Wiktor Babinski

Wiktor Babinski is a PhD candidate in History, specializing in modern East European history. He is interested in the emergence of mass political identity, especially nationalism, as the dominant social organizing force, and its impact on the geopolitical questions of Eastern Europe.

In his doctoral dissertation, Wiktor will write an intellectual history of Polish “eastern policy” (polityka wschodnia), a doctrine seeking Polish independence and a broad realization of liberty and social prosperity through Poland’s acceptance and endorsement of the national aspirations of Ukraine, Lithuania and Belarus. His thesis will follow four generations of political thinkers and doers, from socialist revolutionaries of the late 19^th century, through politicos of interwar Poland, émigré journalists of the Cold War, anti-communist dissidents and underground enthusiasts of East European studies of the 1980s. His work spans four political systems separated by two world wars and one peaceful revolution across a century to discover the roots of Poland’s foreign and domestic posture towards its eastern neighbors in the post-1989 period. By following an intellectual tradition steeped in history, deeply committed to liberty, and enhanced by a careful study of the theory of modern nationalism, he seeks to understand those features of the revolutions of 1989-91 which remain starkly unexplained by other important schools of thought, such as realism and Ostpolitik.

Wiktor graduated with First Class honors in International Relations from the London School of Economics. He used to work at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University as a Senior Researcher to Dr. Niall Ferguson, assisting in research for the second volume of the biography of the former U.S. Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. He was also an assistant and creative writer to the former President of Poland, leader of the “Solidarity” movement and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Lech Wałęsa.

Apart from his doctoral research, Wiktor is interested in global affairs and geopolitics, especially those of Europe and Eurasia; US foreign policy; Cold War history and politics. He travelled in Eastern Europe, Russia, Mongolia, and China, among others. His writing on politics and global affairs appeared in POLITICO, National Review, Newsweek, New Eastern Europe, The National Interest, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and American Purpose, among others.