Description

A great power’s hubris is an expressive use of violence that seeks to prove the unworthiness of a target and, simultaneously, ignores both the limits imposed by the IR structure and the realities of the operational theater of war. Such behavior often translates into unilateralism, wanton destruction, bombastic proclamations, and status concerns. Ivan Gomza compares the Russian tactics and political aims during the first phase of the Russo-Ukrainian war with historical cases of the Crassus’ Parthian campaign, the French war in Indochina, and the U.S. invasion of Iraq. His analysis attributes the Roman, French, US, and Russian underperformance to a combination of greater powers’ hubristic attitude and smaller nations’ flexibility.

Ivan Gomza is Head of Public Policy and Governance Department at Kyiv School of Economics. He holds his Ph.D. in political science. Dr. Gomza was a fellow of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) in 2013, the Fulbright Faculty Development Program in 2016-2017, and Petrach Ukrainian Studies Fellowship in 2022. His scholarly interests comprise democratization, authoritarian regimes, contentious politics, and good governance. Dr. Gomza had his articles published in international academic journals and sits on Communist and Post-Communist Studies journal editorial board. He also authored two books, his most recent title being Republic of Decadent Days: Ideology of French Integral Nationalism under the Third Republic (2021).

Description

Klaus Brummer holds the chair of International Relations at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Germany. He served as co-editor-in-chief of the journal “Foreign Policy Analysis” (2018-2020) and was president of the Foreign Policy Analysis section of the International Studies Association (2015-2016). As guest lecturer/professor, he has taught at Duke University, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Strasbourg, the University of Helsinki, and the Autonomous University of Barcelona. His main research interests include: leadership profiling, domestic drivers of foreign policy, European integration, and foreign policy making in non-Western contexts. He has published in peer-reviewed journals such as Acta Politica, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, German Politics, Foreign Policy Analysis, Government and Opposition, International Affairs, International Politics, International Studies Review, and Journal of European Public Policy, and is co-editor of Foreign Policy Analysis Beyond North America (Lynne Rienner, 2015) and Foreign Policy as Public Policy? (Manchester University Press, 2019). In 2021-2022, Klaus Brummer has been the Hannah Arendt Visiting Chair for German and European Studies at CERES.

Oleksandr Sushko is an Executive Director of the International Renaissance Foundation since January 2018, (Open Society Network) based in Kyiv, Ukraine. Prior to that he worked as a Research Director of the Institute for Euro-Atlantic Cooperation (2006-2017), and Director of the Center for Peace, Conversion and Foreign Policy of Ukraine (2000-2006). Since January 2011, he has served as Chairman of the Board of the International Renaissance Foundation (IRF), Ukraine . Oleksandr Sushko was a first Co-Chair of the EU-Ukraine Civil Society Platform (2015-2016) – the bilateral insitution established within the frames of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement to facilitate civil society cooperation and policy impact. Areas of expertise: Ukraine, EU, Civil Society.

Professor Milada Anna Vachudova (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) 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. She is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is also 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.

Kataryna Wolczuk (Professor of East European Politics, Centre for Russian, European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Birmingham) specialises in East European politics. Currently she is researching relations between the EU and the post-Soviet countries within the framework of the European Neighbourhood Policy and the Eastern Partnership. She is also conducting research on Russia’s role in the ‘shared neighbourhood’ and any potential impact for EU’s role and policies in the post-Soviet space. Previously she studied the dynamics of state-building in Ukraine, as well as the conception of nationhood and national identity in Central and Eastern Europe. Professor Wolczuk contributed to numerous policy-related initiatives and cooperated with and advised a number of UK governmental bodies, international organisations and think-tanks on East European politics, the consequences of EU enlargement and the relations between the EU and its eastern neighbours. She has extensive media experience, including TV and radio interviews, as well as publications in the British and international press.

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.

Description

Small states have tended to seek collective security arrangements, especially in times and regions where larger powers have sought to exercise influence. During the interwar period, the idea of Intermarium – conceptualised as a zone of states stretching from the Baltic to the Black Seas – was promoted in certain circles, particularly in Poland. The idea was revived again as a possible regional development trajectory by some conservatives and liberals in the 2000s. It can be seen as an inspiration for the Three Seas Initiative and the Chinese-backed “17+1” forum as complementary, or even alternate regional cooperation and stability frameworks. Far right groups have also embraced Intermarium, but as an alternative to the influence of Brussels and Moscow in the region. Given the recent geopolitical upheavals following Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine, this presentation asks whether the Intermarium idea has definitively lost its contemporary relevance.

Matthew Kott is a researcher based at the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies (IRES) at Uppsala University in Sweden. He is a historian mainly specialising on contemporary Latvia, but with broader interests in political and intellectual history wider Baltic–Nordic region. His most recent publication is the anthology, Defining Latvia: Recent Explorations in History, Culture, and Politics, co-edited with Siobhán Hearne and Michael Loader (CEU Press, 2022), wherein he also has a contribution examining far-right entryism in post-Soviet Latvian politics. Among his noteworthy previous work is the monograph Himmlers Norge: nordmenn I det storgermanske prosjekt, with Terje Emberland (Aschehoug, 2012), which established a new interpretation of the role of Norwegians in the imagination of the SS and their foreseen place in Nazi-controlled Europe. He is the editor of Journal of Baltic Studies.

Description

Dr Cherchovych’s study will address women’s criminal experience, in particular so called female crimes – infanticide, child abandonment, abortions, which were examined by Lviv Regional Court (Sąd Krajowy Lwowa) during 1865-1905. Who the convicted women were, what life experiences they shared? How did they shape their crimes into stories and what these stories meant? How they talked about their guilt and how in such stories they found a place for their own victimity? For the majority of the accused their act was not the only way out but just one of the chosen options. Why did they choose it? Dr. Cherchovych intends to show how often women who by default were denied the opportunity to choose, according to widely spread perception about mandatory natural women crime conditionality and potential deviancy of women, were able to take advantage of that judgement. The question of Can the Subaltern Speak? (by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak) in regards to the late 19th century Eastern Galician society would have a rather positive answer. As analyzed cases confirmed, the quality of accused woman self-defence in a court had played one of the most important roles in her sentence: the scale of the judgment given by a court had been directly correlated with a woman’s will or unwillingness to speak for herself, to create her own story. Not the education was the most important here (the majority of the accused were illiterate), but rather the very possibility to create her own self-narration which plot would have to go beyond personal life of the accused as vividly as possible covering her surroundings, many others whose social practices this woman had absorbed and had been reproducing.

Ivanna Cherchovych is a historian and anthropologist, a Research Fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology of Ethnology Institute of National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, a member of Ukrainian Association for the Study of Women’s History. She obtained her academic degree “kandydat nauk” (Ph.D. equivalent) from Ivan Krypyakevych Institute of Ukrainian Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in November 2014. Her dissertation was dedicated to everyday life of women from Ukrainian upper class in the late 19th century Habsburg Galicia. She was a visiting research fellow at Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe in Marburg (2017) and German Historical Institute in Warsaw (2019). Her current research focuses on the women’s criminal experience in 19th century Habsburg Galicia. She is currently a researcher hosted by the Jacyk Program.

Description

Sebastian Harnisch is Professor for International Relations and Foreign Policy at the Institute for Political Science of the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences at Heidelberg University, and member of the Board of Directors of the Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA). His main research areas include comparative foreign and security policy, international relations theories, cybersecurity, non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and climate change policy issues. Sebastian Harnisch holds degrees in history and political science from Trier University and was a research fellow at the Japan Center for International Exchange (Tokyo, 1996), Columbia University (New York, 1996), and Yonsei University (Seoul, 1996-1997), as well as Heidelberg’s Center of Excellency, the Marsilius-Kolleg (2012-2013). He has taught at Trier University (2003-2006) and the Federal Armed Forces University in Munich (2006-2007), and was visiting professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University (2011), Al-Farabi Kazakh National University (2013), and China Foreign Affairs University (2018). Sebastian Harnisch is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Foreign Policy Analysis journal, as well as co-¬editor of the series Foreign Policy and International Order (Nomos Verl.) and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia for Foreign Policy Analysis (Oxford University Press). He has published numerous books, volumes, and articles in renowned journals.

Kai Oppermann is Professor of International Politics at the Chemnitz University of Technology. He has previously held positions at the University of Sussex, King’s College London and the University of Cologne. His research centres on the domestic sources of European integration and foreign policy, with a focus on transatlantic relations and British and German and foreign policy. Kai won a Marie Curie Fellowship for a research project on EU referendums and worked as a specialist advisor to the House of Lords External Affairs Sub-Committee in the UK. His work has been published in international peer-reviewed journals such as European Journal of International Relations, West European Politics, Foreign Policy Analysis, Journal of European Public Policy and British Journal of Politics and International Relations. Kai is a co-editor at German Politics and an associate editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Foreign Policy Analysis (2018). He regularly gives media interviews on topics related to German and British foreign policy and transatlantic relations.

Dr. Iryna Solonenko is Senior Fellow at Berlin-based think-tank Center for Liberal Modernity. Since 2012 she has been based in Berlin and served as an expert/consultant for numerous organisations in Germany, the EU and Ukraine. From May 2015 to February 2021 she was associate fellow at DGAP. Since 2012, she has been working on a research project at the European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder), addressing state-business relations in hybrid regimes with a focus on the political role of Ukrainian oligarchs. Between 2000 and 2012, she worked with the Open Society Foundations in Ukraine as the director of the European Program and as a project manager for the EastWest Institute in Kyiv. Dr. Iryna Solonenko holds degrees in international relations, European studies, public administration, and history from the Birmigham University, UK; Central European University, Budapest; National Academy of Public Administration, Kyiv; and National University Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Kyiv. Dr. Solonenko is the author of a number of academic, policy, and media publications. She has served on advisory councils with Ukrainian public authorities, has shared her expertise with EU institutions, and has been a board member or expert with such organizations as Kyiv Dialogue, DiXi Group, the Bertelsmann Transformation Index, the Eastern Partnership Index and Varieties of Democracy. Her most recent article “Ukraine’s Fight Is also a Fight for the West’s Future“ was published in the Internationale Politik Querterly, Issue #2, April 2022 – https://ip-quarterly.com/en/ukraines-fight-also-fight-wests-future

Randall Hansen is Director of the Munk School’s Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, as well as the Global Migration Lab. He is Full Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto and Canada Research Chair in Global Migration. He served as Interim Director of the Munk School from 2017 to 2020. Hansen works on immigration and citizenship, demography and population policy and the effects of war on civilians. His published works include Disobeying Hitler: German Resistance after Operation Valkyrie (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), Sterilized by the State: Eugenics, Race and the Population Scare in 20th Century North America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), Fire and Fury: the Allied Bombing of Germany (Penguin, 2009), and Citizenship and Immigration in Post-War Britain (Oxford University Press, 2000).

Description

Volodymyr Dubovyk is an Associate Professor, Department of International Relations and Director of the 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. 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. Areas of expertise: Ukraine, Transatlantic Relations, U.S., Black Sea security.

Olexiy Haran is Professor of Comparative Politics at the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy (UKMA). In 1991-93, he was Dean and organizer of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the re-born Kyiv Mohyla Academy. Since 2002, he has served as Founding Director of the UKMA School for Policy Analysis, and since 2015 as Research Director at the Democratic Initiatives Foundation, a leading Ukrainian analytical and sociological think tank. He is the co-editor of Constructing a Political Nation: Changes in the Attitudes of Ukrainians during the War in the Donbas (2017), Ukraine in Europe: Questions and Answers (2009), Russia and Ukraine: Ten Years of Transformation (Moscow 2003) and several other books. His latest book is From Brezhnev to Zelensky: Dilemmas of Ukrainian Political Scientist (20121). He is also a frequent commentator in Ukrainian and international media. In winter 2013-2014, Prof. Haran was a member of the Council of ‘Maidan’ movement. In 2014-2016 he spent several weeks at the frontline near Mariupol, Luhansk, Avdiivka, and the Donetsk airport. He has been a member of Public Council under Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine for 15 years.

Currently working on projects related to security sector governance and reforms, Rosaria Puglisi is an expert on countries of Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus and Central Asia. She worked and lived in the region for the best part of the last 25 years, engaged, in both advisory and leadership roles, with international organizations like the European Union, the Council of Europe and NATO. With a background in political affairs, security policy and crisis management, Rosaria has worked first-hand in all the protracted post-Soviet conflicts and been involved in related international conflict prevention and resolution efforts. She holds a PhD from the University of Glasgow on relations between Russia and Ukraine and has written on the Ukrainian security sector after the 2013-14 Maidan.

Dr Kateryna Zarembo is a social sciences scholar. She has been an associate fellow at the New Europe Center (Kyiv, Ukraine) since 2019. Since 2016 she has been teaching at the double-degree “German and European Studies” Master program, administered jointly by the National University of “Kyiv-Mohyla” Academy (Ukraine) and Friedrich Schiller University in Jena (Germany). In 2017-2019 she held the position of a deputy director for research at the New Europe Center. In 2010-2017 she worked at the Institute of World Policy (Kyiv, Ukraine).

Description

Maria Avdeeva, Research Director at the European Expert Association and security analyst. She focuses on disinformation, information operations, and threats to democracy. Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine she has been documenting Russian war crimes and reporting from the ground on the situation in the besieged city of Kharkiv.

Nejra Nuna Čengić is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral fellow at the University of Graz, Centre for Southeast European Studies. She holds a PhD in the Anthropology of Everyday Life from AMEU-ISH Ljubljana, Slovenia. Her research interests and work focus on precarious work, gender, memory(-ies), storytelling and war violence. She made a significant contribution to the establishment of the Gender Studies Programme at the University of Sarajevo, where she gained most of her working experience. Her current research project deals with domestic paid female care work.

Mychailo Wynnyckyj is Associate Professor at the National University “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy” (Sociology Department and Business School), and is the university’s Academic Development Officer. Until recently he served as Head of the Secretariat of Ukraine’s National Agency for Higher Education Quality Assurance, and prior to that as Advisor to three of Ukraine’s Ministers of Education (2015-2019). Originally from Canada, Mychailo has lived permanently in Kyiv for almost two decades. He was awarded a PhD in 2004 from the University of Cambridge (U.K.). His book “Ukraine’s Maidan, Russia’s War: A Chronicle and Analysis of the Revolution of Dignity” was published in 2019.

Alexander Watson is Professor of History at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has written three books and many articles on the First World War, both on its combat operations and on its wider societal impact as a ‘total war’. His most recent major work is The Fortress: The Siege of Przemyśl and the Making of Europe’s Bloodlands (New York: Basic Books, 2020), which explores the Imperial Russian Army’s invasion of what today is western Ukraine and southern Poland and recounts the story of the longest siege of the First World War. Alex’s books have won the U.S. Society for Military History’s Distinguished Book Award (twice), the British Army Military Book of the Year Award, the Fraenkel Prize, the Wolfson History Prize and the Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History.

Sergii Pakhomenko is Associate Professor of the Department of Political Science and International Relations of Mariupol State University. Sergii’s recent positions include the academic coordinator of the Erasmus+ project “Rethinking Regional Studios: Baltic-Black Sea Communication” and the head of the Center of Baltic-Black Sea Studies of Mariupol State University. Among recent publications are articles “Between History and Propaganda: Estonia and Latvia in Russian Historical Narratives”, “Russian-Ukrainian War in Donbas: History as a Tool of Propaganda,” and in a number of foreign specialized publications – “Securitization of Memory During the Pandemic: Cases of Russia and Latvia,” “Memory Policy in Latvia and Ukraine,” and others. In 2017, Sergii was a recipient of the Ivan Vyhovsky Award from the Institute of Eastern Europe of the University of Warsaw.

Description

Dr. Tomas Janeliūnas is a full-time professor at the Institute of International Relations and Political Science (IIRPS), Vilnius University, and Chief Research Officer of the Eastern Europe Studies Centre. He has been lecturing in Vilnius University since 2003, including such subjects as Strategic Studies, National Security, and Foreign Policy of Lithuania, as well as Foreign Policy of the Great Powers. Janeliūnas is also a Director of a non-profit organisation Energy Research Institute. His recent works on energy includes contributions to a book on energy transition of the Central and Eastern Europe and The Palgrave Handbook of Zero Carbon Energy Systems and Energy Transitions.

Before returning to U of T, Andres Kasekamp was Professor of Baltic Politics at the University of Tartu in Estonia and Director of the Estonian Foreign Policy Institute. He has also been a visiting professor at Humboldt University Berlin and a visiting researcher at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. His first book was The Radical Right in Interwar Estonia (Palgrave 2000). His second book, A History of the Baltic States (Palgrave 2010), has been translated into nine languages. His 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. Prof. Kasekamp has appeared as an expert in the foreign affairs committee of the parliaments of Canada, Estonia, Finland and the European Union, as well as the Baltic Assembly.

Žaneta Ozoliņa is a Chairwoman of the Latvian Transatlantic Organization and Professor of International Relations, University of Latvia. Her research interests focus on European integration, Transatlantic security, strategic communication, regional cooperation in the Baltic Sea Region. Žaneta Ozoliņa is the author of more than 100 scholarly articles and editor of several books, including such as “Rethinking Security” (2010), “Gender and Human Security: a View from the Baltic Sea Region” (2015), “Societal Security: Inclusion-Exclusion Dilemma. A portrait of Russian-speaking community in Latvia” (2016), “Stratcom Laughs. In search of an Analytical Framework” (2017), “Subjective Security Perception of Latvia’s Inhabitants: impact on security policy making”(2021). She is a member of the editorial boards of several journals, such as Journal of Baltic Studies, Defence Strategic Communications, Lithuanian Annual Strategic Review. She was a chairwoman of the Strategic Analysis Commission under the Auspices of the President of Latvia (2004-2008) and a member of the European Research Area Board (European Commission, 2008-2012). She was engaged in different international projects commissioned by the European Parliament, the European Commission, NATO, the Council of the Baltic Sea States and other international bodies. She chairs the Foreign Affairs Council of the Latvian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is a member of the European Council of Foreign Relations and the Alphen Group. Žaneta Ozoliņa is a representative of the Boston Global Forum in Latvia.

Way’s research focuses on global patterns of democracy and dictatorship. His most recent book (with Steven Levitsky), Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (forthcoming Princeton University Press) provides a comparative historical explanation for the extraordinary durability of autocracies (China, Cuba, USSR) born of violent social revolution. 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. Way argues that pluralism in the developing world often emerges out of authoritarian weakness: governments are too fragmented and states too weak to monopolize political control. His first 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.

Description

Andrew S. Bowen is an Analyst in Russian and European Affairs at the Congressional Research Service. He is responsible for military, security, and intelligence issues in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the South Caucasus. He has a Master’s degree in Global Affairs from NYU, and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Boston College. Prior to CRS he was a Predoctoral fellow at the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies at George Washington University.