Tom Parfitt
GRANTEE
Tom Parfitt is a correspondent based in Moscow who writes for the British newspaper, The Guardian, and other international publications.
Tom has lived and worked as a journalist in Russia since finishing an MA in politics and security at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, in 2002. He has travelled regularly to Chechnya, Ingushetia and other parts of the North Caucasus to report on armed conflict, terrorism and human rights abuses committed by Russian security forces.
In 2008 Tom completed a four-month, 1000-mile walking expedition across the northern flanks of the Great Caucasus mountain range, between the Black Sea and the Caspian. The journey was supported by the Royal Geographical Society (UK) in the form of its annual Neville Shulman Challenge Award.
During the fall semester in 2009 Tom was a Knight Wallace Journalism Fellow at the University of Michigan studying the role of international diplomacy in Georgia's breakaway regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. For six months in 2010 he was a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC, where he researched Russia's strategies for quelling the Islamist insurgency on its southern border.
Selected articles:
Chechnya's Peace is Built on Murder, The Guardian, July 2009
Moscow's Secret War in Ingushetia,The Spectator, September 2008
Republic of Fear (Chechnya), The Sunday Times Magazine, August 2006