Rural Governance, Governmentality, Political Anthropology, Nation-Building, Rural and Urban Dynamics, Pastoralism, ‘Nomadic’ cultures, Identity, Digital Ethnography and Media Studies

Mongolia and Inner Asia

Munkh-Ochir Surenjav is a PhD student at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies (ISEK) and a Marie Skłodowska‑Curie Actions (MSCA) Doctoral Researcher in the project “Sociology of Authoritarian Law: Insights from Central Asia (SOCIAL),” under the supervision of Prof. Peter Finke. His current research investigates local democratic practices in Mongolia, studying civic participation, traditional authority, and institutional adaptation in Mongolia, with a focus on the post‑socialist local political transformations and evolving governance models in rural and peri-urban areas.

He earned an MA in Anthropology from the University of Cincinnati, USA, in August 2026, completing thesis research examining how social media consumption and representations are shaping the rural imaginaries and the identity of herders in Mongolia. For his BA, Munkh-Ochir graduated from the National University of Mongolia with a dual degree in Anthropology and International Relations in 2022.

Since 2022, Munkh-Ochir has worked on various research projects, implemented by the University of Cincinnati, the University of Melbourne, and the International Institute for the Study of Nomadic Civilizations under the auspices of UNESCO, where he was employed as a full-time Researcher and External Relations Officer between 2022 and 2024. Within these projects, he completed various ethnographic fieldworks among pastoral communities in rural areas in several provinces and urban residents in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, as well as in Astana and Almaty, the Republic of Kazakhstan.