Sergey Golunov is a Doctor of Political Science and a Professor at SDU University (Kaskelen/Almaty, Kazakhstan), where he teaches in the International Relations program. He is the author of around 200 academic publications, including the monograph EU-Russian Border Security: Challenges and Responses (Routledge, 2012) and, together with Asel Bitabar, Bridging Borders: Central Asian Cross-Border Cooperation in a Comparative Global Perspective (Springer, 2025).