MILADA VACHUDOVA

Milada Anna Vachudova, Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is a leading scholar of post-communist transformation, European integration, and the international dimensions of democratization. She is currently the Faculty Director of Strategic Initiatives at the Institute of Arts and Humanities. From 2014 to 2019, she chaired UNC’s Curriculum in Global Studies. She is also a principal investigator of the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES), a widely used dataset on political party positioning across Europe.

Educated at Stanford University (B.A.) and at Oxford University (St. Antony's College) (M.Phil., D.Phil.) as a British Marshall Scholar, Vachudova has held grants and visiting positions at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, the European University Institute and the National Science Foundation. She brings to her work both scholarly rigor and personal connection: the daughter of refugees from Czechoslovakia exiled by the 1968 Soviet invasion, she witnessed the Velvet Revolution firsthand as a student in Prague.

Her landmark book, Europe Undivided: Democracy, Leverage and Integration After Communism (Oxford University Press, 2005), won the Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research and the Marshall Shulman Prize. It established her as a leading voice on how EU conditionality shaped democratic consolidation in Central and Eastern Europe. Her recent articles explore the trajectories of European states due to strengthening ethnopopulism and democratic backsliding – and how these changes are impacting party systems and civic participation. 

Professor Vachudova's current projects include protest in defense of liberal democracy across Europe, the revival of EU enlargement, and Ukraine’s path to EU membership amidst the transformation of European politics and institutions owing to Russia’s war against Ukraine. In 2025, she co-authored an influential essay in Ethics & International Affairs with Nadiia Koval on the EU as both an ethical and geopolitical actor in the context of Russia’s war against Ukraine. Widely published and frequently cited, she continues to shape scholarly and policy debates on democracy, European integration, and the resilience of liberal institutions in a turbulent era.