Karen Dawisha

Karen Dawisha was married to Adeed Dawisha, a professor from Iraq who specializes in Middle Eastern politics, also at Miami University. The couple had two children, Nadia and Emile, and a grandson. They both retired from their academic posts in 2016. Karen Dawisha died in April 2018 from lung cancer.

Dawisha's 2014 book Putin's Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? (Simon & Schuster) has been called "a who's who of the people on the sanctions lists drawn up by America and the EU". It chronicles the rise of Vladimir Putin during his time in St. Petersburg in the 1990s. In the book, Dawisha exposed how Putin's friends and coworkers from his formative years accumulated massive wealth and power. Although Putin was elected with promises to rein in the oligarchs who had emerged in the 1990s, Dawisha wrote that Putin transformed "an oligarchy independent of, and more powerful than, the state into a corporatist structure in which oligarchs served at the pleasure of state officials, who themselves gained and exercised economic control... both for the state and for themselves". As a result, 110 individuals control 35% of Russia's wealth, according to Dawisha. Whereas scholars have traditionally viewed Putin's Russia as a democracy in the process of failing, Dawisha argues that "from the beginning Putin and his circle sought to create an authoritarian regime ruled by a close-knit cabal... who used democracy for decoration rather than direction."

As Director of the Russian Littoral Project, Dawisha was the series editor (with Bruce Parrott) of the 10 volume "International Politics of Eurasia", published by M.E. Sharpe, and also edited several volumes in that series, including: Making of Foreign Policy in Russia and the New States of Eurasia, (coedited with Adeed Dawisha, 1995), The End of Empire? The Transformation of the USSR in Comparative Perspective, (coedited with Bruce Parrott); and The International Dimension of Post Communist Transitions in Russia and the New States of Eurasia, (1997).

Dawisha's other major publications include: Russia and the New States of Eurasia: The Politics of Upheaval (Cambridge University Press, coauthored with Bruce Parrott, 1994); Eastern Europe, Gorbachev and Reform: The Great Challenge, (Cambridge University Press, 1989, 2nd ed., 1990); The Kremlin and the Prague Spring, (California University Press, 1984); The Soviet Union in the Middle East: Politics and Perspectives, (Holmes and Meier for the Royal Institute for International Affairs, 1982); Soviet East-European Dilemmas: Coercion, Competition, and Consent, (Holmes and Meier for the Royal Institute for International Affairs, 1981); and Soviet Foreign Policy Toward Egypt, (Macmillan, 1979).

Dawisha served as an advisor to the British House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee and as an International Affairs Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, and was a member of the Policy Planning Staff and the Bureau of Political Military Affairs of the U.S. State Department from 1985 to 1987. Until the summer of 2000 she was a Professor in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she served as the Director of its Center for the Study of Post-Communist Societies. In 2014, Dawisha received considerable attention for her work detailing the rise and crimes of Vladimir Putin.

Karen Dawisha (nee Hurst, December 2, 1949 – April 11, 2018) was an American political scientist and writer. She was a professor in the Department of Political Science at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and the director of The Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies.

Dawisha was born in Colorado on December 2, 1949 as Karen Hurst to schoolteacher Paula Keene and Harry Hurst, who was a jazz pianist. She had three siblings, two brothers and a sister. After taking a course in the Russian language in High School, she became interested in Russia. She received a bachelor's degree in Russian politics from University of Colorado Boulder, taking a year at Lancaster University in England where she met her husband, Adeed Dawisha. She received her Ph.D. from the London School of Economics.