2025

The Ed A Hewett Book Prize, established in 1994 and sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Michigan, is awarded annually for an outstanding monograph on the political economy of Russia, Eurasia and/or Eastern Europe, published in the previous calendar year.

Honorable Mention: Nataliya Kibita, The Institutional Foundations of Ukrainian Democracy: Power Sharing, Regionalism, and Authoritarianism (Oxford University Press, 2024) 

Nataliya Kibita’s The Institutional Foundations of Ukrainian Democracy is an empirically rich, ambitious, and original study of the triangular relationship between Moscow, Kyiv, and Ukrainian regions in Soviet and post-Soviet Ukraine. Kibita’s study details how Moscow’s efforts to strengthen regional elites at the expense of Ukrainian authorities in Kyiv profoundly weakened Ukraine’s central leadership and undermined post-Soviet state-building. The book makes an invaluable contribution to understanding the historical foundations of the brutal war and the future of democracy in Ukraine. 

Winner: Anne O’Donnell

Prize Committee: Susanne Wengle (chair), Fritz Bartel, and Erik Herron