Event Date: January 26, 2022 - 12:00pm to 1:30pm EST
Location: online

Presented by CIPS

‘There is a real risk for new armed conflict in Europe’.  These are the chilling words of NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. Russia has amassed an estimated 100,000 combat-ready troops, tanks, and heavy military equipment near Ukraine’s border. So far high-level talks with between Moscow and NATO and the United States have failed, as NATO refuses to meet President Putin’s guarantee that Ukraine and former Soviet nations will never be invited to join the military alliance.  In a fast-moving, rapidly changing situation, this expert panel will examine the background to the current crisis, assess the likelihood of war, the prospects of a negotiated solution, and the implications for Ukraine, NATO and global security.                                                                                                                                                                                             

Speakers:

Oxana Shevel is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Tufts University where her research and teaching focuses on Ukraine and the post-Soviet region. Her current research projects examine the sources of citizenship policies in the post-Communist states and religious politics in Ukraine. Her research interests also include comparative memory politics and the politics of nationalism and nation-building. She is the author of award-winning Migration, Refugee Policy, and State Building in Postcommunist Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2011), which examines how the politics of national identity and strategies of the UNHCR shape refugee admission policies in the post-Communist region. Shevel’s research appeared in a variety of journals, including Comparative Politics, Current History, East European Politics and Societies, Europe-Asia Studies, Geopolitics, Nationality Papers, Post-Soviet Affairs, Political Science Quarterly, Slavic Review and in edited volumes. She is a member of PONARS Eurasia scholarly network, a country expert on Ukraine for Global Citizenship Observatory (GLOBALCIT), and an associate of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. She currently serves as President of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies (AAUS) and Vice President of the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN).

Dominique Arel holds the Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa. He is the author of Ukraine’s Unnamed War, a book co-written with Jesse Driscoll (UC San Diego) to be published by Cambridge University Press in August 2022. The book presents an analytical narrative of Maidan, the annexation of Crimea, the war in Donbas, and Ukraine’s transformation and offers a path to conflict resolution. He has written extensively on language and regional politics in Ukraine, including in the volume The Battle for Ukrainian (Harvard University Press, 2017) His most recent publication, “Jerry Hough, Scholar and Entrepreneur” (Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 2021) is an homage to the late Sovietologist and his impact on a generation of graduate students. Arel was also an editor in the volumes Census and Identity (2001), Rebounding Identities: The Politics of Identity in Russia and Ukraine (2006) and Le gouvernement des langues (2010). He has organized since the Annual Danyliw Research Seminar on Contemporary Ukraine at University of Ottawa, and has served since 1998 as Director of the Annual World Convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN), at Columbia University and which features 700+ international scholars working on the post-Communist world, nationalism studies and migration.

Chair:

Jean-François Ratelle is a replacement assistant professor of conflict studies and human rights at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA) at the University of Ottawa as well as an affiliated researcher at the Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at Carleton University. His main research interests include violent extremism, civil wars, foreign fighters focusing primarily on Russia and Eurasia. He recently co-edited a volume dedicated to foreign fighters and violent extremism in Eurasia entitled Networked Insurgencies and Foreign Fighters in Eurasia. His most recent publications have appeared in Critical Studies on Security, Comparative Politics, Caucasus Survey, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, and Terrorism and Political Violence.