Karen Dawisha

Karen Dawisha (née Hurst, December 2, 1949 – April 11, 2018) was an American political scientist and writer. She was a professor in the Department of Political Science at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and the director of The Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies.

Early life and education Dawisha was born in Colorado on December 2, 1949, as Karen Hurst to schoolteacher Paula Keene and Harry Hurst, who was a jazz pianist. She had three siblings, two brothers and a sister.

Career Dawisha served as an advisor to the British House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee and as an International Affairs Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, and was a member of the Policy Planning Staff and the Bureau of Political Military Affairs of the U.S. State Department from 1985 to 1987. Until the summer of 2000 she was a professor in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she served as the Director of its Center for the Study of Post-Communist Societies. In 2014, Dawisha received considerable attention for her work detailing the rise and crimes of Vladimir Putin.

Putin's Kleptocracy

Dawisha's 2014 book Putin's Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? (Simon & Schuster) has been called "a who's who of the people on the sanctions lists drawn up by America and the EU". It chronicles the rise of Vladimir Putin during his time in St. Petersburg in the 1990s. In the book, Dawisha exposed how Putin's friends and coworkers from his formative years accumulated massive wealth and power. Although Putin was elected with promises to rein in the oligarchs who had emerged in the 1990s, Dawisha wrote that Putin transformed "an oligarchy independent of, and more powerful than, the state into a corporatist structure in which oligarchs served at the pleasure of state officials, who themselves gained and exercised economic control... both for the state and for themselves". As a result, 110 individuals control 35% of Russia's wealth, according to Dawisha. Whereas scholars have traditionally viewed Putin's Russia as a democracy in the process of failing, Dawisha argues that "from the beginning Putin and his circle sought to create an authoritarian regime ruled by a close-knit cabal... who used democracy for decoration rather than direction."

Dawisha sought to publish Putin's Kleptocracy with Cambridge University Press (CUP), with which she had previously published five books and which had initially accepted the book; however, her 500-page manuscript, a quarter of which was evidentiary footnotes, was rejected by CUP. Editor John Haslam cited the legal risk of publishing the manuscript in an email of March 20, later published by Edward Lucas in The Economist magazine. Haslam wrote: "Given the controversial subject matter of the book, and its basic premise that Putin's power is founded on his links to organised crime, we are not convinced that there is a way to rewrite the book that would give us the necessary comfort". Dawisha responded that "one of the world's most important and reputable publishers declines to proceed with a book not because of its scholarly quality... but because the subject matter itself is too hot to handle". Dawisha later took her manuscript to Simon & Schuster in the US, where the libel laws are less restrictive. The couple had two children, Nadia and Emile, and a grandson. They both retired from their academic posts in 2016. Karen Dawisha died in April 2018 from lung cancer.