In 1989 and 1990, as an International Affairs Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, I served as special assistant for policy in the Office of Soviet Union Affairs in the U.S. Department of State. While in the Soviet Union as temporary political attache at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, I monitored local elections in Russia, Belarus, and Latvia. I later returned to Russia as a private citizen to serve as staff consultant to the municipal research and training center Dialog, and advisor to the mayor of the Russian city of Novgorod the Great.

In 1997 Novgorod State University awarded me an honorary doctorate for "great merit in the development of the University and an outstanding contribution to the Science, Culture and Education of the Land of Novgorod." In 2007, 2013, 2014, and 2015 I participated in the Valdai Discussion Club, an international gathering of journalists, academics, and diplomats specializing on Russia who meet annually with that country’s top political leadership. In 2008 I spoke at the first international security conference of the Ukrainian Forum in Kiev, hosted by former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma. From 2017-1019 I held the University of Rhode Island's biennial Silvia-Chandley Professorship of Nonviolence and Peace Studies. I am a Member of the Board of the Simone Weil Center and the American Committee for U.S.-Russian Accord.
I have published in The American Interest, Asia Times, Boston Globe, International Herald Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, Foreign Policy, The International New York Times, The Guardian (UK), Responsible Statecraft, The Wilson Quarterly, The Nation, The National Interest,The Fletcher Forum (Tufts), the Harvard International Review, and the Yale Journal of International Affairs. My articles in Russian have appeared in some of the country's leading social science journals and newspapers.
My books include, The Tragedy of Ukraine: What Classical Greek Tragedy Can Teach Us About Conflict Resolution (De Gruyter, 2023), Crafting Democracy: How Novgorod has Coped with Rapid Social Change (Cornell, 2004), The Rebirth of Russian Democracy: An Interpretation of Political Culture (Harvard, 1995), and Russian Foreign Policy: From Empire to Nation-State, co-authored with the late Alvin Z. Rubinstein (Longman, 1997).