Simon joined Crisis Group in February 2022 as Senior Analyst for Ukraine. He conducts research on the war in Ukraine and its far-reaching political, humanitarian and economic consequences. His work focuses on identifying the small spaces for compromise or improvement on the ground.

Prior to joining Crisis Group, Simon worked for a humanitarian aid project in war-torn Donbas. In an earlier phase of the war, he also worked for Germany's Civil Peace Service program in Kyiv in a project that documented human rights violations in Donbas. Simon holds a PhD in Social Anthropology that he gained while working at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, with a thesis on the history of ethnic boundaries in rural south-western Ukraine. He has worked as a researcher at Loughborough University (UK), where he focused on commemorative politics in Kyiv. He studied social anthropology and Slavic languages at the University of Zurich.

• Nationalities policies
• Language policies
• Commemorative politics
• Clientelism
• Humanitarian aid

• German
• Russian
• Ukrainian

2021. “Identity Politics as Pretext and Prediction — Vote Buying and Group Boundaries in Ukraine.” Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization 29 (2): 113–33.

2021. (with Alena Pfoser) “Uncovering Disciplined Pasts: Tour Guiding through Kyiv’s Changing Place Names.” History and Anthropology. https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2021.1881082

2020. (with Alena Pfoser) “Navigating Contested Memories in a Commercialised Setting: Conflict Avoidance Strategies in Kyiv City Tour Guiding.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 27 (5): 487–99. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2020.1821235.

2019. Making Ethnicity in Southern Bessarabia — Tracing the Histories of an Ambiguous Concept in a Contested Land. Leiden and Boston: Brill.

2018. “Soviet Bureaucracy as a Category Coining Machine: Ethnicity, Ethnography, and the ‘Primordial Trap.’” Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society 4 (2): 1–26.