Description

This talk will address the complex issue of memory of the Holocaust in Ukrainian society after the fall of communism. After a brief overview on the main tendencies in the politics of remembrance, the talk will primarily focus on wider societal attitudes and beliefs. Anna Chebotarova will consider the place that Jews occupy in collective memory in Ukraine, which was home to one of the largest pre-war Jewish communities in Europe and became one of the major Holocaust killing fields during the WWII. She will analyze the dynamics of the attitudes of Ukrainians toward Jews and memory of the Shoah in the context of recent debates on antisemitism in Ukraine and in East-Central Europe. As many researchers have repeatedly stressed, the subject of contemporary antisemitism is often not real Jews, but the images of them, including those transmitted through collective memory frameworks. The presentation will explore the multilevel and multidirectional relations between (trans)national and local Holocaust memory and the social distance towards Jews in Ukraine today. Anna Chebotarova will apply mixed method research – the perspective that combines both data from previously conducted research, nationwide representative surveys as well qualitative data. She will explore how the (trans)formation of historical memory influences the perception of the Holocaust and, more broadly, the attitudes towards Jews in post-Soviet Ukraine and the main factors influencing these phenomena.

Anna Chebotarova is a research fellow at the School for Humanities and Social Sciences, St. Gallen University (Switzerland), and the coordinator of “Ukrainian Regionalism: a Research Platform” initiative. She is affiliated with Polish Academy of Sciences, and with the Center for Urban History in East-Central Europe (Lviv, Ukraine). She obtained MA in Sociology and Social Anthropology from the Central European University (Budapest, Hungary) and MA in History and Sociology from Ivan Franko Lviv National University (Lviv, Ukraine). Her research interests include collective memory, Jewish heritage in East-Central Europe, Holocaust memory, heritage studies, qualitative methods of sociological research.

Description

„Papers! Half of Jew’s life is consumed by the futile battle with papers.”- wrote Joseph Roth in his masterful work The Wandering Jews published in 1927. Roth’s statement is the motto of my presentation which tells how national elites exploited citizenship laws to create masses of „alien” Jews.
An anti-Semitic wave swept across East-Central Europe at the end of the First World War. The “Jewish question” became one of the prioritized issues of the new countries. The new political elite in Hungary, in Romania and in Poland, referring to itself as national and Christian, in general did not consider Jewry as part of the “nation”. The solution national elites proposed to the “Jewish question” was, on the one hand, to oust Jews from economic and cultural life, and on the other, to expel the “aliens”. For this reason state authorities were busy creating legal basis for expatriation of the “alien Jews”.
On the other hand the victorious great powers forced the governments of the new East-Central European countries to sign peace treaties and minority treaties which granted citizenship for each citizen living in the territory of the given state.
In my talk, I wish to explore in detail how national governments violated their international commitments and made masses of Jews stateless and vulnerable. Since Hungary is the focus of my talk, I would like to present which members of the Hungarian Jewry were considered aliens by the main actors of public life, what sort of plans were formulated to ensure their elimination, and what specific steps were taken by the successive Hungarian governments to question their citizenship and to expel them. What makes this question especially important is that in both Hungary and Romania, the “alien” Jews became the first victims of the Holocaust. In summer of 1941 they were deported to the occupied territories of the Soviet Union and massacred there.

Tamás Stark received his PhD from the Eötvös Loránd University, Faculty of Humanities in 1993. From 1983 he was a researcher at the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and in 2000 he was appointed a senior research fellow. His specialization is forced population movement in East-Central Europe in the period 1938-56, with special regard to the history of the Holocaust, the fate of prisoners of war and civilian internees, and the postwar migration. In 2014 he was Fulbright visiting professor at the Nazareth College, in Rochester USA. His main publications include Hungary’s Human Losses in World War II (Uppsala, 1995), Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust and after the Second World War, 1939-1949: A Statistical Review (Boulder, CO, 2000), Magyar foglyok a Szovjetunióban. [Hungarian prisoners in the Soviet Union] (Budapest, 2006) „...akkor aszt mondták kicsi robot” – A magyar polgári lakosság elhurcolása a Szovjetunióba korabeli dokumentumok tükrében. [The deportation of civilians to the Soviet Union in the light of contemporary documents] (Budapest, 2017)

Description

Since Xi Jinping visited Kazakhstan in 2013 to unveil the “One Belt, One Road” strategy, China has spent nearly USD 1 trillion in development assistance and infrastructure financing in more than 60 countries. This massive and multi-faceted project—since renamed the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)—has set in motion social, economic, and political transformations with the potential to reshape the globe.

While there has been no shortage of analysis about the project’s origins and initial trajectories, our project is different. We view the BRI as a potential engine of transformations that are varied and difficult to predict; we set our sights on what occurs downstream, i.e. not in the minds of policymakers and project planners but on the ground in specific contexts. But what is the BRI? We welcomed scholars eager to leverage their respective disciplinary and empirical expertise to ask how we might best conceptualize the BRI and its emergent effects on Asian and Eurasian contexts. What historical antecedents, what conceptual frameworks, and what comparative points of reference should frame how we “think into” the BRI and its impact?

While the BRI’s effects will reveal themselves over the course of years and decades to come, we have identified three particularly promising conceptual themes: effects on migration, effects on labour relations, and effects on social mobilization.

Discussions took place as a small conference held via video link with the University of Toronto.

Description

Following the recent grounding of an Irish airline carrying a Belarusian dissident, President Alexander Lukashenko’s fight for power has suddenly taken on international implications. A panel of experts will discuss Belarusian developments since the opposition protests last year and the role of Russia and the West in shaping the fate of Lukashenko and the prospects for Belarusian democracy.

Panelists:

Mark MacKinnon is currently based in London, where he is The Globe and Mail’s Senior International Correspondent. In that posting he has reported on the refugee crisis, the rise of Islamic State, the war in eastern Ukraine, and the Brexit referendum. He was internationally recognized for his 2016 story “The Graffiti Kids,” which followed the lives of the teenagers who inadvertently started the Syrian war.
Mark spent five years as the newspaper’s Beijing correspondent. There he won accolades for his investigations into the garment industry in Asia and for his reporting from the 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan.
Mark has also been posted to the Middle East and Moscow for The Globe and Mail. He has covered the arrival of Canada’s troops in Afghanistan, the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Russia’s war in Chechnya, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah conflict.
A seven-time National Newspaper Award winner, Mark is also the author of The New Cold War: Revolutions, Rigged Elections and Pipeline Politics – which was published in 2007 by Random House, and The China Diaries, an e-book of his train travels through the Middle Kingdom along with photographer John Lehmann.
He has interviewed many world leaders, including Shimon Peres, Aung San Suu Kyi, and Jordan’s King Abdullah II.

Amelie Tolvin is a current MA candidate at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, where her focus and interests lie in authoritarianism, contentious politics and the post-Soviet space. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree, with a major in Political Science and a minor in Russian, at the University of British Columbia in April 2020. She has previously held internship positions at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C., and with the European Values Thinktank’s Kremlin Watch Program. She is currently working on her graduate major research project with Professor Lucan Way, examining the authoritarian responses to the current protest movement in Belarus.

Professor Lucan Way’s research focuses on democratization and authoritarianism in the former Soviet Union and the developing world. His most recent book (with Steven Levitsky), Social Revolution and Authoritarian Durability in the Modern World (forthcoming Princeton University Press) provides a comparative historical explanation of the extraordinary durability of autocracies born of violent social revolution. Professor Way’s solo authored book, Pluralism by Default: Weak Autocrats and the Rise of Competitive Politics (Johns Hopkins, 2015), examines the sources of political competition in the former Soviet Union. His book, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (with Steven Levitsky), was published in 2010 by Cambridge University Press. Way’s work on competitive authoritarianism has been cited thousands of times and helped stimulate new and wide-ranging research into the dynamics of hybrid democratic-authoritarian rule.

Moderator:

Professor Edward Schatz is the Acting Director of the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies and Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. He recently published Slow Anti-Americanism: Social Movements and Symbolic Politics in Central Asia with Stanford University Press. His previous books include Paradox of Power: The Logics of State Weakness in Eurasia (2017) and Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power (2009). Professor Schatz is currently working with Professor Rachel Silvey on a SSHRC-funded project about the downstream effects of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.