As many around the world, Europeans are focused on the war in Ukraine and on the geopolitical events and diplomatic actions surrounding this military invasion taking place on European soil. European integration is changing and being changed before our eyes, with consequences well beyond prices at the pump or the outflux of Ukrainians fleeing war.
In setting up this lecture series, IFE hopes to add depth and background to our understanding of the war by drawing on our networks of university professors and researchers, in three European countries.
– Lecture 1 – March 14th, Sciences-Po professor and historian Pascal Cauchy, “Le Conflit Russia-Ukraine (2014-2022): Essai d’interpretations ”.
Pascal gives a useful presentation of the historical causes of the conflict, starting by eliminating the historical reasons – often cited – which he considers unfounded: Ukraine really being still “Little Russia” of the 14th century; nostalgia for the Russian empire; or even nostalgia for the Soviet Union. Pascal traces the source of the current war to the period beginning in 1991, after the fall of the Berlin wall and the disintegration of the USSR, when a stable world order that would replace east-west cold war with east-west cooperation, as envisioned by Gorbachev, failed to materialize. Pascal Cauchy demonstrates what happened instead, leading to the beginning of war in Ukraine in 2014, a war which, now intensified and rendered more visible, continues today.
– Lecture 2 – March 28, Yauheni Kryzhanouski specialist in European comparative politics, will explore the question “What Does the Nature of Political Regimes Tell us about the War in Ukraine?” .
Yauheni Kryzhanouski is a teacher/researcher at the University of Strasbourg and its Institute for Societies, Actors and Government in Europe (SAGE) Also associated with the Eastern European Research Group at Paris’ prestigious EHESS (advanced social science research institute), Yauheni is a native of Belarus, of Russian and Ukrainian parents.
– Lecture 3 – April 21st, Oviedo-based NGO Asturias Acoge, “Refugiados Ucranianos en España: El punto de vista de una ONG” .
