, Endarkenment, about the evangelical turn on the American left.
She lives in Cambridge and Odessa.

Highlights

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Ukraine's War on Russian is Suicide

My recent Spectator essay on how Kyiv's war against the Russian language splits and alienates Ukrainians, and feeds Kremlin propaganda.

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Ukraine's Human Victory

My recent Economist essay on achieving a human - as opposed to a territorial - victory.


Ukraine's "Decolonisation" as National Suicide

An Einstein Forum public lecture



Odessa - the Solution to Ukraine's National Problem

Broadcast on the Romanenko Show (in Russian)


Books

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Stanford University Press, 2020

Nobody's People

Why do so many in India, the world’s most famously hierarchical society, continue to live with such drive and hope? And why do those long seen as “subjugated” embrace hierarchy rather than flee from it?

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Cambridge University Press, 2014

Patronage as Politics in South Asia

What does it mean when citizens worship their politicians, fall at their feet, or expect them to provide food, jobs, protection, even love? To many observers, these practices look like corruption, feudal leftovers, or failures of democracy.

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Writing now...

Endarkenment

Here Anastasia is tracing the history of how American politics, once built on the principles of the Enlightenment, was refashioned by evangelical Christianity—and how that faith has transformed the political Left—now in turn transforming the Right.

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