Publications

Peer-reviewed articles, preprints and datasets, and selected reports.

My published work runs along three lines: legal culture and cognition; surveillance and security infrastructures; and the measurement of crime and victimization. The two flagship pieces are a near-repeat victimization study in Almaty (Journal of Criminal Justice) and a comparative study of CCTV placement logics across four cities (Journal of Computational Social Science) — both drawing on the same underlying interest in how institutions classify space, risk and people.

Schematic diagram of three overlapping cultural schema clusters, labelled law, rule and right, with unevenly distributed nodes representing individuals.

Peer-reviewed articles

Serebrennikov, D., Minaeva, E., Ross, E. (forthcoming 2026). Surveillance as Governance: Policing Effectiveness and Political Control in the Moscow AI Experiment. Russian Politics. Brill. Scopus Q1

Serebrennikov, D., Varshaver, E. (in press). Cognitive Sociology: Revisiting the Role of Cognition in Sociological Explanation. Sociology of Power. (in Russian)

Serebrennikov, D., Kalkanbay, S. (2026). What’s Sauce for the Goose is Sauce for the Gander? Near-repeat Victimization Across Different Urban Morphologies: Evidence from Almaty, Kazakhstan. Journal of Criminal Justice, 102, 102551. Scopus Q1 — doi.org/10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2025.102551

Serebrennikov, D., Skougarevskiy, D. (2024). A Tale of Four Cities: Exploring Security Through Environmental Characteristics of CCTV Equipment Placement. Journal of Computational Social Science. — doi.org/10.1007/s42001-024-00323-1

Moscow, Paris, Brussels, Edinburgh: two placement logics — networked in the European cities, symbolic in Russia.

Serebrennikov, D. (2023). From Call to Emergency Card: Seeking “112” Operator Discretion. Forum for Anthropology and Culture, 59, 130–152. (in Russian) — doi.org/10.31250/1815-8870-2023-19-59-130-152

How emergency operators convert callers’ accounts into formal incident categories — street-level classification observed as it happens.

Serebrennikov, D. (2023). Gaze Ex Machina: A Brief History of Police CCTV Surveillance in Russia and Western Countries. Urban Studies and Practices, 8(3), 101–112. (in Russian) — doi.org/10.17323/usp832023101-112

A comparative history of police CCTV surveillance across Russia and Western countries.

Serebrennikov, D. (2023). Infrastructure as a Camera Obscura of Social Classifications: Urban Video Surveillance Systems in Small Cities. Monitoring of Public Opinion, 3. (in Russian) — doi.org/10.14515/monitoring.2023.3.2325

Surveillance infrastructure as a material record of official classification — what a camera system is built to see shows whom the local state treats as a suspect.

Verkeev, A., Serebrennikov, D. (2023). Victims of Their Own Fear: Perceived Safety and Crime Victim Experience in Russia. Russian Sociological Review, 22(2), 179–206. (in Russian) — doi.org/10.17323/1728-192x-2023-2-179-206

Perceived safety and actual victimization experience among crime victims in Russia.

Serebrennikov, D., Khodjaeva, E., Shepeleva, O. (2023). “Street-Level Algorithm”: Two Styles of Automated Law Enforcement in the Moscow “Social Monitoring” Application. The Journal of Social Policy Studies, 21(1), 7–24. (in Russian) — doi.org/10.17323/727-0634-2023-21-1-7-24

The Moscow “Social Monitoring” app as behaviour converted into an offence by software, and discretion delegated from street-level bureaucrats to code.

Muravyev, A., Yuldashev, O., Serebrennikov, D. (2021). Surveillance Cameras in Cities: Security and Territory. Neprikosnovenny Zapas, 6(140), 26–41. (in Russian)

Cameras as instruments of urban security and the politics of territory.

Serebrennikov, D., Kuzmina, Yu. (2021). Field Experiments and the Rubin Causal Model: A Review of Approaches and Current Research. Journal of Economic Sociology, 22(4), 117–139. (in Russian) — doi.org/10.17323/1726-3247-2021-4-117-139

A review of field-experimental approaches to causal inference in the Rubin causal model tradition.

Serebrennikov, D. (2020). [Review] Ehrlich, E., Fundamental Principles of the Sociology of Law. Sotsiologicheskiy Zhurnal, 26(1), 183–189. (in Russian) — doi.org/10.19181/socjour.2020.26.1.7059

On living law — the starting point of the work on where law exists outside the statute book.

Preprints and datasets

Kuchakov, R., Serebrennikov, D., Bobrikov, D., Knorre, A., Skougarevskiy, D. (2026). Russian Crime Victimization Survey: Pooled Cross-Sections and a Longitudinal Panel, 2018–2024. SSRN. — dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6418058

The only repeated nationwide victimization survey in Russia, now released as an open dataset: 42,572 pooled respondents across three waves (2018 / 2021 / 2024) plus a 3,456-person longitudinal panel.

Selected reports

Serebrennikov, D., Didikin, A., Bektibaeva, O. (2025). Readability of Legal Acts of the Republic of Kazakhstan: A Computational Linguistics Analysis and Practical Recommendations. (in Russian)

Serebrennikov, D., Kusmanova, A. (2024). Crime Place Never Changed? Spatial Distribution of Non-Serious Theft and Violent Crime in Astana and Almaty. MIND, Maqsut Narikbayev University, with Kazakhstan Sociology Lab. (in Russian) — report

Serebrennikov, D., Bulatov, B. (2024). “The Criminal Always Returns to the Scene”: Testing Near-Repeat Victimization Theory in Astana and Almaty. MIND, Maqsut Narikbayev University. (in Russian) — report

Nurgalin, A., Serebrennikov, D. (2025). Opening the Data: An Assessment of Open Data Availability in the Republic of Kazakhstan. MIND, Maqsut Narikbayev University. (in Russian) — report

Serebrennikov, D., Titaev, K. (2022). Crime and Victimization in Russia, 2018–2021: Results of the Second Wave of the Russian Crime Victimization Survey (RCVS-2021). Institute for the Rule of Law, European University at Saint Petersburg. (in Russian)

More commissioned research, not listed here as standalone publications, appears on the Policy & Data page.