Panel discussion on Ukraine and Europe beyond great power geopolitics
Elena dell’Agnese trasmette la notizia di un interessante talk di approfondimento sulla questione ucraina, a cura dell’Amsterdam Centre for European Studies (ACES) dell’Università di Amsterdam. L’evento si è tenuto il 15 febbraio, e a questo link è disponibile la registrazione.
Di seguito i dettagli:
Amsterdam Centre for European Studies (ACES)
panel discussion on Ukraine and Europe beyond great power geopolitics
featuring political geographers John O’Loughlin and Gerard Toal (Gearóid Ó Tuathail)
Details
Date: Tuesday, 15th February 2022
Time: 8.00 pm CET; 14:00 EST
Location: Online (zoom and live stream)
Register here: here
About the talk:
Our event on February 15th aims to bring valuable historical and geographical context to understanding the various scales of the current crisis in Ukraine, beyond simply a game of great power geopolitics.
Shifting the focus of discussion away from dominant framings of the crisis as largely a contest between the US and Russia, we will examine the positioning of Ukraine and of Ukrainians themselves, not simply as an object of others’ geopolitical agendas. In doing so, we will also bring the ‘question of Europe’ back into the discussion: both as an institutional actor in the negotiations, but also as an ideal shaping Ukrainian geopolitical and geoeconomic choices, as well as identitary ones.
Our panel of experts will engage these questions from a variety of academic perspectives, ranging from history and political geography to international relations, political communication and media studies, offering an empirically-grounded assessment of the various interlocking scales of this crisis, its competing representations and its relevant actors.
Speakers:
Olga Burlyuk
Olga Burlyuk is Assistant Professor of Europe’s External Relations at the University of Amsterdam where her research focuses on EU efforts to transform third states and societies through the promotion of democracy, the rule of law and human rights, trade, development cooperation and cultural interactions, with a focus on Eastern Europe, post-Soviet space, Ukraine and Russia. Her latest books include Unintended consequences of EU external action (co-edited with Gergana Noutcheva, Routledge, 2020) and Civil society in Ukraine post-Euromaidan (co-edited with Natalia Shapovalova, Columbia UP/Ibidem Verlag, 2019). Olga also works on coloniality and/in/of knowledge in academia, and she is currently co-editing a volume Migrant academics’ narratives of precarity and resilience (with Ladan Rahbari)
Michael Kimmage
Michael Kimmage is Professor of History at the Catholic University of America. His most recent book is The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy (Basic Books, 2020). From 2014 to 2016, he served on the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio.
Mykola Martorykh
Mykola Makhortykh is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Communication and Media Research at the University of Bern. In his research, Mykola examines politics- and history-centered information behaviour in online environments and how it is affected by the algorithmic systems, such as search engines and recommender systems. His other research interests include artificial intelligence, trauma and memory studies, in particular digital Holocaust remembrance, armed conflict reporting, cybersecurity and critical security studies, and bias in information retrieval systems.
John O’Loughlin
John O’Loughlin is a political geographer and College Professor of Distinction at the University of Colorado, Boulder. For the past 30 years, he has worked in the former Soviet Union on changing geopolitical orientations, on territorial separatism and its consequences, on de facto states in the Caucasus and Black Sea region, and on the spatial analysis of violent events. His current research examines the geopolitical orientations of residents of the former Soviet states, gathering 12000 responses in two survey waves in 6 countries and 5 territories about views of Russia and the West and preferences for foreign policies. He is one of the founding editors of Political Geography.
Gwendolyn Sasse
Prof. Gwendolyn Sasse has been the Director of the Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS) in Berlin since its establishment in 2016. She is also the Einstein-Professor in the Comparative Study of Democracy and Authoritarianism at Humboldt University, Berlin (since 2021). Her research interests include the dynamics of democracy and authoritarianism, war, migration, and protest, primarily with a focus on Eastern Europe. Her current research concentrates on the war and border regimes in Ukraine, societal mobilization in Belarus, youth attitudes in Russia, and the social and political remittances of migrants. Her book The Crimea Question: Identity, Transition, and Conflict (Harvard University Press 2007; paperback 2014) won the Alexander Nove Prize of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies.
Joanna Szostek
Joanna Szostek is a lecturer in political communication at the University of Glasgow. Her research focuses on the mass media’s role in relations between states, particularly in the post-Soviet region. She is currently working on a British Academy-funded project to explain why levels of engagement with local, national and foreign/transnational media vary within and across ‘peripheral’ areas of Ukraine. Research from her previous projects has been published in leading international peer-reviewed journals, including Perspectives on Politics and The International Journal of Press/Politics. Her professional experience includes several years at BBC Monitoring and many years of living and working in Russia and Ukraine.
Gerard Toal
Gerard Toal (Gearóid Ó Tuathail) is a political geographer and a founding figure in the creation of Critical Geopolitics. A Professor of International Affairs at Virginia Tech’s greater Washington area campus, he is the recipient of multiple research grants from the US National Science Foundation (NSF). His last book Near Abroad: Putin, the West and the Contest for Ukraine and the Caucasus won the International Studies Association’s ENMIA Distinguished Book Award in 2019. He is currently completing the book manuscriptOceans Rise Empires Fall: Theorizing Geopolitics on an Earth in Crisis.
Moderator:
Luiza Bialasiewicz
Luiza Bialasiewicz is a political geographer and Professor of European Governance at the University of Amsterdam, where she also co-directs the Amsterdam Centre for European Studies (ACES).
