Areas of Expertise

Russian domestic, foreign, and security policy; EU-Russia relations
Russian energy, economic, and education policy
Eastern Partnership, especially in the South Caucasus, Belarus, and Ukraine
Russia’s relations with its post-Soviet neighbors and post-Soviet conflict areas
Regional order with a focus on Eastern Europe, South Caucasus, and Central Asia
Russian disinformation and hybrid warfare

Short Bio

Dr. Stefan Meister is Head of the Center for Order and Governance in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia at the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP). From 2019 until 2021, he worked as director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s South Caucasus Office.

From 2017 to 2019, Meister was head of the Robert Bosch Center for Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia at DGAP, where he had previously headed its program for Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia. Before that, he was a senior policy fellow in the Wider Europe Team at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) in Berlin and London. In the 2015/16 term, Meister was a visiting fellow at the Transatlantic Academy in Washington, DC, where he wrote on Russian disinformation and propaganda. He has served as an election observer for the OSCE in post-Soviet countries several times and worked on conflict transformation and institution building in post-Soviet countries.

Meister is co-author of Geopolitics and Security: A New Strategy for the South Caucasus (KAS/DGAP/GIP, 2018), The Russia File (Brookings, 2018), Eastern Voices (Center for Transatlantic Relations/DGAP, 2017), and The Eastern Question (Brookings, 2016).

He studied international relations and East European history in Jena, Leipzig, and Nizhni Novgorod and holds a PhD from Friedrich Schiller University in Jena with a thesis on the transformation of the Russian higher education and research system.