Siarhei Bohdan is a Research Fellow (Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) in the Freigeist Research Group, “The Cold War's Clash of Civilizations”, funded by a Freigeist Fellowship from the Volkswagen Foundation. He became a member of the Center for Global History at the Free University in Berlin in May 2019. Prior to this position, he worked as a journalist, political analyst, researcher and lecturer in media organisations, think tanks, government bodies and academic institutions in Eastern Europe.

He holds a doctoral degree in Political Science from the Otto-Suhr-Institute of the FU Berlin, an M.A. in European Studies from the European Humanities University (Vilnius, Lithuania) and a Specialist Diploma in International Relations, Persian and Japanese from the Belarus State University (Minsk, Belarus).

Siarhei’s intellectual background combines studies of Middle Eastern and (post-)Soviet history as well as many years of experience analysing contemporary political and societal topics in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Recently, his research interests have specifically focused on developments following the collapse of the Soviet Union. In his 2017 doctoral dissertation, Limits of Defiance? The Role of Post-Soviet Nations in Modernisation of the Iranian Armed Forces and Defence Industries, he investigated how the rise of the post-Cold War global order influenced cooperation between Iran and (post-)Soviet nations.

• "'They Were Going Together with the Ikhwan': The Influence of Muslim Brotherhood Thinkers on Shi‘i Islamists during the Cold War," The Middle East Journal 74:2 (Summer 2020): 243-262