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1. "Inventing Eastern Europe" Thirty Years Later: A Conversation with Larry Wolff and Guests

Author:
Malgorzata Mazurek, Larry Wolff, Suzanne Marchand, Emile Greble, and Jan Kubik
Publication Date:
04-2024
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
When Larry Wolff’s book Inventing Eastern Europe was published in 1994, it gave the world a new set of tools for understanding the half of Europe that had recently emerged from behind the Iron Curtain. Most notably, Wolff’s book showed how the conceptual division of the European continent into two distinct civilizations, East and West, although reinforced by the Realpolitik of the Cold War, actually originated in the discourse of philosophes and travelers in the 18th century. Inventing Eastern Europe was revelatory in the mid-1990s, and it has been required reading for serious students of Eastern European history and culture ever since. Please join the East Central European Center and the Harriman Institute for a conversation with Larry Wolff, Suzanne Marchand, Emily Greble and Jan Kubik, moderated by Malgorzata Mazurek, about the genesis, initial impact and continued relevance of this seminal work on the thirtieth anniversary of its publication.
Topic:
Cold War, History, and Philosophy
Political Geography:
Europe and Eastern Europe

2. A Global History of Hungary: Concept, Implementation, Reflection

Author:
Ferenc Laczó
Publication Date:
04-2024
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
The recently released volumes of Magyarország globális története (A Global History of Hungary) are the joint product of 159 scholars from a host of disciplines. Together, they explore the history of an East Central European country in a truly global perspective for the first time. The two volumes cover developments from the formation of the Pannonian Plain and the early spread of human settlement and agriculture, through the emergence of world religions and the era of European colonialism and imperialism, all the way to key issues in the multipolar and contested globalization of our days. This narrative arc already suggests why such a global history of Hungary may be urgently needed today: to reinterpret in a substantial and nuanced manner, for our age of manifold interconnections, the place and various roles of Hungary and Hungarians in the history of the world. More specifically, the 203 chapters included in A Global History of Hungary capitalize on four key insights. First, East Central Europe has tended to be a semi-peripheral area in the global scheme of things, and it has thus been much closer to the global average than some of the parts of the world on which much of recent global historiography has focused. East Central European countries have also developed numerous and still underexplored intercontinental connections outside the Western core that should be of special interest in our age of global multipolarity. At the same time, it can be assumed that this diverse area, as a rather peripheral part of Europe in a formerly largely Eurocentric world, has played the role of a “secondary colonialist” for significant parts of modern history – a topic that needs to be researched in detail and critically scrutinized. Moreover, the predominant transnational orientation of this suburb of Europe has shifted repeatedly and sometimes dramatically, creating a complex pattern of legacies – or “continuities in discontinuity” – that can only be properly analysed through a transnational history on the longue durée. In this presentation, co-editor Ferenc Laczó will reflect on the agenda to embed Hungarian history comprehensively in global frameworks. He will discuss the specific ways in which this agenda has been implemented, not least to explain how the contributing authors have taken up and adapted a recent Western European approach to historiography, what challenges this has entailed, and what opportunities such a process of adaptation to East Central Europe offers.
Topic:
History and Historiography
Political Geography:
Europe and Hungary

3. How Has the Ukraine War Changed the China-Russia Relationship?

Author:
Yun Sun, Segey Radchenko, Andrew Nathan, and Alexander Cooley
Publication Date:
04-2024
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Just prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping proclaimed a “no-limits” partnership between their countries. But Russia’s war in Ukraine has had a profound impact on the Sino-Russian relationship. While Putin has sought Beijing’s support for his territorial grab, China’s position, has been famously characterized as “pro-Russia neutrality”. Geopolitics remains the single most important factor in China’s decision regarding the Ukraine war, as Beijing has been torn between the competing agendas of managing its relations with Russia and relations with Europe. And while the Russians have grown increasingly frustrated with what many in Moscow perceive as Beijing’s double-dealing and unwillingness to commit, Putin’s leverage with Xi Jinping remains limited. As the war in Ukraine grinds into its third year, China and Russia continue unsteadily towards an ever closer alignment even while pragmatically looking out for their own interests in an evolving world.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, Bilateral Relations, Partnerships, Strategic Interests, and Russia-Ukraine War
Political Geography:
Russia, China, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe

4. Book Talk. "Avant-Garde Post– Radical Poetics after the Soviet Union"

Author:
Marijeta Bozovic and Mark Lipovetsky
Publication Date:
03-2024
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
What does leftist art look like in the wake of state socialism? In recent years, Russian-language avant-garde poetry has been seeking the answers to this question. Marijeta Bozovic follows a constellation of poets at the center of a contemporary literary movement that is bringing radical art out of the Soviet shadow: Kirill Medvedev, Pavel Arseniev, Aleksandr Skidan, Dmitry Golynko, Roman Osminkin, Keti Chukhrov, and Galina Rymbu. While their formal experiments range widely, all share a commitment to explicitly political poetry. Each one, in turn, has become a hub in a growing new-left network across the former Second World.
Topic:
Arts, Culture, Leftist Politics, Soviet Union, and Poetry
Political Geography:
Post-Soviet Europe

5. A Year of War: A Reporter's View of Russia's Invasion of Ukraine (3/23/23)

Author:
Joshua Yaffa and Keith Gessen
Publication Date:
04-2023
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine last year, Joshua Yaffa, who spent a decade living and reporting in Russia, has traveled across Ukraine—where he also has deep experience as a journalist—witnessing the war up close and publishing regularly in The New Yorker. He will share his impressions from his numerous reporting trips, which began in the early, fraught days in Kyiv, when the capital was the primary target of the Russian military; to Kharkiv, a historically Russian-speaking city that has faced relentless rocket and artillery fire; from the decimated towns of the Donbas to Zaporizhzhia, a regional capital in the south that became a waystation for Ukrainians fleeing the horrors of Mariupol and elsewhere. Yaffa will describe how the conflict looks and feels on the ground, whether for civilians trapped under bombardment or newly enlisted soldiers. He will also discuss a number of key questions at the start of the war's second year. What has been the role and effect of Western military aid? What sort of end to the fighting is possible? And how will both Russia and Ukraine be forever changed as a result?
Topic:
Conflict, Journalism, and Russia-Ukraine War
Political Geography:
Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe

6. Jewish Female Mental Health Professionals between Poland, the Nazis, and America (3/29/23)

Author:
Klara Naszkowska and Christopher Caes
Publication Date:
04-2023
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
The forced migration of the Jewish people from Europe to the United States in 1933-1941 is one of the most significant phenomena in twentieth–century intellectual history. However, close to nothing has been written on over eighty Jewish women mental-health professionals (mostly psychoanalysts) who fled Nazi persecution to the US, where they became “essential workers” in mental-health care when America joined World War II. Their professional contributions notwithstanding, they are now neglected, understudied, and at risk of being forgotten. The presentation introduces the diaspora of Polish Jewish mental-health professionals: psychoanalysts, social workers, child welfare workers, social psychologists, and body psychotherapists. It will discuss their personal and professional biographies, including family and religious backgrounds, education and career patterns, experiences of exile and (non)belonging, their relationships with the past, and the construction of national, spiritual and cultural identities, with a special attention to Jewish identity. The presentation is based on an ongoing research project located at the intersection of Jewish gender and women’s studies, personal and oral history, and immigration. The primary source of information on the women under investigation is archival personal accounts: unpublished memoirs, correspondence, interviews, diaries, remnants, memories, and post–memories, along with original interviews with family members, friends, and colleagues.
Topic:
History, Holocaust, Forced Migration, Jewish community, and Nazi Germany
Political Geography:
Eastern Europe, Poland, North America, and United States of America

7. A Conversation with Azovstal Defender Illia Samoilenko (2/24/23)

Author:
Illia Samoilenko and Elise Giuliano
Publication Date:
07-2023
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
28 year-old Ukrainian Lieutenant Illia Samoilenko was the deputy commander of the National Guards of Azov. Days before the Azovstal surrender in May, Lieutenant Samoilenko held a news conference broadcast live from a bunker beneath the steelworks. At this press conference, he described for two hours the desperate conditions that wounded soldiers faced. He also said that he and all the others saw themselves as “dead men.” Samoilenko was held in solitary confinement as a prisoner of war by the Russian Federation for 120 days before he was released in a prisoner swap last month.
Topic:
Armed Forces, Conflict, Russia-Ukraine War, and Azovstal
Political Geography:
Ukraine, Eastern Europe, and Mariupol

8. Propaganda Addiction: How Russians Learned to Trust the Kremlin's Falsehoods

Author:
Anton Shirikov
Publication Date:
09-2023
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the world was shocked to learn how often Russians fell for the Kremlin’s pro-war propaganda pushed through loyal state media. Some citizens even trusted television reports more than they believed their own family members in Ukraine. In his talk, Dr. Shirikov will explain how authoritarian media can gain and cultivate such public trust, presenting evidence from surveys and experiments he conducted in Russia in recent years. He will discuss whether Russians are–as scholars often think–sophisticated and discerning news consumers, why they find propaganda messages credible, and why so few of them seek alternative information sources. This research offers insights into how Vladimir Putin’s regime manages public opinion and maintains acceptance of the war.
Topic:
Public Opinion, Authoritarianism, Media, Propaganda, and Russia-Ukraine War
Political Geography:
Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe

9. Ukrainian Organisations' Response to Russia's Full-Scale Invasion

Author:
Maryna Slobodyanuk, Lyudmila Cherkez, and Emma Mateo
Publication Date:
11-2023
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Join the Harriman Institute for an event with Ukrainian activists discussing how their organisations have responded to the 2022 escalation of Russia’s war on Ukraine. We will be joined virtually by activists representing two organisations: Truth Hounds, and TAPS Ukraine. Both organisations were in operation prior to 2022, but their work was significantly impacted by the challenges associated with the full-scale invasion. Maryna Slobodyanuk will discuss the work of Truth Hounds, where she is the Head of the Analytical Department. Truth Hounds has been documenting war crimes and other serious human rights violations in Ukraine since 2014. Lyudmila Cherkez will share the work of TAPS Ukraine, where she is head of communication. TAPS Ukraine is based in Dnipro, 100km from the front lines, and has been supporting those affected by military loss since 2018. TAPS Ukraine was also involved in the creation of the Coordinating Headquarters of Dnipro Volunteers, one of the largest volunteer hubs established in Eastern Ukraine following 24 February 2022. This hybrid event is open to the public and you are welcome to join us online or in person. The event will be moderated by Emma Mateo.
Topic:
Civil Society, Activism, and Russia-Ukraine War
Political Geography:
Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe

10. Radio Monetochka: New Rap, Old Rock, and the State of Anti-War Russian Music

Author:
Liza Monetochka
Publication Date:
11-2023
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Please join the Harriman Institute and the Barnard College Slavic Department for a moderated discussion and Q&A with the popular Russian singer, songwriter, and content-creator Liza Monetochka. Following the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Liza publicly expressed her anti-war stance, left Russia, and gave a series of benefit concerts in Europe directing the revenue to Ukrainian humanitarian funds. In the conversation, we will talk about Russian music as a platform for social and political commentary and a vehicle for community building bringing together anti-war Russophone audiences outside of Russia. Liza will sing a few songs and answer questions about the experience of coming of age, relocation, writing music, and finding strength to do creative work in a moment of crisis. The event is specifically intended for younger students who are unable to attend Monetochka’s concert in NYC because of the 21+ age restriction. Teenagers and younger students (21-) will get priority seating and will be given priority to ask questions. The remaining seats will be offered to the general public.
Topic:
Youth, Music, Activism, and Russia-Ukraine War
Political Geography:
Russia

11. Celebrating István Deák, Keynote by Pieter Judson

Author:
Pieter Judson
Publication Date:
10-2023
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Columbia University’s Department of History, the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies, and the Harriman Institute present a conference in honor of István Deák (1926-2023).
Topic:
History, Conference, and István Deák
Political Geography:
Europe, Hungary, and Austria

12. Celebrating István Deák, Panel III: István and East Central European History

Author:
The Harriman Institute
Publication Date:
10-2023
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Columbia University’s Department of History, the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies, and the Harriman Institute present a conference in honor of István Deák (1926-2023).
Topic:
History, Conference, and István Deák
Political Geography:
Europe, Eastern Europe, and Central Europe

13. Celebrating István Deák, Panel II: István and Hungary: Then and Now

Author:
The Harriman Institute
Publication Date:
10-2023
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Columbia University’s Department of History, the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies, and the Harriman Institute present a conference in honor of István Deák (1926-2023).
Topic:
History, Conference, and István Deák
Political Geography:
Europe, Hungary, and Central Europe

14. Celebrating István Deák, Opening Remarks and Panel I: István the Teacher (10/6/23)

Author:
The Harriman Institute
Publication Date:
10-2023
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Columbia University’s Department of History, the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies, and the Harriman Institute present a conference in honor of István Deák (1926-2023).
Topic:
History, Conference, and István Deák
Political Geography:
Europe, Hungary, and Central Europe

15. Care in the Gap (1/19/22)

Publication Date:
01-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Please join us for the fourth event of our Work of Care in Russia speaker series, a presentation by Tomas Matza (University of Pittsburgh).
Topic:
Health, Health Care Policy, and Care
Political Geography:
Russia and Europe

16. Book Talk. Architectures of Violence by Kate Ferguson

Publication Date:
01-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Paramilitary or irregular units have been involved in practically every case of identity-based mass violence in the modern world, but detailed analysis of these dynamics is rare. Through exploring the case of former Yugoslavia, Kate Ferguson exposes the relationships between paramilitaries, state commands, local communities, and organised crime present in modern mass atrocities, from Rwanda and Darfur to Syria and Myanmar. Visible paramilitary participation masks the continued dominance of the state in violent crises. Political elites benefit from using unconventional forces to fulfil ambitions that violate international law—and international policy responses are hindered when responsibility for violence is ambiguous. Ferguson’s inquiry into these overlooked dynamics of mass violence unveils substantial loopholes in current atrocity prevention architecture.
Topic:
Crime, Governance, Conflict, Violence, and Paramilitary
Political Geography:
Global Focus

17. Crisis in Kazakhstan: Protests, Regime Stability, and Regional Security

Publication Date:
01-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
How did the protests erupt and how will recent events influence government policy? Who is in charge? Will Kazakhstan’s foreign policy orientation change? And what is the significance of the CSTO’s intervention? Our expert panelists will address these and other questions, as well as ponder what the future holds for the country widely considered as Central Asia’s economic engine.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, Economics, Governance, and Protests
Political Geography:
Central Asia, Kazakhstan, and Asia

18. Crisis and Bargaining Over Ukraine: A New US-Russia Security Order?

Publication Date:
01-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
As Russian troops have amassed on Ukraine's border, talks aimed at resolving the standoff between Russia and NATO appear to have collapsed. Poland's Foreign Minister warned that "it seems that the risk of war in the OSCE area is now greater than ever before in the last 30 years." Russia has been seeking a new European security agreement that would include formal binding pledges to limit NATO's expansion and military activities across Eastern Europe. US and NATO officials respond that they will not give up on NATO's principles, especially its "open door" policy towards membership. Ukrainians are bracing for a renewed conflict amidst domestic political turmoil. Are the Russian and Western positions irreconcilable? How did we get to the brink of another conflict? And how would a Russian-Ukrainian war affect Russian and Ukrainian domestic politics? How would it impact Ukrainian identity and foreign policy goals?
Topic:
Defense Policy, NATO, Regional Cooperation, and Military Strategy
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, and Ukraine

19. Book Talk. Contemporary Ukrainian and Baltic Art: Political and Social Perspectives

Publication Date:
02-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Please join the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute for a presentation of the book Contemporary Ukrainian Art and Baltic Art: Political and Social Perspectives (ibidem Press, 2021). The event will feature presentations by the volume’s editor Svitlana Biedarieva and contributors Ieva Astahovska, Olena Martynyuk, and Margaret Tali with moderator Mark Andryczyk (Harriman Institute). This volume focuses on political and social expressions in contemporary art of Ukraine, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia. It explores the transformations that art in Ukraine and the Baltic states has undergone since their independence in 1991, discussing how the conflicts and challenges of the last three decades have impacted the reconsideration of identity and fostered resistance of culture against economic and political crises. It analyzes connections between the past and the present as seen by the artists in these countries and looks at their visions of the future. Contemporary Ukrainian art portrays various perspectives, addressing issues from controversial historical topics to the present military conflict in the East of the country. Baltic art speaks out against the erasure of past historical traumas and analyzes the pertinence of its cultural scene to the European community. The contributions in this collection open a discussion of whether there is a single paradigm that describes the contemporary processes of art production in Ukraine and the Baltic countries. With contributions by Ieva Astahovska, Svitlana Biedarieva, Kateryna Botanova, Olena Martynyuk, Vytautas Michelkevičius, Lina Michelkevičė, Margaret Tali, and Jessica Zychowicz.
Topic:
Nationalism, Arts, Culture, and Identity
Political Geography:
Europe, Ukraine, Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia

20. Book Talk. Stalin's Millennials: Nostalgia, Trauma, and Nationalism

Publication Date:
02-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Stalin’s Millennials examines Joseph Stalin’s increasing popularity in the post-Soviet space, and analyzes how his image, and the nostalgia it evokes, is manipulated and exploited for political gain. The author argues that, in addition to the evil dictator and the Georgian comrade, there is a third portrayal of Stalin—the one projected by the generation that saw the tail end of the USSR, the post-Soviet millennials. This book is not a biography of one of the most controversial historical figures of the past century. Rather, through a combination of sociopolitical commentary and autobiographical elements that are uncommon in monographs of this kind, the attempt is to explore how Joseph Stalin’s complex legacies and the conflicting cult of his irreconcilable tripartite of personalities still loom over the region as a whole, including Russia and, perhaps to an even deeper extent, Koba’s native land—now the independent Republic of Georgia, caught between its unreconciled Soviet past and the potential future within the European Union.
Topic:
Nationalism, Governance, Leadership, Trauma, and Memory
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, Soviet Union, and Georgia

21. Environmental Activism in Russia

Publication Date:
02-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Our panel of distinguished experts will discuss the growing environmental activism movement in Russia. We will be joined by both academics and activists who will explore the unique challenges that environmental activists have faced and continue to endure in Russia. They will also assess the results achieved to date by the Russian environmentalist movement, both from those operating within the country and those abroad.
Topic:
Climate Change, Environment, and Activism
Political Geography:
Russia and Europe

22. Governing Habits: Treating Alcoholism in the Post-Soviet Clinic, Eugene Raikhel

Publication Date:
02-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Critics of narcology—as addiction medicine is called in Russia—decry it as being "backward," hopelessly behind contemporary global medical practices in relation to addiction and substance abuse, and assume that its practitioners lack both professionalism and expertise. On the basis of his research in a range of clinical institutions managing substance abuse in St. Petersburg, Eugene Raikhel increasingly came to understand that these assumptions and critiques obscured more than they revealed. Governing Habits is an ethnography of extraordinary sensitivity and awareness that shows how therapeutic practice and expertise is expressed in the highly specific, yet rapidly transforming milieu of hospitals, clinics, and rehabilitation centers in post Soviet Russia. Rather than interpreting narcology as a Soviet survival or a local clinical world on the wane in the face of globalizing evidence-based medicine, Raikhel examines the transformation of the medical management of alcoholism in Russia over the past twenty years. Raikhel's book is more than a story about the treatment of alcoholism. It is also a gripping analysis of the many cultural, institutional, political, and social transformations taking place in the post-Soviet world, particularly in Putin's Russia. Governing Habits will appeal to a wide range of readers, from medical anthropologists, clinicians, to scholars of post-Soviet Russia, to students of institutions and organizational change, to those interested in therapies and treatments of substance abuse, addiction, and alcoholism.
Topic:
Health, Mental Health, Alcohol, Post-Soviet Space, and Addiction
Political Geography:
Russia and Europe

23. Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture by Edward Tyerman

Publication Date:
02-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Following the failure of communist revolutions in Europe, in the 1920s the Soviet Union turned its attention to fostering anticolonial uprisings in Asia. China, divided politically between rival military factions and dominated economically by imperial powers, emerged as the Comintern’s prime target. At the same time, a host of prominent figures in Soviet literature, film, and theater traveled to China, met with Chinese students in Moscow, and placed contemporary China on the new Soviet stage. They sought to reimagine the relationship with China in the terms of socialist internationalism—and, in the process, determine how internationalism was supposed to look and feel in practice. Internationalist Aesthetics offers a groundbreaking account of the crucial role that China played in the early Soviet cultural imagination. Edward Tyerman tracks how China became the key site for Soviet debates over how the political project of socialist internationalism should be mediated, represented, and produced. The central figure in this story, the avant-garde writer Sergei Tret’iakov, journeyed to Beijing in the 1920s and experimented with innovative documentary forms in an attempt to foster a new sense of connection between Chinese and Soviet citizens. Reading across genres and media from reportage and biography to ballet and documentary film, Tyerman shows how Soviet culture sought an aesthetics that could foster a sense of internationalist community. He reveals both the aspirations and the limitations of this project, illuminating a crucial chapter in Sino-Russian relations. Grounded in extensive sources in Russian and Chinese, this cultural history bridges Slavic and East Asian studies and offers new insight into the transnational dynamics that shaped socialist aesthetics and politics in both countries.
Topic:
Nationalism, Arts, Culture, and Identity
Political Geography:
Europe and Soviet Union

24. What’s Next? Experts Respond to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

Publication Date:
03-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Join us for a special meeting of the New York-Russia Public Policy Series, co-hosted by the Harriman Institute at Columbia University and the New York University Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia. This event is also cosponsored by the Center for Social Media and Politics at NYU and the Salzman Institute of War and Peace Studies.
Topic:
Defense Policy, Military Strategy, Strategic Interests, and Russia-Ukraine War
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, and Ukraine

25. Radomir Konstantinović’s The Philosophy of Parochialism

Publication Date:
03-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
The Philosophy of Parochialism is Radomir Konstantinović’s (1928–2011) most celebrated and reviled book. First published in Belgrade as Filosofija palanke in 1969, it attracted keen attention and controversy through its unsparing critique of Serbian and any other nationalism in Yugoslavia and beyond. The book was prophetic, seeming to anticipate not only the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, but also the totalitarian turn in politics across the globe in the first decades of the new century. With this translation, English-speaking audiences can at last discover one of the most original writers of eastern European late modernism, and gain an important and original perspective into contemporary politics and culture in the West and beyond. This is a book that seems to age in reverse, as its meanings become deeper and more universal with the passage of time. Konstantinović’s book resists easy classification, mixing classical, Montaigne-like essay, prose poetry, novel, and literary history. The word “philosophy” in the book’s title refers to the solitary activity of reflection and critical thinking, and is also paradoxical: according to the author, a defining characteristic of parochialism is precisely its intolerance toward this kind of self-reflexivity. In Konstantinović’s analysis, parochialism is not a simply a characteristic of a geographical region or a cultural, political, and historical formation—these are all just manifestations of the parochial spirit as the spirit of insularity. His book illuminates the current moment, in which insularity undergirds not only ethnic and national divisions, but also dictates the very structure of everyday life, and where individuals can easily find themselves locked in an echo chamber of social media. The Philosophy of Parochialism can help us understand better not only the dead ends of ethnic nationalism and other atavistic ideologies, but also of those cultural forces such as digital technologies that have been built on the promise of overcoming those ideologies.
Topic:
Fragile/Failed State, Governance, Philosophy, State Building, and Modernization
Political Geography:
Kosovo, Yugoslavia, Serbia, and Montenegro

26. Sanctioning Russia: Implications and Expectation

Publication Date:
03-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the West rapidly adopted unprecedented sanctions on Russia. These included a series of export controls and the sanctioning of the Russian Central Bank, major institutions in the financial sector as well as individual “oligarchs” who live and conduct business outside of the country. In addition to these government actions by the United States, the European Union and the UK, hundreds of Western private companies have withdrawn from the Russian market or suspended operations, further exacerbating Russian economic uncertainty. How likely are the sanctions to pressure Russia to halt its campaign in Ukraine, what is their purpose and logic, and what additional measures could be imposed?
Topic:
Economics, Hegemony, Sanctions, Conflict, and Russia-Ukraine War
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, and Ukraine

27. Book Talk. #WomenofBiH

Publication Date:
03-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Please join the Harriman Institute for a talk with Amila Hrustić Batovanja and Masha Durkalić, two co-authors of the book #WomenofBiH, now newly available in English. Dijana Jelača (Brooklyn College) will participate as a discussant with Tanya Domi (Harriman Institute) as moderator. #WomenOfBiH is an artistic, activist, and research initiative comprised of biographies of over fifty BiH women who have broken stereotypes and advocated for women’s rights and emancipation. Each woman was illustrated by a different woman illustrator/designer/artist from Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is a book about first female artists, writers, poets, social workers, national heroines, directors, scientists, musicians, doctors, activists, professors, and other exceptional women from BiH. The initiative was started with the goal of increasing the visibility of women in Bosnia and Herzegovina and to encourage similar educational initiatives. It celebrates women who were trailblazers and pioneers in women’s rights and emancipation, who achieved worldwide fame in their respective fields of work and are some of the greatest treasures of BiH. The book was published in 2019 and has since traveled to more than fifty countries. The publishing of the book was financed by Open Society Foundation and by more than 500 crowdfunding supporters from all over the world. In 2020, the second edition of the book was published in Bosnian, as well as an English edition of 650 copies, supported by OSCE in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Topic:
Women, Feminism, Activism, and Gender
Political Geography:
Europe and Bosnia and Herzegovina

28. Book Talk. La Nijinska by Lynn Garafola

Publication Date:
03-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Overshadowed in life and legend by her brother Vaslav Nijinsky, Bronislava Nijinska had a far longer and more productive career. An architect of twentieth-century neoclassicism, she experienced the transformative power of the Russian Revolution and created her greatest work - Les Noces - under the influence of its avant-garde. Many of her ballets rested on the probing of gender boundaries, a mistrust of conventional gender roles, and the heightening of the ballerina's technical and artistic prowess. A prominent member of Russia Abroad, she worked with leading figures of twentieth-century art, music, and ballet, including Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Poulenc, Alexandra Exter, Natalia Goncharova, Frederick Ashton, Alicia Markova, and Maria Tallchief. She was also a remarkable dancer in her own right with a bravura technique and powerful stage presence that enabled her to perform an unusually broad repertory. Finally, she was the author of an acclaimed volume of memoirs in addition to a major treatise on movement. Nijinska's career sheds new light on the modern history of ballet and of modernism more generally, recuperating the memory of lost works and forgotten artists, many of them women. But it also reveals the sexism pervasive in the upper echelons of the early and mid-twentieth-century ballet world, barriers that women choreographers still confront. Lynn Garafola is Professor Emerita of Dance at Barnard College, Columbia University. A dance historian and critic, she is the author of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and Legacies of Twentieth-Century Dance, and the editor of several books, including The Diaries of Marius Petipa, André Levinson on Dance (with Joan Acocella), José Limón: An Unfinished Memoir, and The Ballets Russes and Its World. She has curated several exhibitions, including Dance for a City: Fifty Years of the New York City Ballet, New York Story: Jerome Robbins and His World, Diaghilev's Theater of Marvels: The Ballets Russes and Its Aftermath, and, most recently, Arthur Mitchell: Harlem's Ballet Trailblazer.
Topic:
Arts, Culture, Feminism, Russian Revolution, and Gender
Political Geography:
Russia and Europe

29. Finding Common Ground: Intercultural Dialogue Among Youth in North Macedonia

Publication Date:
03-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Marija Krstevska will discuss her trajectory as a girl raised in a mono-ethnic environment to a young advocate for intercultural acceptance. She is the Secretary General of the Center for Intercultural Dialogue, a youth organization in Kumanovo, North Macedonia. Through that organization, she has created learning opportunities within non-formal education for diverse groups of learners, advocated for direct involvement in community decision-making, and supported youth participation through inclusive policies. She will discuss the importance of active citizenship, capacity building, and non-formal education in fostering intercultural dialogue among youth.
Topic:
Education, Culture, Youth, Activism, and Gender
Political Geography:
Europe and North Macedonia

30. Book Talk. Torture, Humiliate, Kill: Inside the Bosnian Serb Camp System by Hikmet Karčić

Publication Date:
04-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Please join us for a discussion with genocide scholar Hikmet Karčić, author of Torture, Humiliate, Kill: Inside the Bosnian Serb Camp System (University of Michigan Press, 2022), in conversation with discussant John Cox, director of the Center for Holocaust, Genocide & Human Rights Studies at UNC Charlotte. Moderated by Tanya Domi (SIPA/Harriman Institute).
Topic:
Genocide, Torture, Discrimination, Humanitarian Crisis, and Identity
Political Geography:
Europe and Bosnia and Herzegovina

31. Book Talk. Café Europa Revisited: How to Survive Post-Communism by Slavenka Drakulic

Publication Date:
04-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Please join the East Central European Center at the Harriman Institute for a book talk with Slavenka Drakulic, author of Café Europa Revisited: How to Survive Post-Communism (Penguin Books, 2021), an evocative and timely collection of essays that paints a portrait of Eastern Europe thirty years after the end of communism. This event is part of the Collective Memory and Democratic Backsliding in Central and Eastern Europe series organized by Harriman Institute Postdoctoral Fellow Čarna Pištan, and will be introduced by Aleksandar Bošković co-director of the East Central European Center.
Topic:
Communism, State Building, Post Cold War, Post-Soviet Space, and Anti-Communism
Political Geography:
Europe

32. Russia's Invasion of Ukraine: Reflections on Historical and Psychological Dimensions

Publication Date:
04-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Mariam Antadze will discuss the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine and its mental health and psychosocial implications on communities. Focusing on how war affects mental health and psychosocial development facilitates a better understanding of trauma experienced by people who are directly or indirectly affected. Among the topics Antadze will discuss: Russia's post-Soviet invasions chronologically; what we have learned from Russia's war in Georgia; understanding how sociopolitical and psychological factors interact in war trauma; psycho- and mental health needs that arise from war; and justice as a healing factor.
Topic:
Defense Policy, Military Strategy, Mental Health, Health Crisis, and Russia-Ukraine War
Political Geography:
Europe and Ukraine

33. The First Deportation of Hungarian Jews in World War II, 1941

Publication Date:
04-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
This talk emerges from a book project examining the history and events leading up to the first deportation of Hungarian Jews in 1941. During the first weeks of the campaign against the Soviet Union, the wartime Hungarian government deported more than 20 thousand "foreign” Jews to occupied Soviet territories. Most of them became the victims of the massacre of Kamenetsk-Podolsk in late August. This crime ushered in the period of the Holocaust that Father Patrick Desbois and Paul A. Shapiro have called the "Holocaust by bullets." The talk returns to and takes up the question of "alien Jews” in the period between 1919 and 1941 in East-Central Europe in general and in Hungary in particular, examining how government decrees were used by state authorities in Hungary and in Romania to make it very difficult for Jews to prove their citizenship. The authorities were thus able to 'create' 'aliens' out of unwanted Jews almost without limit. An analysis of these processes exposes the techniques used by nationalist regimes to incite hatred against different groups in society.
Topic:
Genocide, Citizenship, Holocaust, Humanitarian Crisis, and Identity
Political Geography:
Europe and Hungary

34. Disability and the War in Ukraine: Organized Support

Publication Date:
04-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Please join us for a panel discussion on disability and the war in Ukraine, organized by Svetlana Borodina (Harriman Institute). This event will feature the voices of the people who have been working to support people with disabilities in Ukraine during this war. They will speak about their first-hand experiences and the impact that this war has had on the lives of people with disabilities in Ukraine.
Topic:
War, Disability, and Russia-Ukraine War
Political Geography:
Europe and Ukraine

35. Russian-Turkish Relations: Past & Present

Publication Date:
04-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
As Istanbul hosts Russian and Ukrainian negotiators for peace talks to end Russia’s war on Ukraine, and Turkey balances between Ukraine and Russia, Russian-Turkish relations may be entering a new phase. Relations between the two states have grown increasingly fraught in recent years, as the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan and Russia’s role in Syria and the Middle East come up against Turkey’s growing influence in the region. Panelists will discuss relations between Russia and Turkey by analyzing the historical legacies of the Russian and Ottoman empires, and by situating current policies in the broader context of Turkish and Russian relations with NATO, Europe, and the U.S.
Topic:
Diplomacy, International Cooperation, Bilateral Relations, and Alliance
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, and Turkey

36. How Did Left-Wing Print Culture Experiment with Capitalism?

Publication Date:
04-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
While many avant-garde periodicals enthusiastically embraced various aspects of the booming post-WWI economy and technology of the core countries, their imagined readership remained the proletariat or “the masses.” Although the predominantly left-wing avant-garde outlets were overflowing with articles exploring the perspectives opened up by Fordism, Taylorism, standardization, and rationalization, not only did their intended working-class readership experience the everyday regime of “scientific management,” but many of them, especially Hungarian organized workers in the industrial centers of the East Coast, actively fought it. Adopting the approaches of periodical studies, book history, and the cultural history of social life, this presentation has a twofold ambition. First, to understand what kind of political economy was envisioned by the avant-garde journals of the 1920s, especially concerning their interpretation of the distinguishing characteristics of the capitalist economic order. Second, to explore how working-class readers—either trade unionist social democrats or revolutionary communists—understood, re-created, or performed some of the techniques promoted by avant-garde journals: using tactics like speaking choirs, “living journals,” political collages, and workers’ photography to critique that same economic reality of post-WWI capitalism. Through the study of hitherto largely unexplored primary sources, including avant-garde periodicals and leaflets, editorial material, secret police accounts, Comintern documents, and annotated pages of avant-garde and labor movement publications, this lecture investigates how the avant-garde radical imagination about capitalism resonated in the larger ecosystem of workers’ culture. It also explores the significant role of centers like New York City—a global hub of avant-garde periodicals, the heart of surging Fordist capitalism, and a battlefield for multi-ethnic organized workers, including a large number of Hungarian immigrants—played in the formation of a Hungarian-language counter-hegemonic public sphere.
Topic:
Media, Work Culture, Leftist Politics, and Identity
Political Geography:
Europe, Hungary, North America, and United States of America

37. The Parallels of Russian Bellicosity in the Balkans in the Example of Ukraine

Publication Date:
04-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Just last month, the Russian Ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina issued issued a startling threat to the Bosnian government’s aspirations to join NATO. “Bosnia and Herzegovina have the right to decide whether to be a member of NATO, but Moscow reserves the right to respond to such an opportunity,” he said. Russia warned Bosnia and Herzegovina that it could be the Kremlin's next target following Ukraine. This is not the first time Russia has threatened Bosnia. The parallels to Russia’s threats to Ukraine are unerringly uncanny. Bosnia’s significance to Western powers and to Russia stems from the same fact: The country is located squarely at the intersection of NATO and Russian influence. The West recognizes some of the potential Bosnia could have if it were brought into the NATO bloc, but seems not to understand the ramifications of the country slipping into Kremlin-induced disarray. For its part, Russia is just being consistent: Just as it unsuccessfully attempted to prevent Montenegro and North Macedonia from joining NATO, so too is it trying to halt Bosnian aspirations toward the same goal. Bosnia and threatened Balkan states North Macedonia and Montenegro remain fragile to Russian manipulation of its proxies in all of these countries and in the Balkan neighborhood.
Topic:
Defense Policy, NATO, Regional Cooperation, Military Strategy, and Hegemony
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, Ukraine, and Bosnia and Herzegovina

38. Book Panel: Rethinking the Gulag: Identities, Sources, Legacies

Publication Date:
04-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Please join us for the launch of the new volume Rethinking the Gulag: Identities, Sources, Legacies (Indiana University Press, March 2022). Editors Alan Barenberg and Emily Johnson will be joined by contributors Gavin Slade (Nazarbayev University), Mikhail Nakonechnyi (University of Helsinki), and Sarah Young (University College London), discussant Dan Healey (University of Oxford), and moderator Mark Lipovetsky (Columbia University).
Topic:
Crime, Prisons/Penal Systems, and Abuse
Political Geography:
Global Focus

39. How Central Asia Became Part of the Developing World

Publication Date:
04-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
During the Soviet period, official narratives presented Central Asia as a former colony that had been integrated on equal terms into the USSR while overcoming economic backwardness. This ambiguity was useful for Moscow’s Cold War politics and also shaped how Central Asian actors maneuvered within the Soviet system. In the late Soviet period, this ambiguity was largely abandoned. Some Central Asians began to insist on the region’s colonial status, while economists and sociologists in Moscow argued that Soviet development efforts had failed and that the region was culturally too different to fit into socialist economic schemes. In this talk, Kalinovsky will trace how different groups within the USSR can the late Soviet period came to reimagine Central Asia as a part of the Third World, discarding the ambiguity of earlier decades. These views also had profound implications for the region’s post-independence transformation: Western development professionals who came to Central Asia after 1991 found the region much more developed than other places they had worked. That also changed over the course of the 1990s, in part because of the continuing influence of Russian scholars, and in part as a result of the development community's evolving understanding of regional challenges (informed, to a large extent, by local scholars), a change that was solidified with the post 9-11 turn to the Global War on Terror. 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.
Topic:
Development, Economics, Capitalism, and Decolonization
Political Geography:
Central Asia and Asia

40. Eyes that Lead: The History of Guide Dogs for the Blind in East Central Europe and Beyond

Publication Date:
04-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
The lecture explores a hitherto overlooked episode in the history of the human-animal relations: the establishment of professional guide dog training after the First World War, which had its origins in Central Europe. Under this scheme, dogs became helpers, and, furthermore, equal partners to disabled soldiers and soon thereafter also to blind civilians. The lecture shows how the resultant cooperation between guide dogs and their owners placed the human–animal bond on a new footing. It also reveals how an idea initiated by veterans of the German and Austro-Hungarian army spread across the world and what adjustments were necessary to make the scheme suitable for different economic, cultural and social settings. In a broader context the lecture seeks to call attention to the potentials of the burgeoning fields of animal studies and disability histories for the study of East Central Europe.
Topic:
Culture, Disability, and Animals
Political Geography:
Europe

41. Byzantium as Seen by the White Russians in Constantinople

Publication Date:
04-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
or the broad public in pre-revolutionary Russia, Byzantium belonged to religious discourse; it also became a battle cry for Russian imperialism. And, by an irony of history, it was that long-coveted Byzantium that greeted the White Russians as they, orphaned refugees, disembarked in Constantinople following their defeat in the Civil War. What sentiments did the Byzantine monuments inspire in them? It appears that their attitudes were more nuanced than pure nostalgia or dismissal. Sergey A. Ivanov is a member of the British Academy. He has published more than 200 scholarly works on Byzantine culture and the relations between Byzantium and the Slavs. Among his monographs are Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond (Oxford, 2006), “Pearls Before Swine:” Missionary Work in Byzantium (Paris, 2015) and "Византийская культура и агиография" (Moscow, 2020, Byzantine Culture and Hagiography). His guidebook "В поисках Константинополя" was first published in Russian in 2011, went through three editions and was translated into Bulgarian and Turkish. It was published in English as In Search of Constantinople. A Guidebook Through Byzantine Istanbul and Its Surroundings in March 2022.
Topic:
Culture, Urban, Cities, and Monuments
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, Turkey, and Istanbul

42. A Conversation with Polish Basketball Legend Kent Washington

Publication Date:
05-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Join the East Central European Center at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University for a conversation with Kent Washington, the first African-American and first American to play professional basketball in Cold War Eastern Europe. Recruited into the top Polish league in 1979, Washington went on to play five seasons in the Solidarity-era communist country. His story told for the first time in his new memoir, Kentomania: A Black Basketball Virtuoso in Communist Poland, is unprecedented, weaving together professionalism, race, and politics in powerful and daring ways. Washington will appear in conversation with Columbia University Lecturer in Polish Christopher Caes.
Topic:
Cold War, Communism, Race, and Sports
Political Geography:
Europe and Poland

43. Russia’s War on Ukraine: A New Phase

Publication Date:
06-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has entered a new phase. The Kremlin’s initial plan to seize Kyiv with a lightning strike failed due to spirited defense by the Ukrainian military. In response, Russia has concentrated forces in the Donbas, and to a lesser extent southern Ukraine. Fighting remains fierce in these areas and experts disagree about the trajectory of the conflict. Some argue that Ukraine’s superior morale and greater international support will be decisive, while others point to Russia’s sheer advantage in numbers. Our panel of experts will discuss the implications of this new phase of the war. Can Ukraine gain back territory lost in recent weeks? Have Russia’s war aims changed? Should the US and NATO change course? Is it time for all sides to seek a negotiated settlement?
Topic:
Defense Policy, War, Military Strategy, and Russia-Ukraine War
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, and Ukraine

44. Journalism During Wartime: A Conversation with The Kyiv Independent

Publication Date:
09-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
The Kyiv Independent is a leading English-language media source based in Ukraine. Olga Rudenko (Chief Editor, Kyiv Independent) and Daryna Shevchenko (CEO, Kyiv Independent) will talk about the Kyiv Independent’s work in Ukraine and about the challenges of reporting in a country that is at war. Lili Bivings (Contributing Editor, Kyiv Independent) will then lead a discussion with the two presenters which will be followed by a Q & A with the audience moderated by Mark Andryczyk (Harriman Institute). This event is cosponsored by Razom for Ukraine.
Topic:
War, Media, Journalism, and Russia-Ukraine War
Political Geography:
Europe and Ukraine

45. "Sugihara Chiune and the Soviet Union: New Documents, New Perspectives" by David Wolff

Publication Date:
09-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
In 1940 with Europe already at war, Japanese diplomat-spy Sugihara Chiune (often called the "Japanese Schindler") ignored direct orders from Foreign Minister Matsuoka and issued over 2000 Japanese transit visas to Jews stranded in Lithuania after the invasion of Poland. But these visas would have been worthless without Soviet transit visas to cross from Kaunas/Kovno to Vladivostok. Why did Stalin approve this transit, supervised by Molotov, Mikoyan and Beria? How did nearly 4000 Jews travel on 2000 visas? Documents from Soviet and Japanese archives collected, edited and published by Japan's Slavic-Eurasian Research Center and the Holocaust Research Center in Moscow provide answers to these questions and more. Sugihara remains the only Japanese citizen designated a Righteous among the Gentiles by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.
Topic:
Genocide, Migration, Holocaust, and Humanitarian Crisis
Political Geography:
Japan, Europe, and Asia

46. Navalny and Russia's Opposition During the War: A Conversation with Maria Pevchikh

Publication Date:
09-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Please join the Harriman Institute at Columbia University for a discussion with Maria Pevchikh, head of the investigation department at the Anti-Corruption Foundation. Moderated by Elise Giuliano, Senior Lecturer in Political Science.
Topic:
War, Authoritarianism, Civil-Military Relations, Opposition, and Russia-Ukraine War
Political Geography:
Russia and Europe

47. Saludos desde Mariúpol: Covering Ukraine for the Spanish audience

Publication Date:
09-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
In the Spanish media landscape, the shadow of Russia has always loomed large over the image of Ukraine: a confusion fueled by geographical distance and historical myth-making. The Russian-Ukrainian war that began in 2014 and the current large-scale invasion have created an opportunity for Spanish journalists to get to know Ukraine, challenge stereotypes and engage in a dialogue with the readers back home. An ongoing process that nevertheless has brought some change.
Topic:
War, Media, Language, Journalism, and Russia-Ukraine War
Political Geography:
Europe, Ukraine, and Spain

48. Narrating the War Everydayness

Publication Date:
10-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
In early March 2022, the Center for Urban History and colleagues from Poland, the UK, and Luxembourg started to discuss the possibility of ethically well-grounded and methodologically reasonable emergency collecting and archiving of oral testimonies of Ukrainian refugees, IDPs, and volunteers. During the presentation, Otrishchenko will describe multiple decisions we made in this project concerning interactions within the team, sensitivity of recruitment, trauma-informed interviewing, and ethical preservation of collected stories.
Topic:
War, Media, Interview, and Russia-Ukraine War
Political Geography:
Europe and Ukraine

49. Panel I: Deconstructing the Parallels between Holocaust Distortion and Genocide Denial

Author:
Tanya Domi, Laura Cohen, Riada Ašimović Akyol, Hikmet Karčić, James Smith, and Robert Williams
Publication Date:
04-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Genocide denial not only abuses history, including contemporary history, but it also insults the survivors and extends the impact of the original crimes. Denial is the final act that never ends for the survivors. This symposium examines some of the parallels of contemporary genocide denial in the Balkans with increasing Holocaust denial and distortion sweeping across Europe. What can we learn from Holocaust experts and scholars that is applicable to the present? And what are some ways that memory activists resist denial of the most brutal crimes?
Topic:
Genocide, History, Holocaust, Memory, and Activism
Political Geography:
Eastern Europe and Balkans

50. Cultural Encounters: Istanbul and Refugees from the Russian Empire (1919-1923) - Welcome & Panel I

Author:
Özalp Birol, Ipek Cem Taha, Valentina Izmirlieva, Vladimir Alexandrov, and Edward Kasinec
Publication Date:
11-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
The Encounter in Context: Istanbul Under the Armistice Chair: Holger Klein Valentina Izmirlieva (Columbia University), "The Four Paradoxes of Istanbul's Beyaz Ruslar Moment" Vladimir Alexandrov (Yale University), "Frederick Bruce Thomas and Being Black in Constantinople" Edward Kasinec (Hoover Institution, Stanford University), "American Elite Philanthropy, Anna V.S. Mitchell and The Constantinople/Istanbul Russians, 1920-1929"
Topic:
History, Culture, and Refugees
Political Geography:
Russia, Eurasia, and Turkey

51. Cultural Encounters: Istanbul and the Refugees from the Russian Empire (1919-1923) | Panel III

Author:
Vladimir Alexandrov, Ayşenur Güler, Ekaterina Aygün, and Nadia Podzemskaia
Publication Date:
11-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Artists in Transcultural Dialog Chair: Vladimir Alexandrov Ayşenur Güler (Independent Researcher, London) [Via Zoom], "Findings on Gritchenko's Sojourn in Istanbul (1919-1921)" Ekaterina Aygün (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich), "Union of Russian Painters in Constantinople (1921/1922-1923) as an Émigré Artists' Collective" Nadia Podzemskaia (ITEM, CNRS-ETS, Paris), "Constantinople/Istanbul in the First Half of the 1920s, through the Eyes of the Émigré Artists from the Russian Empire"
Topic:
History, Culture, Refugees, and Dialogue
Political Geography:
Russia, Eurasia, and Turkey

52. Cultural Exchanges: Istanbul and Refugees from the Russian Empire (1919-1923) - Panel II

Author:
Valentina Izmirlieva, Holger A. Klein, and Sergey A. Ivanov
Publication Date:
11-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
The Byzantine Legacy Rediscovered Chair: Valentina Izmirlieva Holger A. Klein (Columbia University), "From Russia to Byzantium: Thomas Whittemore's Intellectual Formation and the Work of the Byzantine Institute of America" Sergey A. Ivanov (Moscow Higher School of Economics), "Byzantium as Seen by the White Russians in Constantinople"
Topic:
History, Culture, Refugees, and Byzantine Empire
Political Geography:
Russia, Eurasia, and Turkey

53. Cultural Encounters: Istanbul and the Refugees from the Russian Empire (1919-1923) - Panel IV

Author:
Cengiz Kahraman
Publication Date:
11-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Cengiz Kahraman (Istanbul Photography Museum) and Valentina Izmirlieva present two archives of Iraïda Barry's life and work - one in Istanbul, the other in New York.
Topic:
History, Culture, and Refugees
Political Geography:
Russia, Eurasia, and Turkey

54. The Muslim Resolutions: Bosniak Responses to World War II Atrocities in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Publication Date:
06-2021
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Please join us for a talk with Hikmet Karčić, genocide scholar and author of The Muslim Resolutions: Bosniak Responses to World War II Atrocities in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Center for Islam in the Contemporary World, June 2021). Moderated by Tanya Domi (SIPA/Harriman Institute).
Topic:
Genocide, Religion, Discrimination, World War II, and Humanitarian Crisis
Political Geography:
Europe and Bosnia and Herzegovina

55. Muslims in the 18th-Century Habsburg Cities: The Social Integration of an Unincorporated Population

Author:
David Do Paco
Publication Date:
10-2021
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Please join the Harriman Institute and East Central European Center for a lecture by David Do Paço, István Deák Visiting Professor at Columbia University (Harriman Institute and Department of History). This lecture explores the social life of unincorporated populations in community-based societies, and analyzes how they used the social fabric of global cities to compensate for their administrative marginality, and still have a political impact. It specifically focuses on Muslims in port, continental, and recently reconquered cities in the Habsburg Empire throughout the 18th century to overcome the traditional opposition between “Islam” and “Europe,” and to support the development of inclusive memory policies. It examines the multiple affiliations of fragile populations and offers a new history of foreigners in early modern Europe. It thus fits into the perspective of a new urban history from the ground up and advocates a trans-imperial and global history of Central Europe. David Do Paço is István Deák Visiting Professor at Columbia University (Harriman Institute and Department of History) and a historian of the Habsburg Empire in the 18th century. His research lies at the intersection of urban history, diaspora studies, and historical anthropology. He defended his Ph.D. in 2012 at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and has since been a EUI Max-Weber Fellow and a CEU-IAS Core Fellow. In 2015, he published his first monograph, L’Orient à Vienne au dix-huitième siècle, as part of the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment (Voltaire Foundation). That same year, David joined Sciences Po where, among other responsibilities, he directed the departmental seminar in European History. At Columbia University he is working on his new project “ESLAM: European Societies in the Light of Apolitical Muslims.” He has recently contributed to the Historical Journal, Urban History, and the International History Review.
Topic:
Religion, Minorities, Urban, Cities, and Integration
Political Geography:
Europe and Habsburg Empire

56. Russian Relations with Central Asia and Afghanistan after U.S. Withdrawal

Publication Date:
10-2021
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Join us for a meeting of the New York-Russia Public Policy Series, co-hosted by the Harriman Institute at Columbia University and the New York University Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia. In this second event of the academic year, our panelists will discuss the status of Russian relations with Central Asia and Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrawal. Moderated by Joshua Tucker (NYU Jordan Center) and Alexander Cooley (Harriman Institute). The withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan and the dramatic collapse of the U.S.-backed government in Kabul has ushered in another period of Taliban rule. Regional powers and neighbors have been anticipating the U.S. exit for some time: Russia remains a critical player in the region and, even before the U.S. withdrawal, had demonstrated a pragmatic approach to engaging with the Taliban. What is Moscow’s plan for dealing with the new Afghan government and what are its overall priorities in the region? How will this affect Russia’s relations with the Central Asian states and China? And are there any prospects for renewed cooperation between Moscow and Washington on counterterrorism issues in this period of uncertainty and potential instability? Please join this distinguished group of academic experts who will explore the new complex dynamics of a post-American Afghanistan and Central Asia. This event is supported by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York. Speakers Ivan Safranchuk, Director of the Center of Euro-Asian Research and Senior Fellow with the Institute for International Studies, MGIMO Nargis Kassenova, Senior Fellow and Director of the Program on Central Asia, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University Artemy Kalinovsky, Professor of Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet Studies, Temple University Ekaterina Stepanova, Director, Peace and Conflict Studies Unit, National Research Institute of the World Economy & International Relations (IMEMO), Moderated by: Alexander Cooley, Director of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University Joshua Tucker, Director of the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, New York University
Topic:
International Relations, Military Strategy, Governance, and Foreign Interference
Political Geography:
Afghanistan, Russia, Europe, Asia, North America, and United States of America

57. Book Talk. Ukraine’s Maidan, Russia’s War by Mychailo Wynnyckyj

Publication Date:
11-2021
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Please join the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute for a presentation by Mychailo Wynnyckyj of his book Ukraine’s Maidan, Russia’s War: A Chronicle and Analysis of the Revolution of Dignity (ibidem Press, 2019). Moderated by Mark Andryczyk (Harriman Institute). In early 2014, sparked by an assault by their government on peaceful students, Ukrainians rose up against a deeply corrupt, Moscow-backed regime. Initially demonstrating under the banner of EU integration, the Maidan protesters proclaimed their right to a dignified existence; they learned to organize, to act collectively, to become a civil society. Most prominently, they established a new Ukrainian identity: territorial, inclusive, and present-focused with powerful mobilizing symbols. Driven by an urban “bourgeoisie” that rejected the hierarchies of industrial society in favor of a postmodern heterarchy, a previously passive post-Soviet country experienced a profound social revolution that generated new senses: “Dignity” and “fairness” became rallying cries for millions. Europe as the symbolic target of political aspiration gradually faded, but the impact (including on Europe) of Ukraine’s revolution remained. When Russia invaded—illegally annexing Crimea and then feeding continuous military conflict in the Donbas—Ukrainians responded with a massive volunteer effort and touching patriotism. In the process, they transformed their country, the region, and indeed the world. This book provides a chronicle of Ukraine’s Maidan and Russia’s ongoing war, and puts forth an analysis of the Revolution of Dignity from the perspective of a participant observer.
Topic:
Social Movement, European Union, Revolution, and Euromaidan Revolution
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, and Ukraine

58. Mixing Medicines on Shifting Terrains: The Politics of Integrative Care in Clinical Spaces in Russia

Publication Date:
11-2021
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Part of The Work of Care in Russia speaker series, a book talk by Tatiana Chudakova (Tufts University), author of Mixing Medicines: Ecologies of Care in Buddhist Siberia (Fordham University Press, 2021). After the collapse of state socialism, Russia’s healthcare system, much like the rest of the country’s economic and social sphere, underwent massive restructuring, while the public saw the rise to prominence of a variety of nonbiomedical therapies. Formulated as a possible aid to a beleaguered healthcare infrastructure, or as questionable care of last resort, "traditional medicine" in post-socialist Russia was tasked with redressing—and often blamed for—the fraught state of the body politic, while biomedicine itself became increasingly perceived as therapeutically insufficient. The popularization of ethnically and culturally marked forms of care in Russia presents a peculiar paradox in a political context often characterized by a return to robustly homogenizing state policies. In a context where displays of cultural, religious, and ethnic difference are tightly woven with anxieties about Russia's status as a modern state, the rise of a therapeutic sphere that tended towards multiplicity, fragmentation, bricolage, and a certain ontological agnosticism in the treatment of bodies and subjects appears, at the very least, counterintuitive. Focusing on the therapeutic life at the peripheries of the state, in the Siberian region of Buryatia that unexpectedly finds itself at the forefront of projects of medical integration via a local tradition of “Tibetan Medicine,” this talk explores how categories of official and unofficial medicine are co-constituted, and with what effects on conceptualizations of medical legitimacy, as well as on concrete ways of caring and curing.
Topic:
Health, Governance, Health Care Policy, and Medicine
Political Geography:
Russia and Europe

59. The Rise of Russia and China in the Western Balkans

Publication Date:
11-2021
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Please join the Harriman Institute for a panel discussion on the role of Russia and China in the Western Balkans. The event will feature Reuf Bajrovic, Allison Carragher, Ljubomir Filipović, Ambassador Vesko Garčević, and Ivana Stradner and will be moderated by Tanya Domi (Harriman Institute).
Topic:
Foreign Policy, Hegemony, Strategic Interests, and Influence
Political Geography:
Russia, China, Europe, Asia, and Balkans

60. Digital Selves: Embodiment, Subjectivity in New Media Cultures in Eastern Europe, Eurasia

Publication Date:
11-2021
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Join us to celebrate the launch of a special issue of the journal Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media. The issue, “Digital Selves: Embodiment and Subjectivity in New Media Cultures in Eastern Europe and Eurasia,” is available in open access at digitalicons.org This issue considers the role of the physical and sensory body in relation to social identities and minority advocacy in regional digital culture. Engaging conversations in disability studies, queer studies, and feminist studies, the articles in the issue consider gender, disability, and LGBTQ identity as both embodied and online. The launch will feature brief presentations by participating authors on civilians at war in Ukraine, the assemblage of vibrant disability counterpublics on the Russophone internet, contestations around concepts of ethnicity and heritage in Russia’s border regions through digital music online, queer stories of coming out in Russia and anti-homophobia protest in Poland. With an overview of the project from co-editors of the special issue Cassandra Hartblay and Tatiana Klepikova and a response from Sasha Kurlenkova, PhD Candidate in Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU
Topic:
Culture, Media, Identity, and Digitalization
Political Geography:
Europe

61. Book Talk. Klimat: Russia in the Age of Climate Change by Thane Gustafson

Publication Date:
11-2021
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Please join the Harriman Institute for a presentation by Thane Gustafson, author of Klimat: Russia in the Age of Climate Change (Harvard University Press, 2021). Moderated by Kimberly Marten (Harriman Institute). Russia will be one of the countries most affected by climate change. No major power is more economically dependent on the export of hydrocarbons; at the same time, two-thirds of Russia’s territory lies in the arctic north, where melting permafrost is already imposing growing damage. Climate change also brings drought and floods to Russia’s south, threatening the country’s agricultural exports. Thane Gustafson predicts that, over the next thirty years, climate change will leave a dramatic imprint on Russia. The decline of fossil fuel use is already underway, and restrictions on hydrocarbons will only tighten, cutting fuel prices and slashing Russia’s export revenues. Yet Russia has no substitutes for oil and gas revenues. The country is unprepared for the worldwide transition to renewable energy, as Russian leaders continue to invest the national wealth in oil and gas while dismissing the promise of post-carbon technologies. Nor has the state made efforts to offset the direct damage that climate change will do inside the country. Optimists point to new opportunities—higher temperatures could increase agricultural yields, the melting of arctic ice may open year-round shipping lanes in the far north, and Russia could become a global nuclear-energy supplier. But the eventual post-Putin generation of Russian leaders will nonetheless face enormous handicaps, as their country finds itself weaker than at any time in the preceding century. Lucid and thought-provoking, Klimat shows how climate change is poised to alter the global order, potentially toppling even great powers from their perches.
Topic:
Climate Change, Energy Policy, Environment, Natural Resources, and Green Technology
Political Geography:
Russia and Europe

62. Where To Now? The New Challenges to Russian Independent Media

Publication Date:
11-2021
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Please join the the Program on U.S.-Russia Relations at the Harriman Institute as Ann Cooper, Professor Emerita at Columbia Journalism School, interviews Roman Badanin, founder and editor-in-chief of recently established investigative media outlet Agentstvo and former editor-in-chief of Proekt, and Galina Arapova, Director and Senior Media Lawyer of the NGO Mass Media Defence Center (Russia) and a practicing media lawyer who has who has defended journalists in Russian domestic courts and at the European Court of Human Rights. Moderated by Elise Giuliano (Harriman Institute). Independent journalism in Russia currently faces the most difficult circumstances since the advent of free media in the country. As the Kremlin expands its use of coercion under the guise of legalistic categories such as “undesirable organization” and “foreign agent,” journalists and media organizations confront a set of serious challenges. How do journalists continue their professional work and interact with state authorities, while defending freedom of expression and their personal security? More generally, what is the role of the media under current political conditions?
Topic:
Authoritarianism, Media, State Media, and Free Speech
Political Geography:
Russia and Europe

63. Queer Central Asian Activism

Publication Date:
11-2021
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Please join us for a roundtable discussion on the current state of queer, feminist activism across Central Asia, with expert panelists who are on the frontlines of this fight for equality. Co-sponsored by RUSA LGBT and the Oxus Society for Central Asian Affairs.
Topic:
LGBT+, Identity, Queer Theory, and Activism
Political Geography:
Central Asia and Asia

64. Archives of Solidarity: Yugoslav Newsreels and the Non-Aligned World

Publication Date:
11-2021
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Please join the Njegoš Endowment for Serbian Language and Culture at the East Central European Center for a lecture by the award-winning director and film scholar Mila Turajlić. Moderated by Aleksandar Bošković and Christopher Caes, co-directors of the East Central European Center. Mila Turajlić is an award-winning director born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Her films have screened at numerous festivals including Toronto and Tribeca, and have been released theatrically in Europe, North America and across the former Yugoslavia. Her most recent film The Other Side of Everything (2017) was HBO Europe’s first co-production with Serbia. It won 32 awards including the IDFA Award for Best Documentary Film, the Grand Prix for Best historical documentary released in France in 2018, the IDA Award for Best Writing and was nominated for the LUX Prize the European Parliament. Turajlić's debut feature doc, Cinema Komunisto (2011) played at over 100 festivals and won 16 awards including the Gold Hugo and the FOCAL Award for Creative Use of Archival Footage. Turajlić is currently in post-production on her third feature film, The Labudović Reels, an archival road trip through the archives of African liberation movements of the 50’s and 60’s filmed by Stevan Labudović, the cameraman of Yugoslav President Tito. In her work with archives, Turajlić researches the intersection of personal and national memories, seeking to reactivate forgotten histories, through forms ranging from lecture performances and video art to analytical essays. She teaches documentary and creative use of archives at Sciences Po and INASup in Paris, as well as at a documentary programs run by the Balkan Documentary Center, and Scottish Documentary Institute.
Topic:
Media, Film, and State Media
Political Geography:
Europe

65. The State of US-Russia Relations One Year into the Biden Administratio

Publication Date:
11-2021
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Join us for a meeting of the New York-Russia Public Policy Series, co-hosted by the Harriman Institute at Columbia University and the New York University Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia. Our virtual panel of distinguished academics, practitioners, and commentators will assess the state of US-Russia relations. Following the June presidential summit in Geneva with Vladimir Putin, US President Joe Biden commented that as "powerful and proud countries'' the United States and Russia "share a unique responsibility to manage the relationship" in order to make it "stable and predictable." What is the state of US-Russia relations following the summit and how successful have Washington and Moscow been in realizing this stated goal of more stable and predictable relations? What has been the impact of global events like the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic? Does the Russian military build-up near Ukraine augur a period of renewed tension and even conflict? What is the position of each country now towards the domestic political affairs of the other? How successful have the two sides been in finding new areas for possible coordination or cooperation?
Topic:
Diplomacy, Bilateral Relations, Leadership, Rivalry, and Strategic Interests
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, North America, and United States of America

66. Wellsprings of David Burliuk’s Art: Exploring Enduring Inspiration, Kakhovka to New York

Publication Date:
11-2021
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Please join the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute for a talk by Myroslav Shkandrij exploring the artwork of David Burliuk. Mark Andryczyk (Harriman Institute) will moderate. The art of David Burliuk, the founder of futurism in the Russian empire, went through several phases. From the moment he founded the Hylaea group near Kherson in 1903, during his travels through Siberia and Japan, and after his arrival in New York in 1922 he explored various styles. Among them were impressionism, neo-primitivism, cubo-futurism, surrealism, and ‘radiostyle.’ There were, however, some constant sources of inspiration, to which her continually returned up to his death on Long Island in 1967. These included an enthusiasm for nature, vitality, the Steppe, and the Cossack past of his ancestors. The evidence of his writings, paintings and archives provide keys to understanding puzzling aspects of his development. Myroslav Shkandrij is Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba where he taught Slavic studies. He has published books on Ukraine in the 1920s, Ukrainian-Russian relations, nationalism, avant-garde art, and contested views of revolutionary events. He has also curated a number of exhibitions dealing with the early twentieth-century avant-garde, and has translated several Ukrainian authors into English. In the fall 2021 semester, he is Visiting Professor in History, Ukrainian Studies at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University.
Topic:
Arts, Culture, Revolution, and Identity
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, and Ukraine

67. Anatoly Zverev as a Cultural Phenomenon: Remembering the Artist

Publication Date:
12-2021
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Please join the Harriman Institute and the Kolodzei Art Foundation for a presentation in conjunction with our exhibit Anatoly Zverev: Selections from the Kolodzei Art Foundation. Natalia Kolodzei of the Kolodzei Art Foundation will discuss the artist Anatoly Zverev and his legacy. Introduction by Mark Lipovetsky (Columbia Slavic Department/Harriman Institute), with recorded remarks by Tatiana Kolodzei, art historian/curator Maria Plavinsky and artist/art collector Natalia Kostaki.
Topic:
Arts and Culture
Political Geography:
Russia and Europe

68. Book Talk. "There Is Nothing for You Here" by Fiona Hill

Publication Date:
12-2021
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
lease join the Harriman Institute and the Institute for the Study of Human Rights for a book talk by Fiona Hill, author of There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century (Mariner Books, 2021). The talk will be chaired by David L. Phillips (ISHR) with Alexander Cooley (Harriman Institute) as discussant and interviewer. In There Is Nothing for You Here, a celebrated foreign policy expert and key impeachment witness reveals how declining opportunity has set America on the grim path of modern Russia—and draws on her personal journey out of poverty, as well as her unique perspectives as an historian and policy maker, to show how we can return hope to our forgotten places. Fiona Hill grew up in a world of terminal decay. The last of the local mines had closed, businesses were shuttering, and despair was etched in the faces around her. Her father urged her to get out of their blighted corner of northern England: “There is nothing for you here, pet,” he said. The coal-miner’s daughter managed to go further than he ever could have dreamed. She studied in Moscow and at Harvard, became an American citizen, and served three U.S. Presidents. But in the heartlands of both Russia and the United States, she saw troubling reflections of her hometown and similar populist impulses. By the time she offered her brave testimony in the first impeachment inquiry of President Trump, Hill knew that the desperation of forgotten people was driving American politics over the brink—and that we were running out of time to save ourselves from Russia’s fate. In this powerful, deeply personal account, she shares what she has learned, and shows why expanding opportunity is the only long-term hope for our democracy. Fiona Hill is the Robert Bosch Senior Fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution. From 2017 to 2019, she served as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council. From 2006 to 2009, she served as national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council. She has researched and published extensively on issues related to Russia, the Caucasus, Central Asia, regional conflicts, energy, and strategic issues. Coauthor of Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin and The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold, she holds a master's degree in Soviet studies and a doctorate in history from Harvard University and a master's in Russian and modern history from St. Andrews University in Scotland. She also has pursued studies at Moscow's Maurice Thorez Institute of Foreign Languages. Hill is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and lives in the Washington, DC, area.
Topic:
Diplomacy, Military Strategy, Hegemony, Conflict, Violence, and Strategic Interests
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, North America, and United States of America

69. Russia in Africa: Soviet Legacies, Current Objectives, Local Responses

Publication Date:
12-2021
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
In recent years, Russia has stepped up its engagement in Africa, forging military and security agreements as well as business relationships with leaders in several states. What lies behind Russia’s “return” to Africa? During the Cold War, Africa constituted a major site of Soviet geopolitical competition with the U.S. Does this history, as well as the legacy of Soviet antiracism, inform Russia’s current goals and actions on the continent? Panelists will explore this issue, as well as the impact of Russia’s presence on security and humanitarian crises within Africa. What has been the reaction of various local actors to Russia’s presence? Panelists will also discuss the policy response: how should the international community and the West respond to Russian engagement in Africa?
Topic:
Military Strategy, Hegemony, Foreign Interference, Strategic Interests, and Influence
Political Geography:
Africa, Russia, and Europe

70. Residential Institutions for Disabled People in Russia: Two Models of Care

Publication Date:
12-2021
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Please join us for an event in our Work of Care in Russia speaker series, a talk with Anna Klepikova, Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the European University at St. Petersburg, and author of I Must Be A Fool (European University Press, 2018). Moderated by Svetlana Borodina (Harriman Institute). Anna Klepikova’s dissertation field research was conducted in two residential institutions for people with disabilities in St. Petersburg. Klepikova was inspired to study institutional disability care after watching an NGO volunteer recruitment ad about an orphanage for children with disabilities. She decided to learn more about the volunteers’ motivations and experience by joining them as a volunteer and participant observer for her dissertation research. At the orphanage, Klepikova witnessed a conflict developing between the NGO volunteers and the nurses: a clash between two models of care on the practical level, and two versions of understanding disability on the ideological level. This disconnect resembled the conflict between Western humanistic pedagogics and a patriarchal discriminating approach to disability and difference. After a year, Klepikova transferred to volunteer at a similar institution for adults. There, she found a different conflict between the volunteers and medical staff due to the latter being responsible for various psychiatric restrictions, forced administration of sedative drugs, and involuntary hospitalizations. In this case, the conflict was between the social-constructionist and medicalized approaches to mental illness. In this presentation, Klepikova discusses the differences and intersections in these polar approaches to disability care. Introducing her ethnographic material, she reflects on the nature of anthropological understanding that might form various grounds for solidarity.
Topic:
Health Care Policy, Humanitarian Intervention, Mental Health, and NGOs
Political Geography:
Russia and Europe

71. Memory Battles and Ukrainian Contemporary Art

Publication Date:
12-2021
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Please join the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute for a talk by Kateryna Iakovlenko entitled "Memory Battles and Ukrainian Contemporary Art." After the 2014 Maidan, memory and Ukrainian history became essential topics for Ukrainian contemporary artists. Facing contemporary political challenges and war, they started looking to archives, blind historical spots, and their family history. The historiographical turn in Ukrainian art became a part of an archival impulse process in global art (Hal Foster, 2004). What makes Ukrainian art unique? What specific topics and methods do Ukrainian artists provide? Moreover, how has all this movement influenced intellectual discussion in Ukraine? Kateryna Iakovlenko, Ukrainian curator, critic, and Fulbright Research Fellow at the Scientific Shevchenko Society in the USA, will try to answer these questions. During her talk, Kateryna Iakovlenko will introduce the new book, Stone Hits Stone, which presents research and artistic reflection on Ukrainian history, political violence, the national historical heritage, the avant-garde, and Soviet utopia within the framework of Nikita Kadan’s artistic practice. The book was published as part of the PinchukArtCentre Research Platform and on the occasion of a solo exhibition by Nikita Kadan entitled Stone Hits Stone, where Iakovlenko was an assistant curator, contributor author and book editor.
Topic:
Nationalism, Arts, Social Movement, Memory, and Revolution
Political Geography:
Europe and Ukraine

72. Book Talk. "Air Raid" by Polina Barskova with Translator Valzhyna Mort

Publication Date:
12-2021
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Please join the Harriman Institute for a discussion with poet and scholar Polina Barskova about her new volume, Air Raid (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021). She will be joined by translator Valzhyna Mort and moderator Mark Lipovetsky. This event is part of our Contemporary Culture series. The Siege of Leningrad began in 1941 and lasted 872 days, resulting in the most destructive blockade in history. Already shaken by Stalin’s purges of the ’30s, Leningrad withstood the siege at a great human cost. Air Raid takes us through the archives of memory and literature in this city of death. Polina Barskova’s polyphonic poems stretch the boundaries of poetic form—this is what we’re left with after poetry’s failure to save nations and people: post-death, post-Holocaust, post-Siege, post-revolution; post-marriage and post-literature. How does language react to such a catastrophe? How does a poet find language for what cannot be told? This new translation of a leading contemporary Russian poet confronts English excavating its muteness, stutter, and curse.
Topic:
Arts, Military Strategy, Culture, Memory, World War II, and Poetry
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, and Soviet Union

73. Book Talk. America Kleptocracy by Casey Michel

Publication Date:
12-2021
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Please join us for a discussion with Casey Michel, author of American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World's Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History (St. Martin's Press, November 2021). Moderated by Alexander Cooley, Director of the Harriman Institute. A remarkable debut by one of America's premier young reporters on financial corruption, Casey Michel's American Kleptocracy offers an explosive investigation into how the United States of America built the largest illicit offshore finance system the world has ever known. An indefatigable young American journalist who has virtually cornered the international kleptocracy beat on the US end of the black aquifer. —The Los Angeles Review of Books For years, one country has acted as the greatest offshore haven in the world, attracting hundreds of billions of dollars in illicit finance tied directly to corrupt regimes, extremist networks, and the worst the world has to offer. But it hasn’t been the sand-splattered Caribbean islands, or even traditional financial secrecy havens like Switzerland or Panama, that have come to dominate the offshoring world. Instead, the country profiting the most also happens to be the one that still claims to be the moral leader of the free world, and the one that claims to be leading the fight against the crooked and the corrupt: the USA. American Kleptocracy examines just how the United States’ implosion into a center of global offshoring took place: how states like Delaware and Nevada perfected the art of the anonymous shell company, and how post-9/11 reformers watched their success usher in a new flood of illicit finance directly into the U.S.; how African despots and post-Soviet oligarchs came to dominate American coastlines, American industries, and entire cities and small towns across the American Midwest; how Nazi-era lobbyists birthed an entire industry of spin-men whitewashing trans-national crooks and despots, and how dirty money has now begun infiltrating America's universities and think tanks and cultural centers; and how those on the front-line are trying to restore America's legacy of anti-corruption leadership—and finally end this reign of American kleptocracy.
Topic:
Corruption, Finance, Kleptocracy, and Banking
Political Geography:
North America and United States of America

74. Book Talk. Atomic Steppe: How Kazakhstan Gave Up the Bomb by Togzhan Kassenova

Publication Date:
12-2021
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Please join the Harriman Institute for a discussion with author Togzhan Kassenova about her new book, Atomic Steppe: How Kazakhstan Gave Up the Bomb (Stanford University Press, 2022). Atomic Steppe tells the untold true story of how the obscure country of Kazakhstan said no to the most powerful weapons in human history. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the marginalized Central Asian republic suddenly found itself with the world's fourth largest nuclear arsenal on its territory. Would it give up these fire-ready weapons—or try to become a Central Asian North Korea? This book takes us inside Kazakhstan's extraordinary and little-known nuclear history from the Soviet period to the present. For Soviet officials, Kazakhstan's steppe was not an ecological marvel or beloved homeland, but an empty patch of dirt ideal for nuclear testing. Two-headed lambs were just the beginning of the resulting public health disaster for Kazakhstan—compounded, when the Soviet Union collapsed, by the daunting burden of becoming an overnight nuclear power. Equipped with intimate personal perspective and untapped archival resources, Togzhan Kassenova introduces us to the engineers turned diplomats, villagers turned activists, and scientists turned pacifists who worked toward disarmament. With thousands of nuclear weapons still present around the world, the story of how Kazakhs gave up their nuclear inheritance holds urgent lessons for global security.
Topic:
Arms Control and Proliferation, Nuclear Weapons, Military Strategy, and Denuclearization
Political Geography:
Kazakhstan and Asia

75. New Research on Transitional Justice

Publication Date:
02-2011
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Participants: Aryeh Neier (Founder, Human Rights Watch and President, Open Society Institute), Monika Nalepa (Political Science Department, Notre Dame University), Lara Nettelfield (Post-Doctoral Fellow, Harriman Institute, Columbia University), Tina Rosenberg (Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Haunted Land: Facing Europe\'s Ghosts after Communism), Ruti Teitel (Ernst C. Stiefel Professor of Comparative Law, and Associate Director, Center for International Law, New York Law School, and Visiting Professor, London School of Economics), and Leslie Vinjamuri (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London). This event is part of the "Human Rights in the Post-Communist World: Strategies and Outcomes " series (Harriman Core Project 2010-2011).
Topic:
Human Rights, Human Welfare, International Law, Post Colonialism, and Law
Political Geography:
Africa, New York, and Europe

76. The Politics of International Media Rankings

Publication Date:
03-2011
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Participants: Lee Becker (Professor and Director, James. M. Cox Jr. Center for International Mass Communication Training and Research, University of Georgia), Karin Karlekar (Senior Researcher and Managing Editor, Freedom of the Press Index, Freedom House), Anne Nelson (Adjunct Associate Professor, Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs and former Executive Director, Committee to Protect Journalists) This event is part of the "Human Rights in the Post-Communist World: Strategies and Outcomes " series (Harriman Core Project 2010-2011).
Topic:
Democratization, Science and Technology, International Affairs, and Mass Media
Political Geography:
Georgia

77. Mobilizing for Human Rights

Publication Date:
10-2010
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Beth Simmons (Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affair, Harvard University) Discussants: Kenneth Roth (President, Human Rights Watch); Professor Alexander Cooley(Political Science Department, Barnard College).
Topic:
Civil Society, Human Rights, International Law, International Organization, and Treaties and Agreements

78. How Central is Central Asia? Part 1/3

Publication Date:
10-2010
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
The Third Annual Russia/Eurasia Forum: How Central is Central Asia? Sponsored by the Harriman Institute, Columbia University, and the Kathryn W. and Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University
Topic:
Foreign Policy and Diplomacy
Political Geography:
Russia, Central Asia, and Eurasia

79. How Central is Central Asia? Part 2/3

Publication Date:
10-2010
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
The Third Annual Russia/Eurasia Forum: How Central is Central Asia? Sponsored by the Harriman Institute, Columbia University, and the Kathryn W. and Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University.
Topic:
Energy Policy, Oil, and Poverty
Political Geography:
Russia, Central Asia, and Eurasia

80. How Central is Central Asia? Part 3/3

Publication Date:
10-2010
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
The Third Annual Russia/Eurasia Forum: How Central is Central Asia? Sponsored by the Harriman Institute, Columbia University, and the Kathryn W. and Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University.
Topic:
Foreign Policy and International Affairs
Political Geography:
Russia, United States, Central Asia, and Eurasia

81. The Justice Cascade

Publication Date:
10-2010
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Kathryn Sikkink (Regents Professor and McKnight Presidential Chair in Political Science,University of Minnesota) Discussants: Richard Dicker (Director, International Justice Program, Human RightsWatch); Robert O. Keohane (Professor of Public and International Affairs, PrincetonUniversity, and past president of the American Political Science Association).
Topic:
Civil Society, Human Rights, International Law, and International Affairs