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“Build it and they will come” – this cliché is the centerpiece of urban boosterism. It is central to how urban planners and elites around the world have sought to justify development schemes that lack an obvious demand. While the logic underpinning urban boosterism hinges on a high degree of openness and freedom of movement – both for capital and people – it is a tactic increasingly being used in nondemocratic and otherwise illiberal states. Through a case study of urban boosterism in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan – three resource-rich states around the Caspian Sea – this talk considers how state leaders have adopted urban boosterism in their capital cities, and with what effect. This is an increasingly important task as a growing number of urban planners in nondemocratic, but resource-rich, countries seek to develop spectacular new urban landscapes and position their cities as “world class” hubs for international mega-events, business, etc. A focus on political geography challenges commonplace narratives about the hegemony of neoliberalism in urban boosterism, and shows how boosterist narratives can be re-deployed in such contexts to promote the image of a benevolent and “magical state,” as well as solidifying authoritarian political configurations and a selective engagement with market capitalism.

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This lecture will address the refugee crisis with particular emphasis on the German dimensions, including the present legal situation of refugees in Germany and the constitutional right of asylum. Further important considerations in this context include German legislation to restrict access to social benefits, acceleration of asylum procedures, and recent legislation that designates so-called safe countries of origin. The lecture will also discuss the impact of European Union legislation on asylum law, the Dublin Regulation and its apparent breakdown, Schengen border controls, and the possibilities of restricting the inflow of asylum seekers at EU external borders and at German borders specifically.

Prof. Dr. Kay Hailbronner is professor emeritus at the University of Konstanz and director of the Research Center for Alien and Asylum Law. He has served as counsel to the Federal Republic of Germany in asylum-related cases before the Federal German Constitutional Court as well as the European Court of Justice and has served on several advisory boards and commissions related to refugees and asylum seekers. He is currently co-editor of the Baden-Württembergische Verwaltungsblätter, vice-chair of the Federal Commission on Implementation of the EU Researchers Directive, and a member of the Scientific Council of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees.

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Zsuzsa Csergő is Associate Professor of Political Studies at Queen’s University, Canada. She specializes in the study of nationalism in contemporary European politics, with particular focus on post-communist Central and Eastern Europe. Professor Csergő is the President of the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN). She is currently working on a comparative project about minority integration in the enlarged European Union. Her book about majority-minority conflict over language use in Romania and Slovakia was published by Cornell University Press in 2007. Her articles have appeared in Perspectives on Politics, Foreign Policy, Nations and Nationalism,East European Politics and Societies, and other journals.

Frank Hadler is Research Coordinator and Project Director of the Geisteswissenschafliches Zentrum Geschichte und Kultur Ostmitteleuropas (GWZO) at Leipzig University, Germany. Publications on the history and culture of East Central Europe and the history of historiography inlclude most recently, Lost Greatness and Past Oppression in East Central Europe: Representations of Imperial Experience in Historiography since 1918 (Leipzig, 2007).

Mark Kramer is director of the Cold War studies program at Harvard University and a senior fellow of Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. He has taught at Harvard, Yale, and Brown Universities and was formerly an Academy Scholar in Harvard’s Academy of International and Area Studies and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. Kramer is the author or editor of several books and has written nearly 200 articles on a variety of topics. He has worked extensively in newly opened archives in all the former Warsaw Pact countries and several Western countries. He has been a consultant for numerous government agencies and international organizations.

Attila Marján, economist, Ph.D. in international relations has 14 years of experience working for EU institutions. He also was counsellor for Hungary’s chief negotiator during the country’s accession talks with the EU. He has some twenty years of experience in university education and academic research in EU studies and international relations. He is habilitated doctor of the Budapest Corvinus University. He is a former public policy scholar of the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson Center. Between 2012-2014 he was European research director of the Hungarian Institute of International Relations and head of the International and EU Department of the National University of Public Service in Budapest where he is now associate professor.

Peter Smuk is Associate Professor in the Department of Constitutional Law and Political Sciences and Vice-Dean for Education of the Faculty of Law and Political Sciences at the Széchenyi István University in Győr, Hungary. He received his Ph.D. in law at the Széchenyi István University in 2008. His principal research has been concerned with rights of opposition, parliamentary procedures, freedom of political expression, and deliberative democracy. He is the author of more than 70 articles in Hungarian and other languages, four monographs, and has presented papers in more than 30 conferences in several countries.

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Dominic Lieven graduated first in his year, 1973, at the University of Cambridge. He was a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard and, on completing his PhD, became a lecturer in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics, where he is now Professor of Russian Government. He has also been a visiting professor at Tokyo and Harvard Universities, as well as a Humboldt Fellow in Göttingen and Munich. He has published widely, writing on aristocracy, late imperial Russia, and empire. Dominic’s most recent book, Russia against Napoleon, was a major new history of the Napoleonic Wars from the Russian perspective which draws on previously unexploited Russian archival sources. The End of Tsarist Russia, to be published by Allen Lane in May 2015, will provide an account of the First World War told from the Russian perspective.

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The 2014 European Parliament elections outcome and the ongoing migrant crisis presented the trend of greater votes for far-right, Eurosceptic parties such as France’s Front National and the UK’s UKIP. What has contributed to their success? Should the EU be worried about this surge in popularity? What can be done to combat this popularity? Join ESSA and our guest speaker Professor Francisco Beltran to analyse the impact of these parties in EU politics.

Francisco Beltran is a Lecturer in Comparative and European Politics at the Department of Political Science and at the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, University of Toronto. He is also adjunct faculty at the Open University of Catalonia, Spain, where he teaches political science and political theory. He has been a Visiting Researcher at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB), a Visiting Professor at the Munk School for Global Affairs, a Research Fellow at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, a Visiting Researcher at the London School of Economics, and a Lecturer at the Department of Government, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid. He obtained his PhD in Political Science at the UAM, Madrid. His research interests include comparative policies of immigration and integration, political economy of the European welfare states, and political theory of liberalism. He has published a book on “European Social Models” (2009), and several articles and chapters on social policy, multiculturalism, and immigrants’ integration. He is currently working on a book on welfare state models and immigrant integration regimes.

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Although early modern European travelers to the Ottoman Empire often noted its inhabitants’ “fatalism,” to the point of making it an Orientalist stereotype, little has been done to study this fatality as an intellectual phenomenon. In fact, contemporary accounts point to robust debate over fate, freewill, and predestination. What was behind these debates? What issues were at stake? This talk looks at European, Turkish, and Arabic sources from the 17th and 18th centuries and explores the wider significance of freewill in the Ottoman universe–particularly over the concept of political reform–in the hope of shedding light on a milieu that was asking anxious, searching questions about the human condition, the empire, and its ultimate fate.

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** Please note that this event has been rescheduled to begin at 3 p.m.**

This paper explains how gendered political symbolism answers class grievances in contemporary France. It draws from ethnographic observation and interviews of petty bourgeois adherents of the radical right wing Front National (FN) party, especially focusing on the love and admiration party members express for Marine Le Pen, the party’s leader. Petty bourgeois FN supporters view the French political class as a bourgeois liberal class. Their critique of mainstream politics is a critique of class, and vice versa. Furthermore, this bourgeois class is implicitly seen as a male class of professional politicians. Therefore, a symbolically potent woman is seen as the appropriate corrective to France’s political-economic woes. Marine Le Pen is adored as the political daughter intimately known from childhood, and unlike professional male politicians, supporters see her as literally born for politics, incarnating a familiar and impassioned corrective to male bourgeois elites. The paper also briefly consider some feminist dilemmas in considering how Marine Le Pen’s political success is premised, in part, on her self-presentation as an impassioned, embodied, maternal, and filial political figure.

Dorit Geva is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University. She completed her Ph.D. in Sociology at New York University, was then the Vincent Wright Fellow in Comparative Politics at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute, and spent four years as a Harper Schmidt Fellow teaching social theory at the University of Chicago. She joined the Central European University in Autumn 2011. Her expertise is in political sociology, qualitative methods, gender politics, and comparative and historical sociology. She wrote a comparative book on the politics of military service in France and the United States, published by Cambridge University Press in 2013, and related journal articles published in the American Journal of Sociology, Polity, Politics and Society, and various other journals. Her current research, supported by a European Commission Marie Curie Career Integration Grant, follows the gender politics of right-wing parties and movements in France.

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Now in its fifth year, the civil war in Syria has turned into one of the world’s most severe humanitarian catastrophes, a major challenge to international security, and one of the main triggers of the refugee crisis currently facing Europe. This talk discusses the European Union’s policy response to the Syrian conflict, as well as its attempts to deal with the refugee movements the conflict has given rise to. It outlines the international and internal constraints that have complicated EU decision-making on the issue, and develops policy options for a more effective EU response.

MEP Arne Lietz has served as a member of the European Parliament for Saxony-Anhalt (Germany) in the Group of the Progressive Alliance of Social Democrats since July, 2014. He is a full member of the EP’s Committee on Foreign Affairs, the Delegation for Relations with Israel, and serves on the Subcommittee on Human Rights. Within these committees, he focuses on trade policy with developing countries, supply chains, TTIP, and the resolution on the humanitarian crisis in Iraq and Syria.

Mr. Lietz has been member of the SPD since 2008 and has served in numerous positions within the party including Chairman of the SPD Local Association Wittenberg from 2011 to 2014 and Spokesman of the Committee of Experts in Culture and Experts in Europe of the SPD in Saxony-Anhalt since 2013.

Before his political career with the SPD, Mr. Lietz served as the European representative of the American Educational Organization from 2004 to 2006 and was was a research assistant at the Bundestag from 2007 to 2009. From 1997 to 2004, Mr. Lietz studied history, politics and education at the Humboldt University of Berlin and earned a Master’s degree as a historian at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

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Catherine E. Clark is Assistant Professor of French Studies in the Global Studies and Languages Section at MIT. She is a cultural historian who specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France and visual culture.

Her current book project, Paris and the Cliché of History, explores the intersection of the history of Paris and the history of photography. It tells the story of the various uses of photos as documents of the capital’s past from the establishment of Paris’s municipal historical institutions (the Musée Carnavalet and the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris) to the amateur photo contest “C’était Paris en 1970,” which created an archive of 100,000 pictures of the city. The project combines the history of collecting photographs with a consideration of the theoretical assumptions that underpinned their use, alongside prints and paintings, in illustrated books, historical exhibitions, and commemorations. Her article about photographs of the Liberation of Paris is forthcoming in the American Historical Review. Clark is also currently writing about films shot in and around Paris during the 1970s.

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David Wolff has taught at Hokkaido University’s Slavic-Eurasian Research Center since 2006. He has authored and edited volumes on Russian migration to Harbin, the KGB in the Baltic, Siberia and the Russian Far East, the Russo-Japanese war, etc. He is now working on a volume on Stalin’s Eurasian foreign policy and an article on soybeans.

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Since the end of communist rule in Poland in 1989, there have been dramatic changes in Church-state relations and in the religious sphere more generally. These changes may be grouped into four sets. First, among Catholics, belief in various Church doctrines and participation in religious rites (such as attendance at Sunday liturgy) have declined tangibly. Second, in spite of the aforementioned erosion of Catholic belief, the Church has nonetheless been able to change the legal framework of the state in several ways in areas of interest to the hierarchy – in particular where the ban on abortion, the blocking of IVF treatment, and the protection of “Christian” values in the broadcast media are concerned. Third, revelations concerning the extensive friendly contacts between Catholic clergy (including some bishops) and the state Security Service –especially the passing along by the former of information of interest to the latter – have eroded the prestige of Catholic clergy. And fourth, the operation, since 1991, of an anti-Semitic and anti-liberal Catholic radio station under the direction of Father Tadeusz Rydzyk of the Redemptorist Order has made its contribution to the religious/secular polarization in Poland today.

Sabrina P. Ramet is a Professor of Political Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), in Trondheim, Norway. Born in London, England, she was educated in Philosophy at Stanford University, received her MA through the University of Arkansas, and earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from UCLA in 1981. She is the author of 12 scholarly books, among them Thinking about Yugoslavia: Scholarly Debates about the Yugoslav Breakup and the Wars in Bosnia and Kosovo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). She is also editor or co-editor of 31 books. Her books have been published in Croatian, French, German, Italian, Polish, and Serbian translations. Her latest book is an edited volume – Gender (In)equality and Gender Politics in Southeastern Europe: A question of justice, co-edited with Christine M. Hassenstab (published in April 2015 by Palgrave Macmillan). In addition to her scholarly work, she has also written a humorous short novel, Café Bombshell: The International Brain Surgery Conspiracy, and four books of humorous verse, the latest being History of Russia and the Soviet Union in humorous verse. She is currently writing a history of the Catholic Church in Poland, under contract with Palgrave, as well as a second novel.

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Hidden and hard to reach populations often intrigue social science and policy researchers, yet present predictable challenges when it comes to identification and engagement in research. These populations typically include those facing prejudice and stigma, rendering them less willing to identify themselves in public contexts. There have been few empirical attempts to combine demographic forecasting techniques, ‘big data’ and qualitative methods to address the above problem. In this project, we demonstrate that the combination of these methods can present a new avenue through which we can identify and engage these populations. We focus on the Hungarian Roma population of Toronto as our case study, as the growing literature on these recent refugees is still devoid of population level empirical evidence when it comes to their socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. Without this, we lack a basic understanding when it comes to the socioeconomic barriers the recent Hungarian Roma refugees may face in their new homeland. Our results have the potential to aid in the design of appropriate public policy interventions.

Boróka Bó is a PhD candidate in the Department Sociology and a PhD candidate in the Department of Demography at the University of California, Berkeley. She holds fellowship positions at the National Science Foundation, Soros Foundation and at the United States Agency for International Development. Her research interests broadly encompass areas of stratification, gender, migration and demography. She has conducted research on internalizing prejudices, time poverty and health among the Roma population, intergenerational support exchanges between migrant children and aged parents in Romania, conceptualizing socioeconomic rights in South Africa, and exploring trajectories of resilience among ‘aged-out’ foster youth in the United States. She has presented and published her research on three continents. Her dissertation focuses on the intersection of gender and social mobility in populations where ethnicity is often fluid.