Events Past

Series: Lecture

Afghan society has been indelibly marked in by war and the exodus of a large part of its population. But it also characterized by the presence of innumerable international and nongovernmental organizations, as well as armed forces from many countries. Adopting mobility as an analytical key, and mindful of the significance of analysing processes and phenomena across scales, Alessandro Monsutti presented a global though intimate ethnography of Afghanistan based on my new book that offers a decentered perspective on the contemporary world.

Series: Seminars and Colloquia

The Macedonia name dispute, one of the very first dispute of the post-Cold War era in Southeast Europe, was finally settled in June 2018 with the signing of the Prespa Agreement. The deal between Greece and North Macedonia was hailed as historic and an important breakthrough for the entire region’s integration to Western institutions. However, because the name dispute was broadly seen internationally as an incomprehensible spat, without fully grasping the high emotional load and the significant political stakes in both countries, not enough attention has been paid to the complex process leading to the settling of the dispute and to the challenges of a demanding implementation process. Even the very decision to embark on negotiations for a comprehensive settlement entailed high costs for uncertain future returns for both sides. The talk introduced the project that aims to develop a comprehensive understanding of the decision making process that brought the two sides to the negotiating table, the complex negotiations that led to the Prespa Agreement and the challenging implementation. Underpinning all these is the role of the European Union, both in actively facilitating the rapprochment and in shaping the political conditions that enabled the settlement through the process of European integration. The project aims to draw conclusions about the complex and multifaceted role that the EU plays in disputes in Southeast Europe.

Series: Panels and Discussions

The election of Donald Trump as 45th president of the US four years ago was a sea change in many ways, but above all a sign of rising populism and a changing world order. His tenure has unsettled the transatlantic relationship, questioned the nature of multilateralism by insisting on transactional relations, doubted the need for NATO. In recent months, not only the fight against the coronavirus, but also the newly inflamed debate on structural racism have dominated the country’s domestic political discourse, which has generated global resonance far beyond the borders of the US.

Series: Panels and Discussions

The election of Donald Trump as 45th president of the US four years ago was a sea change in many ways, but above all a sign of rising populism and a changing world order. His tenure has unsettled the transatlantic relationship, questioned the nature of multilateralism by insisting on transactional relations, doubted the need for NATO. In recent months, not only the fight against the coronavirus, but also the newly inflamed debate on structural racism have dominated the country’s domestic political discourse, which has generated global resonance far beyond the borders of the US.

Series: Seminars and Colloquia

With technological change so rapid, and global concerns rivaling the traditionally local focus of most human beings, media assume an ever more important role in our societies. That is particularly true in central and eastern Europe, where journalists and their audience mostly have had a mere three decades to establish and mold independent media that suit or reflect their societies. Just in the weeks since Alison Smale was writing to Ivan on her chosen subject, developments in the former Soviet space – in this case, Belarus, and its Baltic and Polish neighbors, and Russia and Germany over Alexei Navalny – have shown their power to surprise most outside observers, and thus to influence the world. Who is telling this tale, and how?

Series: Conferences and Workshops

The eighth graduate workshop of the Russian Art and Culture Group considered the deep implications posed by the problem of religious art by examining the various ways in which the icon was adapted in modern Russia to serve different artistic, philosophical, and political agendas.

Series: Lecture

Her talk told a story about forensics as an art of paying attention. It offered some of the ingredients of the book that Mohsen Lihidheb and Amade M'Charek are currently working on in the context of the Emma Goldman Award.

Series: Seminars and Colloquia

On 10 July 2020, by a decree of the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the basilica of Hagia Sophia – the central monument of the Byzantine Empire and the entire Orthodox world – was turned from a museum into a mosque. The conversion attracted worldwide attention and the leaders of the US, the EU and Russia, as well as most international institutions, appealed to Erdoğan not to go ahead with the plan. However, all the warnings were ignored and the first festive Muslim service was held on 24 July, with the country’s leadership in attendance. In this talk, various aspects of the conversion of Hagia Sophia, including political, religious, cultural and art-historical issues of this most significant event, were discussed.

Series: Seminars and Colloquia

Freedom came to Serbia in 2000, with a decade-long delay with respect to the rest of the post-Communist Europe. Ever since, the country has been on a wobbly transition towards an established democracy and EU membership. More than Serbia’s inability to settle firmly on a Westward geopolitical course and its uneasy relationship with its neighbors, it is the lack of trust between the citizens and their government internally that stood in the way of the construction of a lasting democracy. Was there a political conspiracy to murder of Zoran Djindjic, the first democratically elected Prime Minister since WW2? Did a criminal network steal more than three thousand babies from mid-1950s to 2000, and gave them to illegal adoption? Is sustainable democratisation compatible with the unreformed security service and their monopoly on secrets? Is the mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic by the current regime historically unique, or can it be set in the broader historical perspective of state capture and disregard of the independent institutions in Serbia and Yugoslavia? The answer to these questions concerning Serbia can serve as an allegory for all of the post-Communist world’s untold stories that combined, offer an explanation to its shaky democratization in the last three decades. Populists and their outlandish conspiracy theories did not come from thin air. It is the lack of transparency and accountability of the mainstream governments that created reservoirs of disgruntled citizens thus transforming them in an easy prey for the enemies of democracy.

Series: Seminars and Colloquia

The talk dealt with the impact of Enlightenment ideas on rethinking the image of Cossacks in the Ukrainian peripheries of the Russian Empire in the second half of the eighteenth century. The mechanisms through which eighteenth century West European Enlightenment political and historical thought provided intellectual resources for both orientalizing the Cossack political tradition and empowering it were examined. Orientalist discourse was introduced by Voltaire, used by Saint Petersburg enlightened absolutists to justify the elimination of Cossack autonomies, and accepted by a segment of the local elite. On the other hand, Enlightenment political thought, exemplified in particular by Rousseau and Montesquieu, was used to go beyond traditional estate and regional particularism, to rethink the Cossack political tradition in more universalist categories of republicanism and to set it against Catherine II’s supposed ‘despotism’.