Aimar Ventsel

Aimar Ventsel, PhD, is a visiting researcher at the Skytte Institute of the University of Tartu. He is an anthropologist who has conducted research in the Arctic since the mid-1990ies, especially in Western Siberia and  Russian Far East, mainly in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), but also Greenland and Scandinavian Sapmi. Ventsel’s main academic interests are the power dynamics of Russia’s ethnic republics in Siberia, history of colonisation of the region and its implications in current political and economic rights, post-Soviet transition of the economy, and the de-colonization debates in Russia. He has also studied indigenous oppositional but also pro-Kremlin movements and organisations in the Russian North. Ventsel is an author of two academic monographs and many academic articles.