Description

Russia’s assault on Ukraine has reminded the world about the threat it faces from Moscow. But that’s not the only war that Russia has been fighting and Ukraine is not the only target. Long before February 2022, Russia was already engaged in semi-covert campaigns around the world, using any means possible to expand its power and influence and leaving a trail of destruction along the way.  In his new book Russia’s War on Everybody, long-term Russia-watcher Keir Giles examines what this longer war means for us all.

Instead of talking only to diplomats, politicians and generals, Keir has also looked at the effect of Russia’s ambition on ordinary people around the world. Interviewing 40 eyewitnesses from a dozen countries across four continents, including Canada, he has tried to tell the stories the world doesn’t hear about the impact of Russia’s hostility on individuals and societies that may not even realize they are a target – through corruption, disinformation, cyber offensives and more.  Keir will introduce the book and its findings, and take questions on what he has learned over three decades of studying Russia and how it tries to get its way at all of our expense.

About the speaker

Keir Giles has spent decades watching and explaining Russia. Currently a fellow with the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House in London, he has also worked with more than a dozen national and international defence research agencies around the world warning of the growing threat from Moscow. He is a regular contributor and commentator on Russian affairs for international print and broadcast media.  His previous publications include Russia’s ‘New’ Tools for Confronting the West (2016), and the Handbook of Russian Information Warfare (2016). Former president of Estonia Toomas Ilves said of his last book, Moscow Rules: What Drives Russia To Confront The West (2019) that "my only regret is that I did not have this book 35 years ago".

Description

States typically have lasted 100 years at top size (rarely over 200) before shrinking. Political concentration of the world has grown exponentially over the last 5000 years, as measured by four quantities: the largest state’s share of world dry land area (A1/AW); the most populous state’s share of world population (P1/PW); area-based effective number of states (NA); population-based effective number of states (NP). Jointly, they point to a single world state 2600 years from now, if (and only if) the previous trend continues. Within 5000 years of concentration, Rein Taagepera and Miroslav Nemcok, More People, Fewer States (manuscript), distinguish three acceleration points: early state formation around -3200, leading to Runner Empires; horse-riding and authority delegation breakthroughs around -600, leading to Rider Empires; and modern technology around 1800, leading to Engineer Empires.

In the Engineer phase, population concentration seems to fall below the millennial trend. When one attempts to postdict the next 100 years in 1200, 1300 and so on, based on full knowledge of previous empire sizes, one would mostly grossly off the mark. The last 70 years have been unusually stable. This cannot be expected to last.  

Speaker bio

Professor Rein Taagepera is interested in quantitatively predictive logical models in social sciences. He has published seminal research on predicting the number and size of parties on the basis of electoral systems, and the consequences for government stability. His books include: Making Social Sciences More Scientific: The Need for Predictive Models (Oxford UP 2008); Predicting Party Sizes: The Logic of Simple Electoral Systems (Oxford UP 2007); Seats and Votes: The Effects and Determinants of Electoral Systems (with M. S. Shugart) (Yale University Press, 1989). Taagepera has been awarded two of the most prestigious prizes in political science: the Karl Deutsch Award (International Political Science Association, 2016) and the Johann Skytte Prize (Skytte Foundation, Sweden, 2008). This places him in the exalted company of recipients Robert Putnam, Juan Linz, Pippa Norris and Jane Mansbridge. Additionally, Taagepera contributed to the restoration of Estonia’s independence and its transition to a successful democracy, including as a presidential candidate and the founder of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Tartu. His The Baltic States: Years of Dependence, 1940-1990 (Hurst & University of California Press, 1993) is the classic study of Soviet rule.

Description

About the speakers:

Professor Jan Macháček – Academic staff from University of Ostrava, Czechia responsible for the subjects of public administration, the geography of tourism, demography, and geographical excursions.  

Macháček’s research interests include environmental aspects of industrial activity, artisanal mining, and its socio-economic aspects. Artisanal mining (artisanal mining) employs tens of millions of people in the world and could be one of the tools for the development of less-developed regions, especially in developing countries. Another area of interest is the development of the Czech rural areas within the current demographic trends. The development of the rural areas (and cities) is followed by the concept of SMART cities, which has come to the fore in regional planning in recent years.

Description

The Russian “demographic crisis” has been a major focal point of Putin’s political rhetoric and domestic policy for nearly two decades. This talk presents research analyzing the tools and their effects – in the political realm and in terms of population – of the Russian government’s attempts to raise the birth rate.  

About our Speaker:

Leslie Root is a postdoctoral researcher for the Colorado Fertility Project at the University of Colorado Boulder. She received her PhD in demography from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2020, and holds an MA in Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies from Georgetown University. Her work focuses on fertility politics and policies in low-fertility countries, including Russia and the United States.

Description

This presentation explores how drinking water in the second half of the eighteenth century became fully commercialized, like any other good on the Parisian market. After the 1760s, private water companies competed with and tried to replace the municipal water system and the network of water carriers. These companies changed the norms and values that defined the previous water system to ensure their own success, which lasted from the 1760s to 1790s. Yet, in spite of their bold claims, water companies never managed to completely overhaul the municipal system nor to fully replace water carriers. To analyze the companies’ lack of success, this talk is structured around three axes. First, I will trace the companies’ tactics and strategies to commercialize water.

Constance de Font-Réaulx will show how water companies sought to create market would not be driven by credit, status, and personal relations but by abstract commercial exchanges, wealth, and consumer appetites. Second, she will analyze why water companies went bankrupt. She will show that companies did not generate enough interest among consumers, many of whom preferred to continue relying on their local water carriers. Third, she will analyze how the possibility of water becoming subject to market forces triggered a new debate about whether humans have a right to water.   

Constance de Font-Réaulx is a scholar of early modern France. She is a former student of the École Normale Supérieure (Ulm) and holds her Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on the commercialization and commodification of drinking water in early modern Paris. She examines debates over the governance of the supply of water when commercial and financial capitalism had begun transforming nature into a commodity. She is currently working on a manuscript entitled The Power of Water: The Politics of the Parisian Waterworks (1660-1800). Her research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Description

Experts on Ukrainian, American, and European politics will discuss issues surrounding military and other forms of support to Ukraine.

About the speakers:

Milada Anna Vachudova is a Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She specializes in European politics, political change in postcommunist Europe, the European Union and the impact of international actors on domestic politics. Her recent articles explore the trajectories of European states amidst strengthening ethnopopulism and democratic backsliding – and how these changes are impacting party systems and the European Union. Professor Vachudova is part of the core team of the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) on the positions of political parties across Europe. She served as the Chair of the Curriculum in Global Studies at UNC from 2014 to 2019. Her book, Europe Undivided: Democracy, Leverage and Integration After Communism (Oxford University Press) was awarded the Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research.

Volodymyr Dubovyk is an associate professor, Department of International Relations and Director, Center for International Studies, Odesa I. I. Mechnikov National University (Ukraine). V. Dubovyk has conducted research at the Kennan Institute, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (1997, 2006-2007), at the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland (2002), taught at the University of Washington (Seattle) in 2013 and at St. Edwards university/University of Texas (Austin) in 2016-17. Volodymyr has been a Fulbright Scholar twice. He is the co-author of Ukraine and European Security (Macmillan, 1999) and has published numerous articles on US-Ukraine relations, regional and international security, and Ukraine’s foreign policy. His areas of expertise are Ukraine, Transatlantic Relations, U.S., Black Sea security and security studies.  

James Goldgeier is a professor of International Relations and served as Dean of the School of International Service at American University from 2011-17. He is a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University’s Center on International Security and Cooperation and a Visiting Fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution. He serves as the chair of the State Department Historical Advisory Committee and is a member of the Secretary of State’s International Security Advisory Board.  

Pawel Zerka is a policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. He is a lead ECFR analyst on European public opinion. He contributes to ECFR’s Re:shape Global Europe project, which seeks to develop new strategies for Europeans to understand and engage with the changing international order. Pawel is also engaged in discussions about Europe’s economic statecraft, and he works on Polish and European foreign policy. Based at ECFR’s Paris office, he has been part of the team since August 2017. Previously, Zerka worked as expert and head of programmes at two leading Polish think tanks, demosEUROPA-Centre for European Strategy and WiseEuropa. Zerka holds a PhD in economics and a master’s degree in international relations from the Warsaw School of Economics, having also studied at SciencesPo Bordeaux and Universidad de Buenos Aires.

Markus Kaim is a senior fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs of the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP). He has been a DAAD Professor for German and European Studies at the University of Toronto (2007-2008), and Acting Professor for Foreign Policy and International Relations at the University of Constance (2007). He was a Visiting Fellow at the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at Johns Hopkins University (2005). Since 2012, he is adjunct professor at the Department for Political Science, University of Zurich and guest instructor at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin.

Description

Keya Bayramova will discuss the traditions of Turkmen women, the culture of visual arts in Central Asia, and important cultural artifacts such as textiles, carpets, jewelry and clothing. Using specific examples of visual art and cultural objects, Dr. Bayramova presents her journey as a successful businesswoman and curator; from her beginnings in Turkmenistan, to her current work as founder of the Durdy Bayramov Art Foundation.

About the speaker:

Dr. Keya Bayramova is the founder and curator of the Durdy Bayramov Art Foundation in Toronto, Canada. Heavily influenced by her father and renowned Turkmen artist Durdy Bayramov, Bayramova is heavily invested and passionated in the preservation and presentation of Central Asian Arts and Culture.

Description

As part of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Putin’s government has deported hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens from the country into Russia. Four experts in international law and genocide will discuss the sources, extent and impact of Russia’s actions.

About the speakers:

Eugene Finkel is a professor of International Relations at John Hopkins University. He works at the intersection of political science and history. He was born in Ukraine and grew up in Israel. Finkel received a BA in Political Science and International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a PhD in Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on how institutions and individuals respond to extreme situations: mass violence, state collapse, and rapid change.

Nataliia Hendel is a research fellow at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights. She is a board member of Support for Fundamental Research Fund (Odesa, Ukraine) and holds an LLM and a PhD in international law. She is an expert and trainer on international humanitarian law for teachers and civil servants conducted by the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union. She was an expert and trainer on international humanitarian law for teachers conducted by the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union together with the Ukrainian Red Cross Society (2021–2022).

Kateryna Rashevska, lawyer from the Regional Centre for Human Rights. Legal expert at the Regional Center for Human Rights in Kyiv and a Ph.D. fellow at the Department of International Law, Educational and Scientific Institute of International Relations, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv.

Oleksandra Romantsova is the executive director of the Center for Civil Liberties and a human rights activist. Since May 2014, Oleksandra has been working at the Center for Civil Liberties, where will the end of 2016 she coordinated the project of mobile observation of human rights violations and war crimes in the east of Ukraine in the Anti-Terrorist Operation Zone (ATO) and political persecution in occupied Crimea. Since 2015 and till now, she has also been responsible for international advocacy of the Center’s work. Actively engaged in advocacy of international support for Ukraine and bringing responsible for war crimes in Ukraine to justice. Laureate of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize as Executive Director of the Center for Civil Liberties.

Lucan Way (chair) is a professor of Political Science and co-Director of the Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine, CERES.

Description

Poland in recent years has grown to become a regional leader in the area of security, energy, economy and more. Building on strong relations with its partners in the Central Eastern Europe, Poland initiated numerous effective regional formats, including the economy oriented Three Seas Initiative that binds 12 neighboring countries from Estonia to Croatia or the Bucharest 9 format that allows for the coordination of the strategic coordination of the NATO eastern flank. Recently, in the wake of the Russian aggression against Ukraine, Poland’s role has become visible globally. In his talk, Poland’s Ambassador Witold Dzielski will delve into the rationale of further deepening of the Poland-Canada partnership.

About the speaker:

On April 28, 2022, Witold Dzielski took office as Poland’s Ambassador to Canada. From 2015, he was Director of the Bureau of International Policy at the Chancellery of the President of the Republic of Poland, responsible for President Andrzej Duda’s foreign activities. Earlier, he worked at the Department of Americas at the Poland’s Foreign Ministry. 2007-2012, while posted at Poland’s Embassy in Washington D.C., he was responsible for EU-US relations, as well as Polish-Jewish affairs. Prior, among other professional activities, he was a university lecturer and a high school teacher. He was active in several civic society organization dealing with topics revolving around transatlantic affairs and human rights. He is an author of a fantasy novel and policy articles. An Aikido black belt, former captain of a basketball team. Has a wife and two sons.

Description

About the speakers:

Maria Berlinska, Ukrainian military volunteer and women’s rights advocate.

Oksana Kis, Head of the Departmeny of Social Anthropology at the Institute of Ethnology, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

Anna Kvit is a Visiting Research Fellow at University College London. Anna’s research is focused on gender equality and women’s rights in the military sector of Ukraine. She has also worked for international and civil society organizations and contributed to the development of policies on the implementation of the Women, Peace and Security agenda in Ukraine."

Anna Dovgopol, Women Lead in Emergency Coordinator, CARE Ukraine.

Galyna Kotliuk, Gender and Democracy Program Coordinator at the Heinrich Böll Foundation.

Chair: Ksenya Kiebuzinski, co-Director of the Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine, Head of the Petro Jacyk Central & East European Resource Centre.

Description

How can we understand Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine? Which of our pre-existing classifications of war best encapsulates the motives for armed intervention?  In this presentation, Dr. Richard Arnold argues that the invasion should be seen as an ethnic war, one in which Ukrainians are fighting for ethnicity whereas the Russians are fighting about ethnicity. One of the most prominent symbols of the shared history between the two countries is the Cossack legacy and the ideas are evaluated against event analysis of developments in each country, focus groups conducted with Ukrainian refugees in Poland, and salience graphs of the Cossack image in the Russian and Ukrainian presses.

About the speakers:

Richard Arnold is the author of Russian Nationalism and Ethnic Violence: Symbolic Violence, Lynching, Pogrom, and Massacre (2016, Routledge) and a member of the PONARS Eurasia network. His work has appeared in numerous journals and book series, including Post-Soviet Affairs, Theoretical Criminology, Problems of Post Communism, Nationalities Papers, PS: Political Science and Politics, Ethnic and Racial Studies and the Oxford Handbook on the Radical Right. He was guest co-editor (with Andrew Foxall, Henry Jackson Institute [London]) on special editions of a journal on the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics and the FIFA 2018 World Cup. He teaches classes in comparative politics and international relations, including The Politics of International Sport and the Model United Nations annual trip to New York.

Ed Schatz (Chair) is the director of the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, director of the Belt and Road in Global Perspective, director of Eurasia Initiative and  professor for the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. His latest book, Slow Anti-Americanism: Social Movements and Symbolic Politics in Central Asia, was published 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). Schatz is currently working with Professor Rachel Silvey on a SSHRC-funded project about the downstream effects of China’s Belt and Road Initiative and directs CERES’ Eurasia Initiative.

Description

Capital generated by the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) affects local networks, however, little is known about how it transforms these local networks. This knowledge is nevertheless important in order to assess the trickle-down effects of the BRI and, more broadly, its feasibility in specific local contexts.

Based on 16 months of ethnographic field research in one of the main Belty and Road Initiative (BRI) hubs, Verena La Mela studied how women sustain BRI capital by converting money into enduring social relationships, which secure social support in times of uncertainty. In doing so, she extends the conversation about the BRI as a transformative agent of local networks by adding a temporal dimension to the discussion.

About the speakers:

Verena La Mela, M.A., is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, supported by the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany. She is also a researcher in the Swiss National Science Foundation funded project “ROADWORK: An Anthropology of Infrastructure on China’s Inner Asian Borders” (https://roadworkasia.com/).

Rachel Silvey is the Richard Charles Lee Director of the Asian Institute and Professor in the Department of Geography and Planning. She is a Faculty Affiliate in CDTS, WGSI, and the Ethnic, Immigration and Pluralism Studies Program. She received her Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Washington, Seattle. Professor Silvey is best known for her research on women’s labour and migration in Indonesia. She has published widely in the fields of migration studies, cultural and political geography, gender studies, and critical development. Her major funded research projects have focused on migration, gender, social networks, and economic development in Indonesia; immigration and employment among Southeast Asian-Americans; migration and marginalization in Bangladesh and Indonesia; and religion, rights and Indonesian migrant women workers in Saudi Arabia.

Description

Professor Igor Lukes talks about the 30th anniversary of independent Czech Republic, Central Europe, Russia, both past and present.

About the speaker:

Lukes writes primarily about Central Europe. His publications deal with the interwar period, the Cold War, and contemporary developments in East Central Europe and Russia. His scholarly articles have been published in eleven countries and in such periodicals as Journal of Contemporary History, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Diplomacy & Statecraft, Historie a vojenstvi, Studies in Intelligence, and Slavic Review. Lukes is the recipient of the Central Intelligence Agency 2012 Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Literature on Intelligence and the 2000 Stanley Z. Pech Prize for his article The Rudolf Slansky Affair: New Evidence.

In 2018 he was a Visiting Fellow at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna. He was the 2017 Phi Beta Kappa Honorary Initiate, and had Erasmus Mundus Grant in 2015 and a Fulbright Specialist Grant in 2014. He was a 2012 W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow and the Bitton National Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. In 2004-05 he was a Fellow at The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. His work has won the support of various other institutions, including Fulbright, Fulbright-Hays, IREX, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 1997, Lukes won the Metcalf Award for Excellence in Teaching at Boston University.

Lukes is Honorary Consul General of the Czech Republic in Boston.

Description

This presentation will discuss on-going work on the nature of slavery as revealed in the sharia court records of Aleppo. It will include statistical information on aspects such as regional origins, gender, prices, manumission, and runaways. It will also focus on a couple of interesting case studies and suggest some very preliminary conclusions.

Description

About the speakers:

Olha Khometa is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Slavic Literatures and Languages at the University of Toronto, where she is working on her dissertation, entitled “The Politics of Style: Late Modernism in the Ukrainian, Jewish Russophone and Russian Literatures in the 1930s.” Olha earned both her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees with a major in Ukrainian Language and Literature, at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Kyiv, Ukraine. She completed the summer school program at the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute in 2014. She is a co-organizer of the series of literary readings entitled Contemporary Ukrainian Diaspora & Emigre Literature in cooperation with the Canadian Ukrainian Art Foundation in Toronto.

Anna Rakityanskaya is the Librarian of Russian and Belarusian collections at Harvard Library. Her special professional interests include creating, describing and curating collections of ephemeral and non-traditional materials in both physical and born-digital formats. She is also actively involved in collaborative digital collecting projects. My latest article Belarusian Politics and Society Web Archive: Preserving the Belarusian Grassroots Protest will appear in the latest issue of the Journal of Belarusian Studies.

Olena Pavlova is a Professor of Ethics, Aesthetics and Cultural Studies at the Taras Schevchenko National University of Kyiv.

Maria Rohozha is a Professor of Ethics, Aesthetics and Cultural Studies at the Taras Schevchenko National University of Kyiv.

Ksenya Kiebuzinski (Chair) is the co-director of the Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine, head of the Petro Jacyk Central & East European Resource Centre, and Slavic Resources Coordinator for the University of Toronto Libraries. Her research interests include nineteenth-century French stage representations of Ukraine, its historical figures, and events, as well as bibliography, the history of the book, and Austrian Galicia. Recent publications include a forthcoming volume, The Great West Ukrainian Prison Massacre of 1941: A Sourcebook (Amsterdam UP, 2016), co-edited with Alexander Motyl, and Maximum Imaginativeness: An Exhibition on Modern Czech Book Design, 1900–1950: Exhibition and Catalogue (Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, 2015), plus articles on Sacher-Masoch’s Galician tales in French translation, for a volume she coedited of the journal 20th-century Ukraine: Culture, Ideology, Politics (2015); another on Léo Delibes’ Galician opera ‘Kassya,’ Austrian History Yearbook (2015); and one on a Carpathian band of brigands for a festschrift in honor of Paul Robert Magocsi (2015)

Description

The talk focuses on one particular set of actors within Dr. Kuby’s broader research on American Jewish activism in post-1945 France: the Paris Office staff of the American Jewish Committee (AJC).

Kuby uses the case of the AJC to illuminate how France became the key setting for the American Jewish confrontation with post-Holocaust Europe. By considering how the organization’s leaders intervened in French conversations about both the recent Jewish genocide and the fate of North African Jewish populations, she demonstrates their eagerness to displace antisemitism  onto non-Western "others," elide the French state’s own participation in the Holocaust, and cast France, despite its now-diminished geopolitical role, as the epicenter of a cosmopolitan, tolerant West.

About the speakers:

Emma Kuby is an associate professor of History at Northern Illinois University. An intellectual, political, and cultural historian of modern Europe, she specializes in postwar France and its empire. Her book Political Survivors: The Resistance, the Cold War, and the Fight against Concentration Camps after 1945 (Cornell University Press, 2019) received the George Louis Beer Prize from the American Historical Association and the David H. Pinkney Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies.

William Nelson is a professor in the History department at University of Toronto at Scarborough. Nelson specializes in the history of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. His research focuses on the ways that ideas about time, race, and biopolitics emerged in eighteenth-century France and the Atlantic world.

Description

After the 2014 annexation of Crimea and Russian-backed separatist movement in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, Western and Russian observers alike assumed that Dnipropetrovsk would be the next front in Russia’s hybrid war on Ukraine. However, Dnipro underwent an unexpected transformation from the “Rocket City” clinging to its Soviet laurels into “The Outpost of Ukraine” (forpost Ukraїny), a metaphor which reflects its strategic role in both defending and protecting the state.

This presentation chronicles and analyzes the public discourses of civic nationalism that emerged in the immediate aftermath of the war in Donbas and crystallized in the years since. Drawing upon representations of Dnipro’s role in the war in the local and national media, memory institutions, and new urban spaces, journalist Olena Andriushchenko and the cultural historian Nick Kupensky show how the metaphor that Dnipro was the “outpost of Ukraine” proved to be a particularly effective new myth, one with the power to signify both strength and compassion and synthesize a wide array of civic activity: volunteering to fight, caring for IDPs, healing the wounded, and facilitating new social relations.

About the Speakers:

Nick Kupensky is an associate professor at the United States Air Force Academy, where he teaches Russian and Foreign Area Studies. He is completing a book manuscript The Soviet Industrial Sublime: The Awe and Fear of DniproHES, 1928-1945. His research on Carpatho-Rusyn, Russian, and Ukrainian modernism has appeared in Harvard Ukrainian Studies, H-Ukraine, Muzeinyi visnyk, Nationalities Papers, Richnyk Ruskoi Bursy, Ukraina Moderna, and the edited collection Ukraine’s Outpost: Dnipropetrovsk and the Russian-Ukrainian War.

Olena Andriushchenko is a journalist from Dnipro, Ukraine, where she has worked as a correspondent for the newspaper Dnepr vechernii, the director of the press center at Open TV Media, and a freelancer for Voice of America, Ukrainian People, and other American media outlets. Her research on the war in Donbas has appeared in the edited collection Ukraine’s Outpost: Dnipropetrovsk and the Russian-Ukrainian War. Her book manuscript Changed by War: A Reporter’s Notebook collects the stories of IDPs, soldiers, and volunteers.

Description

In this talk, Choi Chatterjee will share highlights from her recent book, Russia in World History: A Transnational Approach that compares British and Russian imperial history. She will speak about the concept of imperial nationalism found in the works of Vasily Klyuchevsky and George Trevelyan. These historians had a dream that to some may seem an impossible one—to rescue the good nation from the hideous coils of imperialism. Chatterjee will consider the role of the historian in writing the nation and empire.

About the speaker:

Choi Chatterjee is Professor and Chair of History at California State University, Los Angeles. She has published two monographs, co-authored two textbooks, and co-edited four volumes of original scholarly essays. Chatterjee’s most recent monograph, Russia in World History: A Transnational Approach was published in 2022 by Bloomsbury Press.  She is a passionate advocate of everyday environmentalism and is a co-founder of the research project: Historical Database of Climate Adapted Agriculture in Los Angeles.

Description

On the occasion of his first visit to Canada as Secretary General of the European External Action Service, Mr. Stefano Sannino (deputy minister of foreign affairs in the EU system) comes to the Munk School of Global Affairs for an open discussion on how the European Union is adapting, together with its allies, to face and shape an increasingly challenging geopolitical context.

About the speaker:

Stefano Sannino is the Secretary-General of the European External Action Service (EEAS) of the European Union since 1 January 2021. He held the post of the Deputy Secretary General for Economic and Global Issues at the EEAS from April 2020 to December 2021.

From March 2016 to April 2020 he was Ambassador of Italy to Spain and Andorra. From July 2013 until March 2016 he held the position of Permanent Representative of Italy to the EU in Brussels.

After a period at the Cabinet of the President of the Commission (from 2002 to 2004) he joined the Directorate General for External Relations as Director for Crisis Management and Representative at PSC (2004-2006), then Director for Latin America (2008-2009) and finally as Deputy Director General for Asia and Latin America (2009-2010). In 2010 he moved to the Directorate General for Enlargement as Deputy Director General and later as Director General, a position he held until June 2013.

From 2006 to 2008 he was the Diplomatic Advisor to the Italian Prime Minister and his Personal Representative to G8 summits.

He has also held the position of Ambassador and Head of the OSCE Mission in Belgrade from 2001 to 2002 and within the Italian Diplomatic Service: Deputy Head of Mission of the Italian Embassy in Belgrade (1994-1996), Head of the Secretariat of the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (1996-1998), Diplomatic Advisor and Head of the Cabinet of the Minister of Foreign Trade (1998-2001). Sannino is fluent in Spanish, English and French beyond his native Italian.

Description

When international development organization’s began working in post-Soviet Central Asia in the 1990s, they encountered newly independent countries that did not fit the hierarchies of development familiar from previous decades. They relied on local experts, activists, and interpreters to make sense of the places they encountered, design assistance programs, and carry out interventions. This talk will explore how international development workers and their counterparts in the region made sense of each other, and how their interactions shaped mutual perceptions that would continue to affect the way donors approached the region and how locals viewed the development enterprise.  

About the speakers:

Artemy Kalinovsky is Professor of Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet Studies at Temple University. He earned his BA from the George Washington University and his MA and PhD from the London School of Economics, after which he spent a decade teaching at the University of Amsterdam. His first book was A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Harvard University Press, 2011). His second book, Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan (Cornell University Press, 2018), won the Davis and Hewett prizes from the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. He is currently working on a project that studies the legacies of socialist development in contemporary Central Asia to examine entanglements between socialist and capitalist development approaches in the late 20th century.

Ed Schatz (Chair), Director of the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, Director of the Belt and Road in Global Perspective, Director of Eurasia Initiative, Professor for the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. His latest book, Slow Anti-Americanism: Social Movements and Symbolic Politics in Central Asia, was published 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 and directs CERES’ Eurasia Initiative.

Description

Estonia is a small frontline NATO member which is playing an oversized role in the Western response to Russia’s war against Ukraine. Estonia has provided more aid per capita to Ukraine than any other country, devoting 1% of its entire GDP to help resist aggression. For more than a year Estonia has been particularly busy assisting Ukraine and working to bolster European security and maintain alliance unity. Mr Roger will give a short overview of what and why has been done so far and needs to be done in the future.

About the speakers:

Martin Roger is the Director General for NATO and Transatlantic Relations at the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Previously, Roger served as Estonia’s Ambassador to Poland, Deputy Head of Mission in France and Director for Eastern Europe in the Estonian MFA. He holds an LLM in International Law from the University of Amsterdam.

Andres Kasekamp is a professor at the Department of History and the Elmar Tampold Chair of Estonian Studies at the University of Toronto. Kasekamp’s research interests include populist radical right parties, memory politics, European foreign and security policy, and cooperation and conflict in the Baltic Sea region. He has served as the editor of the Journal of Baltic Studies, and is currently the President-Elect of the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies.

Description

This one-day international conference explores the question of “plants and empires” from multiple vantage points: circulation and networks, labour, plant uses (medicinal, perfume, culinary). A host of spaces are considered, including botanical gardens, perfumeries, sites of contact. Plants considered include breadfruit, ylang-ylang and vanilla, amongst many others.

Panel I, 9 AM, Jackman Building, Room 100

Andreas Motsch, University of Toronto, “The discovery of panax quinquefolius (Canadian ginseng): botany, theology and the history of pharmacology.”

Prof. Bertie Mandelblatt, John Carter Brown Library, Rhode Island "Breadfruit between Two Global Empires: Slavery, Subsistence and Imperial Competition from New Guinea to Martinique."

Dr. Oana Baboi, University of Toronto. “Experiences with oriental plants: 16th-century Portuguese surveys of Indian materia medical.”

Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library Visit, 11 AM

Panel II, 2 PM, Jackman Building Room 100

Prof. Owen White, University of Delaware, "A Different Kind of Colonist: Phylloxera in Algeria."

Mathilde Cocoual, Centre de la Méditerranée Moderne et Contemporaine, "Colonisation et nouvelle géographie des plantes à parfum (19e-20e siècle)". Prof. Eric Jennings, University of Toronto, “The French empire’s near vanilla monopoly, 1870-1960.”

Prof. Gillian McGillivray, Glendon College/ York University, "Empire’s Orphan: Cane-sugar and Capitalism in Brazil, 1889-1959."

Description

From research-based examples to the resilience of local communities and various sociological polls, Tymofii Brik discusses a year of resilience in Ukraine.

About the Speaker:

Tymofii Brik is serving at Northwestern University as the Roberta Buffett Visiting Professor of International Studies in the Department of Sociology during the Spring 2023 quarter.

Brik is rector at the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) in Ukraine. His research interests focus on religious markets, long-term social mobility and social network analysis. Since 2021, Brik has served as the national coordinator of the European Social Survey (ESS) in Ukraine, an international comparative study conducted in the majority of European countries since 2002. Brik also serves as the Chairman of the Supervisory Board of the CEDOS think tank, as a member of the advisory board of the Texty.org “Rating Sellers” project, and as a member of the advisory board of Gradus Research.

Brik is also one of the co-founders of the public restaurant Urban Space 500 in Kyiv.

Description

Information is not yet available.

Description

The event includes two talks by Bernardo Bolanos Guerra and Camelia Tigau, Visiting Professors at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, Global Migration Lab. The titles included are: Three-Step Climate Mobility: Disasters, Economic Migration and Forced Displacement by Bernardo Bolanos Guerra and Underemployment as a Violation of the Responsibility to Protect: Objective Representations of Exiled Professionals in Canada by Camelia Tigau.

Three-Step Climate Mobility: Disasters, Economic Migration and Forced Displacement By Bernardo Bolanos Guerra

· Human mobility in Mexico and Central America is linked to climate change, and it can be tracked through environmental degradation, violence and harshening economic conditions.

· Women, children, and the elderly who stay behind after the migration of men are more vulnerable to internal forced displacement caused by organized crime.

· The environmental conditions leading to international migration and forced internal moves are not fundamentally different.

Underemployment as a Violation of the Responsibility to Protect: Objective Representations of Exiled Professionals in Canada by Camelia Tigau

· Labour integration in conditions that contradicts a person`s previous experience (underemployment) provokes emotional and physical damage.

· Recertification should be part of a more encompassing approach to the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in countries of destination.

· Intellectual exiles have an extraordinary capacity to rationalize and even conceptualize conflicts based on their displacement experience, and therefore propose solutions to international conflicts.

About the speakers:

Bernardo Bolanos-Guerra has taught environmental law and political philosophy at the Metropolitan Autonomous University, Mexico City. His recent work is a proposal for the international regulation of environmental migration. He also reflects on the legal implications of the connection between hydrometeorological processes and forced displacement.

Camelia Tigau is an Associate Researcher at the Center for Research on North America, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and regional vice-president of the Global Research Forum on Diasporas and Transnationalism (GRFDT, India). Her present research aims to outline the differences between voluntary and forced skilled migration.

Description

While scholars have filled rooms with books about the eastern German border:  where it was, where it should have been, how it moved, how its role in people’s lives shifted and changed across our clearly periodized political histories, the southern German border has received relatively little attention. In part, that is because of the hegemonic position of nation-states and the historians who study and promote them. For them, the eastern border was a perennial problem, one demanding solutions, which led to a great deal of violence. In contrast, the southern German border has not appeared to be much of a problem at all, which might seem to make it less important, less worthy of inquiry.  

In this talk, Glenn Penny argues that the opposite may be true: that this neglected region can tell us more about the contours of a globalized German history than those regions that were animated for so long by a series of titillating and often violent ruptures.

This event is funded by the DAAD with funds from the German Federal Foreign Office (AA). 

About the Speakers:

Glenn Penny studies histories of belonging, knowledge, and migration from the middle of the eighteenth century until the present by pursuing German speakers and German communities all over the world. He is also deeply engaged in the workings of ethnological museums.

James Retallack teaches courses and supervises PhD field preparation in European history from 1770 to 1945. His research interests (1830-1918) include German regional history, nationalism, anti-Semitism, elections, and historiography. He is General Editor of “Oxford Studies in Modern European History” and was inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2011.

Description

The 1923 compulsory population exchange between Greece and Turkey has been used as an important precedent in the discourse concerning conflict resolution in the post-WWII context; it has been singled out as an important causal factor for the development of the two national states; and, it has spurred a critical debate in the social sciences about the adverse humanitarian consequences and traumatic effects of such policies. But what effect did the exchange have on the Greek constitutive story? In this presentation, I intend to put the events into a larger historical context of the spread of nationalist ideology through mass schooling, the consequent aversion to alien rule, and the homogenizing imperative capturing the imagination of most leaders of existing and aspiring national states. Within such a context, the population exchange was one of the many policies that governing elites could use to render the borders of the state congruent with those of the nation, the most critical element of nationalist ideology. Thus, modernity in Southeast Europe took the form of ethnic separation, not integration or multiculturalism.

About the speaker:

Harris Mylonas is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University and editor-in-chief of Nationalities Papers. His research contributes to our understanding of states’ management of diversity that may originate from national minorities, immigrants, diasporas, or refugees. He is the author of The Politics of Nation-Building: Making Co-Nationals, Refugees, and Minorities (Cambridge University Press, 2012), for which he won the European Studies Book Award as well as The Peter Katzenstein Book Prize. He has co-edited two volumes, Enemies Within: The Global Politics of Fifth Columns (Oxford University Press, 2022; w/ Scott Radnitz) and The Microfoundations of Diaspora Politics (Routledge, 2022; w/ Alexandra Délano Alonso). His forthcoming book, co-authored with Maya Tudor, is entitled Varieties of Nationalism: Communities, Narratives, Identities (Cambridge University Press). Mylonas’ work has also been published in the Annual Review of Political Science, Perspectives on Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Security Studies, European Journal of Political Research, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Territory, Politics, Governance, Nations and Nationalism, Social Science Quarterly, Nationalities Papers, Ethnopolitics, and various edited volumes. Mylonas received his Ph.D. from Yale University, and continued his post-doctoral work at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies as an Academy Scholar.