Debra Javeline

Biography

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

Javeline is most recently the author of After Violence: Russia’s Beslan School Massacre and the Peace that Followed (Oxford University Press, 2023). Her other publications include Protest and the Politics of Blame: The Russian Response to Unpaid Wages (University of Michigan Press, 2003) and 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, and Climate Policy.

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 and funding from the National Science Foundation and Notre Dame’s Environmental Change Initiative, 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. With scholars of environmental governance, she co-edited a special issue of Climatic Change on “Adapting to Water Impacts of Climate Change” (2019). With a former Notre Dame undergraduate biologist, she published a book chapter, “Adaptation of Ecosystems in the Anthropocene,” in Research Handbook on Climate Change Adaptation Policy and a book chapter, “The Unexplored Politics of Climate Change Adaptation,” in Handbook of U.S. Environmental Policy (both with Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019 and 2020, respectively). She and Sarah Lindemann-Komarova updated their 2010 work in Journal of International Affairs with an article on “Financing Russian Civil Society” (Europe-Asia Studies, 2019). 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, and in 2020, she was supported by Notre Dame’s Institute for Advanced Study.

On leave Fall 2025 and Spring 2026