Description

The breakup of the USSR was unexpected and unexpectedly peaceful. Though a third of the new states fell prey to violent civil conflict, anarchy on the post-Soviet periphery, when it occurred, was quickly cauterized. Driscoll argues that this outcome had very little to do with security guarantees by Russia or the United Nations and a great deal to do with local innovation by ruthless warlords, who competed and colluded in a high-risk coalition formation game. The research design for the forthcoming book, which shall serve as the basis for the talk, combines ethnography and game theory, quantitative and qualitative methods, and presents a revisionist account of the post-Soviet wars and their settlement. Most of the empirical material was gathered over many years of fieldwork in Georgia and Tajikistan, but speculative policy conclusions draw on recent observations from Ukraine.

Jesse Driscoll holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University. He was an OCV fellow at Yale and a GAGE fellow at the University of Virginia, and most recently a member of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies from 2009-2013. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His work has been published in The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Research and Politics, and The Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology, and his book is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in the Comparative Politics series.

Description

The talk will discuss the role of the Ukrainian mainstream media in reporting crises in the context of extensive social media, the use of Russian TV domestically and abroad, the role of international media (traditional and new web outlets), and the pro-Ukraine and pro-Russia narratives in Western elite and public opinion. It will touch as well on civic pressure for structural reforms (and against corruption), citizens and political parties, and the role of art in the Ukrainian revolution.

Nataliya Gumenyuk is a Ukrainian journalist, co-founder of Hromadske.TV (Public TV), an Editor-in-Chief of Hromadske International – Hromadske English/Russian newsroom. Hromadske.TV is a civic initiative of the Ukrainian journalists to create public broadcasting system in Ukraine. It has no ties to the Ukrainian government or business groups. Launched on the eve of some of the most tumultuous days in the country’s history, Hromadske.TV has become the go-to medium for the Ukrainians — the place to discover and a way to make sense of what was happening in the country. Nataliya had also worked as the head of Foreign News Desk of INTER, the biggest Ukrainian TV channel. She has reported on major political and social events from nearly 50 countries, with a particular focus on post-Arab spring developments in the Arab world. She has been giving commentaries on events in Ukraine for a number of international media. Nataliya also teaches at the Master Programme of Kyiv Mohyla School of Journalism.

Description

Dr. Raoul Delcorde is the Ambassador of Belgium to Canada, with rank of minister plenipotentiary. He assumed his current post in August of this year, having served previously in Poland, Sweden, and Washington, DC. He is an Officer of the Order of Leopold II, Commander of the Order of the Crown, and holds various foreign honours. Dr. Delcorde is also currently a Guest Professor at the Institut des Etudes Europeennes, Universite Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, and is the author of a half-dozen books and more than 30 articles in the field of international relations.

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Oksana Huss (Petro Jacyk Visiting Young Scholar) is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at Institute for Development and Peace, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. The topic of her thesis is “Political Corruption in Competitive Authoritarian Regimes of post-Soviet Countries: The case of Ukraine.” Previously, she graduated in Political Science, Law and Anthropology from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich (Mag.) and in International Relations from State University of Transkarpatia, Ukraine (M.A.). She has been awarded a scholarship from the Hanns-Seidel-Foundation. At CERES, Oksana Huss works on conceptual issues, connecting dynamics of political corruption in Ukraine to different regime trajectories.

Description

Georgy Ganev is a program director for economic research at the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia and an assistant professor at Sofia University’s Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, where he teaches courses in introductory macroeconomics, money and banking, and new institutional economics. His interests are related to issues of macroeconomics, monetary theory and policy, political economy, transition, development and growth economics, new institutional economics, and social capital.

Description

**This event will be webcast live starting at 2 p.m. Please click the link below to view the live stream.**

The Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies together with the European Cultural Institutes in Canada are inviting eminent Czech, French, German, Polish, and Hungarian scholars to discuss (Eastern and Western) Europe’s hopes and expectations 25 years ago and compare them with European and global realities today.

Panelists:

Libor Žídek is an associate professor at Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. His main field of interest is economic transformation from centrally planned to market economies in Central and Eastern Europe. He has published several articles on this topic, and his book about the transformation process in Central Europe is in print (CEU Press, Hungary). He has given lectures and courses about the topic in the UK, Germany, and Hungary and is invited to Poland and Macedonia.

Jörn Mothes was born 1962 in Stralsund. He is a German theologian and an East German civil rights activist. He was actively involved in the dissolution of the East German State Security secret police. Mothes helped establish the Stasi Archives in the new province of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where he was State Commissionerfrom 1998-2008. Today he is the head of division in the Ministry of Education in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

Adam Reichardt is the editor-in-chief of New Eastern Europe, a bimonthly magazine dedicated to Central and Eastern European affairs. He previously spent eight years in public policy in Washington DC, as well as a large portion of his studies in Kraków, Poland, where he now permanently resides.

Attila Marjan has been working in EU diplomacy and at EU institutions (European Commission, European Council) in Brussels for fourteen years. He participated at Hungary’s EU-accession negotiations as counselor to the chief negotiator, then joined the European Commision in 2004 as political and economic advisor to EU Commissioners. He was public policy scholar of the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson Center. His book, titled “Europe’s Destiny” published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 2010 was selected for the best academic titles list in the USA. He was European research director of the Hungarian Institute of International Relations and currently is head of the International and EU Department of the National University of Public Service in Budapest.

Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol holds a BA in European Studies from Sciences Po, Strasbourg, an MSc (Distinction) in International History from the London School of Economics and a PhD from the European University Institute in Florence.Prior to joining the Adam Smith Business School, he has been Pinto Post-Doctoral Fellow at the LSE, and Research Associate in the Economic History Department at the University of Glasgow. Emmanuel’s research interests lie in international economic history, European integration, the development of international/European financial regulation and supervision and the internationalisation strategies of commercial banks.

Jiří Vykoukal graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy of Charles University in history. After graduation he became a research fellow at the Institute of Central and East European History of the Czechoslovak Academy of Science and later a research fellow at the Institute of History of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Department of Modern History. In 1991/1992 he lectured as a visiting professor at Lawrence University (USA). Now he is a director of the Institute of International Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University. He has been a member of several scientific institutions (Eurasian Political Studies Network, Scientific Board – Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague, Czech – Polish Historians Commission) and is on the editorial boards of prestigious scientific journals. His main areas of interest are Central European countries (esp. Poland, Hungary and Slovakia) and their relation to Russia and Post-soviet countries.

Description

Why vote if it takes me more than 30 minutes? The impact of internet voting on reducing the cost of electoral participation. Declining levels of turnout have become characteristic in most of the developed world while the use of internet voting is expected to alleviate the problem. A particular feature of internet voting is convenience: instead of voting at the polling station, people can comfortably choose the time and place to cast their votes. Making voting more convenient, thus, eases political participation, especially among those for whom it is relatively costly.

Description

In recent decades, scholarship on the Old Regime nobility has emphasized the group’s enduring power and its successful adaptation to changing circumstances. This interpretive orientation (which perhaps owes something to our contemporary experiences of ruling class tenacity) has had a significant impact on interpretations of modernity’s founding event, the French Revolution of 1789. In particular, it has encouraged viewing the Revolution as fundamentally the product of ideas and values, rather than of changes in French society.

This paper presents an alternative perspective, exploring indicators of the nobility’s decay over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The analysis starts with the nobility’s numbers, which declined sharply after 1650, then moves to questions of family organization, the economics of state service, and the returns on the nobility’s most important resource, land. The French nobility, the paper suggests, had owed many of its successes to specific political circumstances; as these changed, it changed also.

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Information is not yet available.

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The opening of the exhibition will take place on January 9th, 2015 at 2pm at the Vivian and David Campbell Conference Facility, and will be followed by a lecture by Dr. Lukasz Kaminski, the President of the Institute of National Remembrance.

The exhibition will be on display from 9 to 26 January, 2015 at the Munk School of Global Affairs, 1 Devonshire Place.

Admission Free.

Description

Based on videotaped oral histories conducted with Jews living in small-towns throughout Ukraine, this multimedia presentation discusses Jewish life and death under Communism and Nazism.

Location: Jackman Humanities Building, Room 100, 170 St. George Street

Co-sponsors: the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, the Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine, and the Centre for Jewish Studies

This event is free and open to the public. No registration required. Please arrive early as seating is limited.

Description

Women’s participation in EuroMaidan and its social and media evaluations largely reflect the social position of women in the Ukrainian society. In the current economic and social situation, entrenched stereotypes of men as family breadwinners and leaders in the public sphere (particularly, in politics) and stereotypes of women as mostly wives and mothers inhibit progress in gender equality in Ukrainian society. In my research I will try to discuss three major ideas: (1) (International) media discourse about EuroMaidan was “narrow”; event (practices) is much more diverse; (2) Women were not “helpers”, but “participants” of EuroMaidan; (3) women had possibility to fulfill not only “traditional” (“female”) roles; new niches for egalitarian (emancipatory) participation were possible. The empirical base for research is the examples of speeches on Maidan, journal articles, pictures and video materials, blogs and social networks; participants observation and interviews with activists. The theoretical background of my research is feminist theories, especially intersection of feminism and nationalism (Yuval-Davis 1997; Bohachevsky-Chomiak 1994; Kis 2005; Rubchak 1996; Zhurzhenko 2012 and others).

Description

Smell is fundamental to the way in which we perceive the world around us, and yet historians have scarcely explored either the smell of the past or pervious attitudes to odors. While art historians have extant material artifacts with which to reconstruct the ‘period eye’, the very evanescence of scent means that prospective historians of smell lack any comparable sources with which to deduce what we might call the ‘period nose’. This paper suggests that one route into the otherwise problematic history of smell is through the study of perfume, the product that, more than any other, was intended to manipulate olfaction. Rather than searching for the birth of ‘modern’ perfumery, I intend here to delineate the changing meanings of perfume during the eighteenth century. Besides treating perfume as an objective physical substance, I will also show how it was a subjective phenomenon tied to contemporary understandings of air and smell. In doing so, I intend to nuance and modify Alain Corbin’s influential account of odor. The central thesis to be advanced in the paper is that, over the course of the eighteenth century, perfume underwent a partial transformation. Before 1700, perfumers touted above all else the medicinal qualities of their products. During the 1700s, however, these purported medicinal qualities changed and were partly superseded by entirely new claims to the effect that perfume was, for men and women alike, a necessary luxury.

Kirsten James is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation is provisionally titled “The Science of Scent and Business of Perfume in Paris and London in the Eighteenth Century.”