Lisa Sundstrom is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia. Her regional area of expertise is Russia and the former Soviet Union, with major research interests including democratization, human rights, gender politics, the politics of international democracy assistance, and NGO activism in both domestic and transnational politics. Her current ongoing research, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, examines Russian human rights NGOs’ interactions with the Council of Europe and European Court of Human Rights, and the impact of those interactions on NGOs themselves and human rights practices in Russia. She is working with a number of scholars from North America and Europe to build a network of scholars and human rights practitioners interested in questions of legal mobilization by NGOs and activist lawyers in international human rights courts.

Publications:

Courting Gender Justice: Russia, Turkey, and The European Court of Human Rights (forthcoming 2019 from Oxford University Press) in a collaboration with Valerie Sperling and Melike Sayoglu.

Funding Civil Society: Foreign Assistance and NGO Development in Russia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.

Russian Civil Society: A Critical Assessment, edited by Alfred B. Evans, Jr., Laura A. Henry, and Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom. Armonk, NY: ME Sharpe, 2005.

“Private Actors, Public Policy Impacts: The Forest Stewardship Council in Russia and Brazil,” co-authored with Laura A. Henry. Forests 8(11) (2017), 445.

“Russian Women’s Activism: Grassroots Persistence in the Face of Challenges,” in Women’s Movements in a Global Era: The Power of Local Feminisms. 2^nd fully revised edition, ed. Amrita Basu (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2016), pp. 213-239.

“Russian NGOs and the European Court of Human Rights: A Spectrum of Approaches to Litigation.” Human Rights Quarterly 36, no. 4 (2014): 844–68.

“Russia’s Climate Policy: International Bargaining and Domestic Modernisation,” co-authored with Laura A. Henry, Europe-Asia Studies 64, no. 7 (September 2012): 1297-1322.

“Russian Women’s Activism: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back,” in Women’s Movements in a Global Era, edited by Amrita Basu (Westview Press, 2010).

“Western Aid and the State-Society Balance in Novgorod and Khabarovsk,” co-authored with Olga Beznosova, Problems of Post-Communism, 56, no. 6 (November/ December 2009): 21-35.

“Russia and the Kyoto Protocol: Seeking an Alignment of Interests and Image“, co-authored with Laura A. Henry, Global Environmental Politics, Vol. 7, no. 4 (November 2007).

“Russia and the Kyoto Protocol in Comparative Perspective,” co-authored with Laura A. Henry, in Global Climate Treaties: Risks and Benefits for Russia and Other Countries, published in both Russian and English (Moscow: Environmental Projects Consulting Institute and Environmental Defense, 2006), pp. 19-30.

“Foreign Assistance, International Norms, and Civil Society Development: Lessons from the Russian Campaign,” International Organization, Vol. 59, no. 2 (spring 2005): 419-49.

“Limits to Global Civil Society: The Gaps between Western Donors and Russian NGOs,” in Global Civil Society and Its Limits, edited by Sandra Halpern and Gordon Laxer (Palgrave Publishers, 2003).

“Women’s NGOs in Russia: Struggling from the Margins,” Demokratizatsiya, Vol. 10, no. 2 (Spring 2002).