Friederike Augustin works as a pre-doctoral research fellow for the project "Judicial autonomy under authoritarian attack" at the Department of Social Sciences (ISW) of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She received her MA in East European Studies and Comparative Social Research from Freie Universität Berlin and Higher School of Economics Moscow, and her BA in European Studies from Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg. Her research focuses on civil society, social movements, democratization and autocratization processes, and judicial independence in Central and Eastern Europe.