Alena Ledeneva

Alena Ledeneva is an internationally renowned expert on informal governance, corruption, informal economy, economic crime, informal practices in corporate governance, and role of networks and patron-client relationships in Russia and around the globe. Her books Russia's Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking, and Informal Exchange (Cambridge University Press, 1998), How Russia Really Works: Informal Practices in the 1990s (Cornell University Press, 2006), and Can Russia Modernize? Sistema, Power Networks and Informal Governance (Cambridge University Press, 2013) have become must-read sources in Russian studies and social sciences.  She received her PhD in Social and Political Theory from Cambridge University (1996) and joined the UCL in 1999. She was a pillar leader of the largest EC funded research project ANTICORRP.eu (2012-2017), a Co-PI of the INFORM project in West Balkans (2016-2019) and many others. She is a founder of the UCL FRINGE Centre for the Study of Social and Cultural Complexity and the Global Informality Project (in-formality.com). She is editor-in-chief of the Global Encyclopedia of Informality (UCL Press, 2018) and co-editor of the FRINGE series at the UCL Press.