Past Events

	Title	Date	Type	Speakers
	The New Asian Geopolitics	Mon, 29.04.2019, 18:00	Panels and Discussions	Shivshankar Menon	The New Asian Geopolitics Mon, 29.04.2019, 18:00 Speakers: Shivshankar Menon Series: Panels and Discussions In this talk, Ambassador Menon considered the longer term drivers of this phenomenon and where they might take the geopolitics of Asia in the future. Read more

	European Universities	Mon, 15.04.2019, 16:00	Seminars and Colloquia	Christian Rogler Jakub Jirsa	European Universities A Laboratory of Dead-End Paths Mon, 15.04.2019, 16:00 Speakers: Christian Rogler Jakub Jirsa Series: Seminars and Colloquia Universities all around the globe nowadays find themselves in an almost schizophrenic situation: highly successful and growing on one hand, yet suffering from pressure and uncertainty on the other hand. The presentation will explain how this situation is caused by problems of accountability that universities face in the age of popular democracy. Secondly, it will more specifically discuss the problems of humanities departments in Central Europe. These institutions share the global problems, but in addition face specific problems that originate from the troubled history of the region (both before 1989 and after). In many cases, this leads to the failure of local universities to enact their own legislation that would create a transparent and stable environment for research and education. The talk referred to particular cases that nicely demonstrate the tremendous impact that these problems have on concrete university life. Read more
European Universities A Laboratory of Dead-End Paths Mon, 15.04.2019, 16:00 Speakers: Christian Rogler Jakub Jirsa Series: Seminars and Colloquia Universities all around the globe nowadays find themselves in an almost schizophrenic situation: highly successful and growing on one hand, yet suffering from pressure and uncertainty on the other hand. The presentation will explain how this situation is caused by problems of accountability that universities face in the age of popular democracy. Secondly, it will more specifically discuss the problems of humanities departments in Central Europe. These institutions share the global problems, but in addition face specific problems that originate from the troubled history of the region (both before 1989 and after). In many cases, this leads to the failure of local universities to enact their own legislation that would create a transparent and stable environment for research and education. The talk referred to particular cases that nicely demonstrate the tremendous impact that these problems have on concrete university life. Read more
	Vicious and Virtuous Circles in the Rural Economy of East European Borderlands (19th-20th Century)	Mon, 08.04.2019, 16:00	Seminars and Colloquia	Irina MarinRolf Bauer	Vicious and Virtuous Circles in the Rural Economy of East European Borderlands (19th-20th Century) Mon, 08.04.2019, 16:00 Speakers: Irina MarinRolf Bauer Series: Seminars and Colloquia The borderlands of Eastern Europe, that is the territories on the edges of the three empires Austro-Hungarian, Tsarist and Ottoman, remained predominantly rural in character well into the 20th century. As late as 1960 up to 40% of the population in the region still lived and worked in the countryside. The social history of the region is thus inevitably the history of the rural communities that inhabited this space and this history is a mixture of development and underdevelopment. Poverty and wealth coexisted side-by-side begging the question of what propelled some rural communities forward into the 20th century and why others still retained an outlook and cultivation techniques that harked back to the Middle Ages. Read more
Vicious and Virtuous Circles in the Rural Economy of East European Borderlands (19th-20th Century) Mon, 08.04.2019, 16:00 Speakers: Irina MarinRolf Bauer Series: Seminars and Colloquia The borderlands of Eastern Europe, that is the territories on the edges of the three empires Austro-Hungarian, Tsarist and Ottoman, remained predominantly rural in character well into the 20th century. As late as 1960 up to 40% of the population in the region still lived and worked in the countryside. The social history of the region is thus inevitably the history of the rural communities that inhabited this space and this history is a mixture of development and underdevelopment. Poverty and wealth coexisted side-by-side begging the question of what propelled some rural communities forward into the 20th century and why others still retained an outlook and cultivation techniques that harked back to the Middle Ages. Read more
	Imaginaries of Democracy and Dissent	Wed, 03.04.2019, 18:00	Lecture	Jiri Priban	Imaginaries of Democracy and Dissent From Kelsen's Legal Normativism to Patočka's Philosophical Heresy, and Beyond Wed, 03.04.2019, 18:00 Speakers: Jiri Priban Series: Lecture When Charles Taylor engaged in explorations of modern social imaginaries more than two decades ago, he could hardly have predicted how popular his inquiry would become among political and legal philosophers in recent years. Imaginaries precede theoretical knowledge and refer to the ways people imagine and share their social existence. As deeply entrenched modes of collective understanding, they evolve in society and represent a symbolic dimension in which members imagine their collective existence and living as a whole. Read more
Imaginaries of Democracy and Dissent From Kelsen's Legal Normativism to Patočka's Philosophical Heresy, and Beyond Wed, 03.04.2019, 18:00 Speakers: Jiri Priban Series: Lecture When Charles Taylor engaged in explorations of modern social imaginaries more than two decades ago, he could hardly have predicted how popular his inquiry would become among political and legal philosophers in recent years. Imaginaries precede theoretical knowledge and refer to the ways people imagine and share their social existence. As deeply entrenched modes of collective understanding, they evolve in society and represent a symbolic dimension in which members imagine their collective existence and living as a whole. Read more
	Workers’ Experiences of Post-Soviet Deindustrialisation	Mon, 01.04.2019, 16:00	Seminars and Colloquia	Anastasiya Ryabchuk Marci Shore	Workers’ Experiences of Post-Soviet Deindustrialisation Mon, 01.04.2019, 16:00 Speakers: Anastasiya Ryabchuk Marci Shore Series: Seminars and Colloquia As the socialist project went bankrupt with the break-up of the USSR, workers were left in an ideological vacuum. It was filled either by hope-filled dreams of successful individual adaptation to the capitalist order, or by nostalgic sentiment towards the Soviet past as a means of critiquing the present, or (on the contrary) by blaming all the current problems on the Soviet past in an attempt at ‘decommunisation’ and investing in nationalist or religious conservative projects. Read more
Workers’ Experiences of Post-Soviet Deindustrialisation Mon, 01.04.2019, 16:00 Speakers: Anastasiya Ryabchuk Marci Shore Series: Seminars and Colloquia As the socialist project went bankrupt with the break-up of the USSR, workers were left in an ideological vacuum. It was filled either by hope-filled dreams of successful individual adaptation to the capitalist order, or by nostalgic sentiment towards the Soviet past as a means of critiquing the present, or (on the contrary) by blaming all the current problems on the Soviet past in an attempt at ‘decommunisation’ and investing in nationalist or religious conservative projects. Read more
	The Architecture of Global Migration Politics	Thu, 28.03.2019, 18:00	Panels and Discussions	Ayşe Çağlar Ruth Wodak	The Architecture of Global Migration Politics Thu, 28.03.2019, 18:00 Speakers: Ayşe Çağlar Ruth Wodak Series: Panels and Discussions The new Global Compacts on Refugees and Migrants are important documents of the global politics of migration. They are also valuable documents to understand the way migration is politically and intellectually constructed as a research and policy issue. In their multi-stakeholder and market-inspired approach, these documents identify the role of migration/migrants in global economy prioritizing and according varying responsibilities on different groups of actors within the language of rights and humanitarian protection to secure sustainable “orderly and safe” migration. The concepts of responsibility and protection are central to the architecture of a global system of protection envisioned in these documents. They are giving shape to the 21st century notion of humanitarianism. The public debate aimed to put these compacts under scrutiny to explore their semantics, blind spots, as well as their political and social implications in dealing the complex reality of global migration. We ask “what are the terms, the sites, scales, and strategies of protection”; “what are the economic and political logics informing them”; and “how are the responsibilities of different groups defined and envisaged to be shared, and to what consequences”. Read more
The Architecture of Global Migration Politics Thu, 28.03.2019, 18:00 Speakers: Ayşe Çağlar Ruth Wodak Series: Panels and Discussions The new Global Compacts on Refugees and Migrants are important documents of the global politics of migration. They are also valuable documents to understand the way migration is politically and intellectually constructed as a research and policy issue. In their multi-stakeholder and market-inspired approach, these documents identify the role of migration/migrants in global economy prioritizing and according varying responsibilities on different groups of actors within the language of rights and humanitarian protection to secure sustainable “orderly and safe” migration. The concepts of responsibility and protection are central to the architecture of a global system of protection envisioned in these documents. They are giving shape to the 21st century notion of humanitarianism. The public debate aimed to put these compacts under scrutiny to explore their semantics, blind spots, as well as their political and social implications in dealing the complex reality of global migration. We ask “what are the terms, the sites, scales, and strategies of protection”; “what are the economic and political logics informing them”; and “how are the responsibilities of different groups defined and envisaged to be shared, and to what consequences”. Read more
	How Smart People Got Too Powerful and Why That Might be About to Change	Wed, 27.03.2019, 16:00	Seminars and Colloquia	David F Goodhart	How Smart People Got Too Powerful and Why That Might be About to Change Wed, 27.03.2019, 16:00 Speakers: David F Goodhart Series: Seminars and Colloquia There is one overarching explanation for current political discontents that is hiding in plain sight: cognitive ability—that hard to define ability that helps people to pass exams and then process information efficiently in their professional lives—has become the gold standard of human esteem. People with higher levels of cognitive ability—what one might call the cognitive classes—now shape society. And they do so broadly in their own interests favouring openness, autonomy, mobility and a social fluidity that they find easy to navigate. Read more
How Smart People Got Too Powerful and Why That Might be About to Change Wed, 27.03.2019, 16:00 Speakers: David F Goodhart Series: Seminars and Colloquia There is one overarching explanation for current political discontents that is hiding in plain sight: cognitive ability—that hard to define ability that helps people to pass exams and then process information efficiently in their professional lives—has become the gold standard of human esteem. People with higher levels of cognitive ability—what one might call the cognitive classes—now shape society. And they do so broadly in their own interests favouring openness, autonomy, mobility and a social fluidity that they find easy to navigate. Read more
	Messianism and Sociopolitical Revolution in Islam	Mon, 25.03.2019, 16:00	Seminars and Colloquia	Ayşe Çağlar Said Arjomand	Messianism and Sociopolitical Revolution in Islam Mon, 25.03.2019, 16:00 Speakers: Ayşe Çağlar Said Arjomand Series: Seminars and Colloquia This report of Saïd Arjomand`s work on progress followed a new theoretical approach to the sociology of revolution offered in Revolution: Structure and Meaning in History to appear next month with regard to the motivation to revolutionary action. This approach shifts the focus of analysis from the putatively general causes of revolutions to the specific motivation and consequences of revolutionary social action in historical and comparative perspective. Within this framework, major instances of Islamicate revolutionary transformation beginning with Muhammad’s constitutive revolution and the rise of Islam in seventh-century Arabia, followed by four cases of medieval and early modern Mahdist revolutions are examined in the companion volume he is working on. The persistence as well as radical transformation of the millennial motivation in revolutionary movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries will be treated in the concluding chapters. The presentation briefly outlined the conclusions regarding the Fatimid revolution in North Africa at the beginning of the tenth century and the Berber revolution of Mahdi Ibn Tumart in Southwestern Maghreb in the mid-twelfth century but mostly focus in the Shi`ite Messianism in occupied Iraq and the Sunni reaction to it in the form of DA`ESH/ISIS in the concluding chapter. Read more
Messianism and Sociopolitical Revolution in Islam Mon, 25.03.2019, 16:00 Speakers: Ayşe Çağlar Said Arjomand Series: Seminars and Colloquia This report of Saïd Arjomand`s work on progress followed a new theoretical approach to the sociology of revolution offered in Revolution: Structure and Meaning in History to appear next month with regard to the motivation to revolutionary action. This approach shifts the focus of analysis from the putatively general causes of revolutions to the specific motivation and consequences of revolutionary social action in historical and comparative perspective. Within this framework, major instances of Islamicate revolutionary transformation beginning with Muhammad’s constitutive revolution and the rise of Islam in seventh-century Arabia, followed by four cases of medieval and early modern Mahdist revolutions are examined in the companion volume he is working on. The persistence as well as radical transformation of the millennial motivation in revolutionary movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries will be treated in the concluding chapters. The presentation briefly outlined the conclusions regarding the Fatimid revolution in North Africa at the beginning of the tenth century and the Berber revolution of Mahdi Ibn Tumart in Southwestern Maghreb in the mid-twelfth century but mostly focus in the Shi`ite Messianism in occupied Iraq and the Sunni reaction to it in the form of DA`ESH/ISIS in the concluding chapter. Read more
	Brexit: Deal or No Deal? What’s next for Britain and the EU?	Sun, 24.03.2019, 11:00	Panels and Discussions	Ivan Vejvoda Mary KaldorTessa Szyszkowitz, Tom Tugendhat, Denis Staunton	Brexit: Deal or No Deal? What’s next for Britain and the EU? Sun, 24.03.2019, 11:00 Speakers: Ivan Vejvoda Mary KaldorTessa Szyszkowitz, Tom Tugendhat, Denis Staunton Series: Panels and Discussions In June 2016, the majority of the British population voted in favour of the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union. Since then, this decision has created enormous political waves within Great Britain – it has been in fact already termed as the biggest political crisis in the UK since World War II. Read more
Brexit: Deal or No Deal? What’s next for Britain and the EU? Sun, 24.03.2019, 11:00 Speakers: Ivan Vejvoda Mary KaldorTessa Szyszkowitz, Tom Tugendhat, Denis Staunton Series: Panels and Discussions In June 2016, the majority of the British population voted in favour of the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union. Since then, this decision has created enormous political waves within Great Britain – it has been in fact already termed as the biggest political crisis in the UK since World War II. Read more
	Systemic Earthquake: National, Regional and the Global Dimensions	Tue, 19.03.2019, 18:00	Panels and Discussions	Ivan KrastevAhmet Davutoğlu	Systemic Earthquake: National, Regional and the Global Dimensions Tue, 19.03.2019, 18:00 Speakers: Ivan KrastevAhmet Davutoğlu Series: Panels and Discussions In the second event of the series “Geopolitical Talks” IWM Permanent Fellow Ivan Krastev talked with Ahmet Davutoğlu, former Prime Minister of Turkey (2014-2016), about the current geopolitical challenges on national, regional and international level. Read more
Systemic Earthquake: National, Regional and the Global Dimensions Tue, 19.03.2019, 18:00 Speakers: Ivan KrastevAhmet Davutoğlu Series: Panels and Discussions In the second event of the series “Geopolitical Talks” IWM Permanent Fellow Ivan Krastev talked with Ahmet Davutoğlu, former Prime Minister of Turkey (2014-2016), about the current geopolitical challenges on national, regional and international level. Read more