Markus Göransson

Senior Lecturer

About Markus

Engelsk beskrivning om dig själv: I am a Senior Lecturer in War Studies at the Swedish Defence University and hold a PhD in International Politics from Aberystwyth University. My research focuses on military affairs in Soviet and post-Soviet Eurasia, including Russian/Soviet military debates and ground tactics.

Prior to working at the Swedish Defence University, I completed a postdoc at the Stockholm School of Economics in 2017-2018, researching Syrian war refugees in Lebanon and their use of cell phones in their livelihood strategies. My PhD thesis, defended in 2016, concerned Soviet-Afghan War veterans in Tajikistan and their emergence as a social and political collective in the 1980s. It was runner up for the British International Studies Association’s prize for best doctoral thesis in international studies in the UK in that year.

I have published on Soviet-Afghan War veterans, Russian military discourse, Syrian war refugees in Lebanon and fieldwork methods in post-conflict research contexts. Much of my research is interview-based and has been undertaken in post-conflict and otherwise fragile contexts, including the Philippines, Burundi, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Lebanon. I have also done research on Soviet-Afghan War veterans in Ukraine, Lithuania and Latvia. I have an MA in Conflict Studies and Human Rights from Utrecht University (cum laude) and a BA Hons. in Modern History from the University of Oxford.