Debra Javeline

Biography

Fellow, Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies
Fellow, Kellogg Institute for International Studies
Fellow, Nanovic Institute for European Studies

Affiliated faculty, Environmental Change Initiative

Javeline is the author of two books, After Violence: Russia’s Beslan School Massacre and the Peace that Followed (Oxford University Press, 2023) and Protest and the Politics of Blame: The Russian Response to Unpaid Wages (University of Michigan Press, 2003). A new manuscript with Gabrielle Ciliberti, Meritocracy and My Kid: A Mother-Daughter Manifesto for Fixing America’s Broken Special Education System, was completed in 2026.

Her other publications include articles in The American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, Political Research Quarterly, Public Opinion Quarterly, Law & Society Review, Problems of Post-Communism, Social Science & Medicine, Policy Sciences, Bioscience, Climatic Change, Natural Hazards Review, Global Environmental Politics, Climate Policy, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, and World Development.

Among recent titles are “The Most Important Topic Political Scientists are Not Studying: Adapting to Climate Change” (Perspectives on Politics, 2014), “Does It Matter if You ‘Believe’ in Climate Change? Not for Coastal Home Vulnerability” (Climatic Change, 2019), “Economic Incentives for Coastal Homeowner Adaptations to Climate Change” (Climate Policy, 2023), and "Russia in a Changing Climate" (WIREs Climate Change, 2023).

Javeline divides her time between the study of Russia and the study of global environmental problems, especially climate change. Her current book project is Unadapted: A Portrait of Unchanged Humans on a Changed Planet. With Notre Dame engineers, she continues to study coastal homeowners in a changing climate and the factors that influence homeowner risk reduction in anticipation of hurricanes and other disasters. She contributed a chapter on “Climate Change” to the 10th edition of the widely used textbook, Developments in Russian Politics (Bloomsbury, 2024), and with Graeme Robertson and Robert Orttung, she co-directs the PONARS Task Force on Russia in a Changing Climate.

Javeline has conducted survey research in the former Soviet Union for the U.S. Information Agency (now State Department) and the U.S. Agency for International Development. She has held fellowships from Fulbright-Hays, Mellon, ACTR, FLAS, Harvard University's Davis Center for Russian Studies, the University of Colorado's Institute of Behavioral Science, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research. In 2011-12, she was supported by a Mellon New Directions fellowship to study ecology and environmental law; in 2020, she was supported by Notre Dame’s Institute for Advanced Study; and in 2025-26, she was supported by Notre Dame’s Franco Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good.