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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.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has reached another crucial point. The Ukrainian counter-offensive in early September surprised the world and the Kremlin, forcing a hasty Russian retreat. In response, the Kremlin declared mobilization and pushed on with the annexation of the territories it had managed to hold. Russia has also escalated its threats against the U.S. and Europe, aiming to undermine the Western resolve in supporting Ukraine. Our panel of experts on Russia and Ukraine will discuss the developments that we can expect in the next few months. What would be the impact of Putin’s mobilization on the war effort and on regime support in Russia? How would the mobilization and the annexations affect the Ukrainian counter-offensive? How do Ukraine and Ukrainian society respond to this escalation? How should we understand and deal with Putin’s nuclear threats?

Register for the Zoom webinar. Watch on YouTube. 

This event is supported by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York.

SPEAKERS

Timothy Frye, Marshall D. Shulman Professor of Post-Soviet Foreign Policy at Columbia University

Michael Kofman, Research Program Director in the Russia Studies Program at CNA; Fellow at the Kennan Institute, Woodrow Wilson International Center

Oxana Shevel, Associate Professor of Political Science at Tufts University; Current President of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies (AAUS); Associate of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University

Sam Greene, Director for Democratic Resilience at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA); Professor in Russian politics at King’s College London

Anastasiia Vlasenko, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, New York University

Dmitry Gorenburg, Senior Research Scientist in the Strategy, Policy, Plans, and Programs Division of the Center for Naval Analyses; Associate at the Harvard Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies

Moderated by:

Elise Giuliano, Senior Lecturer in Political Science, Director of the Program on US-Russia Relations

Joshua Tucker, Director of the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, New York University

BIOGRAPHIES

Timothy Frye is the Marshall D. Shulman Professor of Post-Soviet Foreign Policy at Columbia University. He is the author of Brokers and Bureaucrats: Building Markets in Russia, which won the 2001 Hewett Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, and Building States and Markets after Communism: The Perils of Polarized Democracy, which won a Best Book Prize from the APSA Comparative Democratization section in 2010; and Property Rights and Property Wrongs: How Power, Institutions, and Norms Shape Economic Conflict in Russia, which was published in 2017. His most recent book, Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin’s Russia, will be published by Princeton University Press in April 2021.

Oxana Shevel is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Tufts University, current President of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies (AAUS), and an associate of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. Shevel’s current research projects examine the sources of citizenship policies in the post-Communist states; church-state relations in Ukraine; the origins of separatist conflict in Donbas; and memory politics in post-Soviet Ukraine. She is the author of 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. The book won the 2012 American Association of Ukrainian Studies book prize. 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 also currently serves as Vice President of the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN), a country expert on Ukraine for Global Citizenship Observatory (GLOBALCIT), and a co-chair of the Post-Communist Politics and Economics Workshop at the Davis Center at Harvard.

Michael Kofman serves as Research Program Director in the Russia Studies Program at CNA and as a Fellow at the Kennan Institute, Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, DC. His research focuses on the Russia and the former Soviet Union, specializing in Russian armed forces, military thought, capabilities, and strategy. Previously, he served as a Program Manager and subject matter expert at National Defense University, advising senior military and government officials on issues in Russia and Eurasia. Mr. Kofman is also a Senior Editor at War on the Rocks, where he regularly authors articles on strategy, the Russian military, Russian decision-making, and related foreign policy issues. Mr. Kofman has published numerous articles on the Russian armed forces, security issues in Russia/Eurasia, and analyses for the US government. He holds an MA in International Security from the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.

Sam Greene is Director for Democratic Resilience at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). Sam is also a Professor of Russian Politics at King’s College London. Before joining CEPA, he founded and directed the King’s Russia Institute for ten years. Prior to moving to London, Sam lived and worked for 13 years in Moscow, as Director of the Center for the Study of New Media & Society at the New Economic School and as Deputy Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center. He is the author of Moscow in Movement: Power & Politics in Putin’s Russia (Stanford, 2014) and Putin v. the People: The Perilous Politics of a Divided Russia (Yale, 2019, with Graeme Robertson), as well as numerous academic and policy papers. An American and British citizen, Dr. Greene holds a PhD and MSc from the London School of Economics and a BSJ from Northwestern University and is an elected fellow of the British Academy of Social Sciences. 

Anastasiia Vlasenko is a postdoctoral fellow at the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia who studies electoral politics and democratization with specialization in politics of Ukraine and Russia. Her monograph project, ‘The Electoral Effects of Decentralization: Evidence from Ukraine’ investigates how decentralization reform affects electoral mobilization and diversity in a weakly institutionalized democracy. Vlasenko is particularly interested in transitional period reforms, propaganda, legislative politics, and forecasting. Her research has been published in the Journal of Politics.  She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at Florida State University in 2022, M.A. in Political Science from Florida State University in 2018, M.A. in International Relations from New York University in 2016, and M.Sc. in European Affairs from Lund University in 2013, and B.A. in Political Science from the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in 2011. In 2020-2021, she worked at Hertie School in Berlin as a visiting researcher. In 2014-2016, Vlasenko was a Fulbright scholar at New York University. At Florida State University, she taught courses on comparative politics and post-Soviet studies.

Dmitry Gorenburg is Senior Research Scientist in the Strategy, Policy, Plans, and Programs division of CNA, where he has worked since 2000. Dr. Gorenburg is an associate at the Harvard University Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and previously served as Executive Director of the American Association of the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS). His research interests include security issues in the former Soviet Union, Russian military reform, Russian foreign policy, and ethnic politics and identity. Dr. Gorenburg is author of Nationalism for the Masses: Minority Ethnic Mobilization in the Russian Federation (Cambridge University Press, 2003), and has been published in journals such as World Politics and Post-Soviet Affairs. He currently serves as editor of Problems of Post-Communism and was also editor of Russian Politics and Law from 2009 to 2016. Dr. Gorenburg received a B.A. in international relations from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University.

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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.

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.  We have invited four experts to 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?

Register for the Zoom webinar.

This event is supported by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York.

SPEAKERS

Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Senior Fellow and Director, Transatlantic Security Program, CNAS

Michael Kofman, Senior Research Scientist in the Russia Studies Program at CNA; Fellow at the Kennan Institute, Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, DC

Kadri Liik, Senior Policy Fellow, European Council on Foreign Relations

Olga Oliker, Program Director for Europe and Central Asia at the International Crisis Group in Brussels; Adjunct Professor of European and Eurasian Studies at SAIS Europe

Moderated by:
Joshua Tucker, Director of the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, New York University

Timothy Frye, Marshall D. Shulman Professor of Post-Soviet Foreign Policy at Columbia University

BIOGRAPHIES

Andrea Kendall-Taylor is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Transatlantic Security Program at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). She works on national security challenges facing the United States and Europe, focusing on Russia, the state of the Transatlantic alliance, and threats to democracy. From 2015 to 2018, she was Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council (NIC). Prior to joining the NIC, Andrea was a senior analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency. Outside of CNAS, Andrea is a CNN National Security Analyst and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. She received her B.A. in politics from Princeton University and her Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Michael Kofman serves as Research Program Director in the Russia Studies Program at CNA and as a Fellow at the Kennan Institute, Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, DC. His research focuses on the Russia and the former Soviet Union, specializing in Russian armed forces, military thought, capabilities, and strategy. Previously, he served as a Program Manager and subject matter expert at National Defense University, advising senior military and government officials on issues in Russia and Eurasia. Mr. Kofman is also a Senior Editor at War on the Rocks, where he regularly authors articles on strategy, the Russian military, Russian decision-making, and related foreign policy issues. He runs a personal blog on the Russian armed forces. Mr. Kofman has published numerous articles on the Russian armed forces, security issues in Russia/Eurasia, and analyses for the US government. He holds an MA in International Security from the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.

Kadri Liik is a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Her research focuses on Russia, Eastern Europe, and the Baltic region. Before joining ECFR in October 2012, Liik was the director of the International Centre for Defence Studies in Estonia from 2006 until 2011, where she also worked as a senior researcher and director of the Centre’s Lennart Meri Conference. Throughout the 1990s, Liik worked as a Moscow correspondent for several Estonian daily papers, including the highest-circulation daily in Estonia, Postimees, as well as Eesti Päevaleht and the Baltic News Service. In 2002, she became the foreign news editor at Postimees. In 2004, she left to become editor-in-chief at the monthly foreign affairs magazine, Diplomaatia. She was also the host of “Välismääraja”, a current affairs talkshow at Raadio Kuku in Tallinn. Liik holds a BA in Journalism from Tartu University (Estonia) and an MA in International Relations specialising in diplomacy from Lancaster University.

Olga Oliker is Program Director for Europe and Central Asia at the International Crisis Group in Brussels. Oliker’s research interests center on the foreign and security policies of Russia, Ukraine, and the Central Asian and Caucasian successor states to the Soviet Union, domestic politics in these countries, U.S. policy towards the region, and nuclear weapon strategy and arms control. Prior to joining the International Crisis Group, Oliker directed the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and held various research and management roles at the RAND Corporation, including as Director of the Center for Russia and Eurasia. Early in her career, she served at the U.S. Department of Defense. She is an Adjunct Professor of European and Eurasian Studies at SAIS Europe and a member of the Deep Cuts Commission.

 

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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.

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?

Register for the Zoom Webinar or join the YouTube livestream. 

This event is supported by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York.

SPEAKERS

Sergei Guriev, Professor of Economics at Sciences Po

Emily Holland, Assistant Professor in the Russia Maritime Studies Institute at the U.S. Naval War College

Richard Nephew, Program Director, Center on Global Energy Policy; former Principal Deputy Coordinator for Sanctions Policy, U.S. Department of State

Maria Shagina, Visiting Senior Fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs; Member of the Geneva International Sanctions Network at the Graduate Institute Geneva

Moderated by:
Timothy Frye, Marshall D. Shulman Professor of Post-Soviet Foreign Policy at Columbia University
Joshua Tucker, Director of the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, New York University

BIOGRAPHIES

Sergei Guriev is a Professor of Economics at Sciences Po, Paris. Previously, he was Rector of the New Economic School in Moscow from 2004 to 2013. In 2016–2019, he served as the Chief Economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). His research interests include political economics, development economics, labor mobility, and contract theory. Guriev has published in international refereed journals including American Economic Review, Journal of European Economic Association, Journal of Economic Perspectives and American Political Science Review. He is the co-author (with Daniel Treisman) of the forthcoming book Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century (Princeton University Press, April 2022). In 2022, Guriev co-founded the campaign True Russia to raise donations for Ukrainians. Twitter @sguriev

Emily Holland is an Assistant Professor in the Russia Maritime Studies Institute at the US Naval War College. Previously she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, and a visiting scholar at the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at NYU, the European Council on Foreign Relations (Berlin), and the German Institute for Economic Research (Berlin). Her research focuses on the geopolitics of energy and Russian foreign policy and her forthcoming book project is on European energy security. Dr. Holland’s work has appeared in Newsweek, The Washington Post, War on the Rocks, Lawfare, the Journal of International Affairs, and The Christian Science Monitor amongst others. Holland holds a Ph.D., MA, and BA in political science from Columbia University. Twitter @EmilyJHolland

Richard Nephew is the author of The Art of Sanctions and an expert on the use of sanctions for deterrence and impact. Nephew most recently served as the deputy special envoy for Iran in the Biden-Harris administration. He previously served as Principal Deputy Coordinator for Sanctions Policy at the Department of State and as the lead sanctions expert for the U.S. team negotiating with Iran during the Obama Administration. Nephew served as the Director for Iran on the National Security Staff where he was responsible for managing a period of intense expansion of U.S. sanctions on Iran. Earlier in his career he served in the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation at the State Department and in the Office of Nonproliferation and International Security at the Department of Energy. Twitter @RichardMNephew

Maria Shagina is a Visiting Fellow at the Center on US Politics and Power at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, where she will be working on currency statecraft and de-dollarization. She is also a member of the Geneva International Sanctions Network at the Graduate Institute Geneva. Shagina’s research interests cover economic statecraft, international sanctions and energy politics, with a particular focus on the post-Soviet states. She has written extensively on Western sanctions towards Russia, energy security in Eurasia and Russia’s political economy and foreign policy. Her publications have appeared in the IISS, Carnegie Moscow Center, CSS (ETH Zurich), European Council on Foreign Relations, Foreign Policy Research Institute, Atlantic Council, SWP, and The Kennan Institute. She has consulted government agencies and the private sector on issues of energy security and sanctions. Twitter @maria_shagina

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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.

In response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we seek to provide context and promote understanding through a dialogue between experts. This unprecedented situation we find ourselves in as part of a global society calls for a decisive response. We believe we can best contribute by playing to our strengths: informed analysis and public debate. Our responsibility to the communities we serve is to inform and educate in the atmosphere of increased disinformation and multiplication of alternative “truths.” Our panelists will address some of the most pressing questions of the moment.

Register for the Zoom webinar or join the YouTube livestream. 

This event is supported by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York.

SPEAKERS

Timothy Frye, Marshall D. Shulman Professor of Post-Soviet Foreign Policy at Columbia University

Volodymyr Kulyk, Head Research Fellow at the Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies, National Academy of Sciences Ukraine

Kimberly Marten, Professor of Political Science at Barnard College

Brian Milakovsky, analyst working on economic recovery issues in the development sector in Luhanska Oblast, Ukraine

Oxana Shevel, Associate Professor of Political Science at Tufts University

Moderated by:
Joshua Tucker, Director of the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, New York University

BIOGRAPHIES

Timothy Frye is the Marshall D. Shulman Professor of Post-Soviet Foreign Policy at Columbia University and Director of the International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. He is the author of Brokers and Bureaucrats: Building Markets in Russia, which won the 2001 Hewett Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, and Building States and Markets after Communism: The Perils of Polarized Democracy, which won a Best Book Prize from the APSA Comparative Democratization section in 2010; and Property Rights and Property Wrongs: How Power, Institutions, and Norms Shape Economic Conflict in Russia, which was published in 2017. His most recent book, Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin’s Russia, will be published by Princeton University Press in April 2021.

Volodymyr Kulyk is a Head Research Fellow at the Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. He has taught at Columbia, Stanford and Yale Universities, Kyiv Mohyla Academy and Ukrainian Catholic University, and has held research fellowships at Harvard, Stanford, Woodrow Wilson Center, University College London, University of Alberta and others. Since 2013, he has served as Ukraine’s representative in the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance. His research fields include the politics of language, memory and identity in contemporary Ukraine, media and discourse studies, on which he has widely published in Ukrainian and Western journals and collected volumes. Kulyk is the author of three books, most recently Dyskurs ukraїnskykh medii: identychnosti, ideolohiї, vladni stosunky (The Ukrainian Media Discourse: Identities, Ideologies, Power Relations; Kyiv: Krytyka, 2010). He has also edited two collected volumes published in Ukraine and two special issues of Western academic journals.

Kimberly Marten is a professor of political science at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is a faculty member of Columbia’s Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies, and Saltzman Institute for War and Peace Studies. She has written four books, including Warlords: Strong-Arm Brokers in Weak States (Cornell, 2012) and Engaging the Enemy: Organization Theory and Soviet Military Innovation (Princeton, 1993), which received the Marshall Shulman Prize. The Council on Foreign Relations published her special report, Reducing Tensions between Russia and NATO (2017). In addition to her numerous academic journal articles, her policy pieces have appeared in the Washington Quarterly, ForeignAffairs.com, War on the Rocks, Lawfare, the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog, the Huffington Post, the New York Times, and the New Republic, and she was honored to testify before Congress about Russia’s Wagner Group in July 2020. She is a frequent media commentator, and appeared on “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart. She earned her A.B. at Harvard and Ph.D. at Stanford. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and is a founding member of PONARS-Eurasia.

Brian Milakovsky has been working in Ukraine and Russia since 2009 in environmental, humanitarian and economic development projects. For the past five years he has lived in the government-controlled areas of Luhansk Oblast in eastern Ukraine. He has written on socio-economic aspects of the Donbas conflict for the Kennan Institute, Foreign Affairs, the National Interest and other publications.

Oxana Shevel is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Tufts University, current President of the American Association for Ukrainian Studies (AAUS), and an associate of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. Shevel’s current research projects examine the sources of citizenship policies in the post-Communist states; church-state relations in Ukraine; the origins of separatist conflict in Donbas; and memory politics in post-Soviet Ukraine. She is the author of 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. The book won the 2012 American Association of Ukrainian Studies book prize. 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 also currently serves as Vice President of the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN), a country expert on Ukraine for Global Citizenship Observatory (GLOBALCIT), and a co-chair of the Post-Communist Politics and Economics Workshop at the Davis Center at Harvard.

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Join us for a meeting of the New York-Russia Public Policy Series, co-hosted by the New York University Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia and the Harriman Institute at Columbia University.

As Russian troops have amassed on Ukrainian’s border, talks aimed at resolving the stand-off 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?

This event is supported by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York.

This event recording is now available on YouTube.

SPEAKERS

Keith Darden, Associate Professor, School of International Service, American University

Olena Lennon, Adjunct Professor of Political Science and National Security, University of New Haven

Olga Onuch, Associate Professor in Politics, University of Manchester

Mary Sarotte, Kravis Professor of Historical Studies, Johns Hopkins University

Maxim Suchkov, Director of the Institute for International Studies, MGIMO University

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

BIOGRAPHIES

Keith Darden is an Associate Professor in the School of International Service at American University specializing in comparative politics, international relations, and the politics of Eurasia. His research focuses on nationalism, state-building, and the politics of Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia. His forthcoming book, Resisting Occupation (Cambridge University Press), explores the development of durable national loyalties through education and details how they explain over a century of regional patterns in voting, secession, and armed resistance in Ukraine, Eurasia and the world. His award-winning first book, Economic Liberalism and Its Rivals (Cambridge University Press, 2009) explored the formation of international economic institutions among the post-Soviet states, and explained why countries chose to join the Eurasian Customs Union, the WTO, or to eschew participation in any trade institutions. At SIS, Prof. Darden teaches courses in international relations, comparative politics, and the politics of Eurasia. Beyond SIS, Prof. Darden is co-editor of the Cambridge University Press Book Series Problems of International Politics and is actively engaged with Russia and Eurasia though the Bilateral Working Group on US-Russia Relations, PONARS Eurasia, the Valdai Discussion Club, and other forums.

Olena Lennon is an adjunct professor of Political Science and National Security at University of New Haven. After completing her PhD at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, she moved back to Ukraine to fulfill her Fulbright obligations. She returned to the U.S. shortly before the onset of the Maidan revolution in November 2013 and the ensuing war in eastern Ukraine. With her family remaining in the active war zone, she has kept her finger on the pulse through direct communication with people on the ground, local media outlets, and frequent visits. She has participated in several panels related to issues in Ukraine, facilitating a more informed and objective analysis of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war and not only. Lennon’s work has appeared in Foreign Affairs, The National Interest, Nationalities Papers, Journal of Political Risk, Yale Global, Demokratizatsiya, Higher Education in Europe, and other publications. Her current research is focused on questions of political legitimacy, conflict management, and identity politics.

Mary Sarotte is the Kravis Professor of Historical Studies at Johns Hopkins University, a researcher at Harvard’s Center for European Studies, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a former member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Her books include  Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate (2021), The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall, listed as a Best Book of 2014 by The Economist and the Financial Times, and 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe, a Financial Times Best Book of 2009.

Maxim A. Suchkov is Director of the Institute for International Studies, and Associate Professor at the Department of Applied International Analysis at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO-University). He is also an expert of the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC) and of the Valdai Discussion Club. His research interests include security and foreign policy, future conflicts, US-Russia relations, developments in the Middle East as well as the impact of technology on international relations. Suchkov is a frequent contributor and columnist to Russian and international media.

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Join us for a meeting of the New York-Russia Public Policy Series, co-hosted by the New York University Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia and the Harriman Institute at Columbia University.

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  to make relations more stable and predictable?  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? And how successful have the two sides been in finding new areas for possible coordination or cooperation? Please join us for a remote Zoom panel on November 29th with a distinguished group of academics, practitioners and commentators to assess the state of US-Russia relations.

Register for the Zoom webinar or watch the event on the YouTube livestream. 

SPEAKERS

Timothy Colton, Morris and Anna Feldberg Professor of Government and Russian Studies, Harvard University

Alexander Gabuev, Senior Fellow and Chair of the Russia in the Asia-Pacific Program, Carnegie Moscow Center

Rose Gottemoeller, Steven C. Házy Lecturer, Stanford University Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Center for International Security and Cooperation; Former Deputy Secretary General of NATO

Robert Legvold, Marshall D. Shulman Professor Emeritus, Department of Political Science, Columbia University; previous Harriman Institute Director (1986–1992)

Maria Snegovaya, Postdoctoral Fellow, Political Science, Virginia Tech University; Visiting Scholar, Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies and  Illiberalism Studies Program, George Washington University

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

BIOGRAPHIES

Timothy Colton is Morris and Anna Feldberg Professor of Government and Russian Studies at Harvard University. He has previously served as director of the Davis Center and chair of the Harvard Department of Government. Colton’s main research interest is Russian and Eurasian government and politics. He is the author of, among other works, The Dilemma of Reform in the Soviet Union (Council on Foreign Relations, 1986); Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis (Harvard University Press, 1995), which was named best scholarly book in government and political science by the Association of American Publishers; Transitional Citizens: Voters and What Influences Them in the New Russia (Harvard University Press, 2000); Popular Choice and Managed Democracy: The Russian Elections of 1999 and 2000, with Michael McFaul (Brookings, 2003); Yeltsin: A Life (Basic Books, 2008, and published in Russia by Atticus-Azbuka in 2013); Russia: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2016); and Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia, with Samuel Charap (International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2017). Colton has been a fellow of the American Academy for Arts and Sciences since 2011.

Alexander Gabuev is a senior fellow and the chair of the Russia in the Asia-Pacific Program at the Carnegie Moscow Center. His research is focused on Russia’s policy toward East and Southeast Asia, political and ideological trends in China, and China’s relations with its neighbors—especially those in Central Asia. Prior to joining Carnegie, Gabuev was a member of the editorial board of Kommersant publishing house and served as deputy editor in chief of Kommersant-Vlast, one of Russia’s most influential newsweeklies. Gabuev started his career at Kommersant in 2007 working as a senior diplomatic reporter, as a member of then president Dmitry Medvedev’s press corps, and as deputy foreign editor for Kommersant. His reporting covered Russia’s relations with Asian powers and the connection between Russian business interests and foreign policy. Gabuev has previously worked as a nonresident visiting research fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) and taught courses on Chinese energy policy and political culture at Moscow State University. In April-June 2018, Gabuev was a visiting scholar at Fudan University (Shanghai, China), and was teaching courses on Sino-Russian relations. Gabuev is a Munich Young Leader of Munich International Security Conference and a member of Council on Foreign and Defense Policy (Russia).

Rose Gottemoeller is the Steven C. Házy Lecturer at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and its Center for International Security and Cooperation. Gottemoeller was the Deputy Secretary General of NATO from 2016 to 2019, where she helped to drive forward NATO’s adaptation to new security challenges in Europe and in the fight against terrorism. Prior to NATO, she served as the Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security at the US Department of State, advising the Secretary of State on arms control, nonproliferation and political-military affairs. While Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control, Verification and Compliance in 2009 and 2010, she was the chief US negotiator of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) with the Russian Federation. Prior to her government service, she was a senior associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, with joint appointments to the Nonproliferation and Russia programs. She served as the Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center from 2006 to 2008, and is currently a nonresident fellow in Carnegie’s Nuclear Policy Program. She is also a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Robert Legvold is Marshall D. Shulman Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University, where he specialized in the international relations of the post-Soviet states. He was director of the Harriman Institute from 1986 to 1992. Prior to coming to Columbia in 1984, he served for six years as Senior Fellow and Director of the Soviet Studies Project at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. His interests include the foreign policies of Russia, Ukraine, and the other new states of the former Soviet Union, U.S. relations with the post-Soviet states, and the impact of the post-Soviet region on the international politics of Asia and Europe. His most recent book is Return to Cold War (Polity, 2016).

Maria Snegovaya is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Political Science at Virginia Tech University and a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies and the Illiberalism Studies Program at George Washington University. She is also a member of PONARS Eurasia, a George Washington University-based network of academics advancing new approaches to research on politics and society in Russia and Eastern Europe. Snegovaya’s research interests include party politics, political behavior and political economy. She explores the ongoing democratic backsliding and re-autocratization in Eastern Europe and the tactics used by Russian actors and proxies who circulate disinformation to exploit these dynamics in the region. She also studies Russia’s domestic and foreign policy. Snegovaya’s work has been published in numerous political science and policy journals, including West European Politics, Party Politics, Post-Soviet Affairs, Journal of Democracy, Democratization, and the Washington Post‘s political science blog the Monkey Cage. Her research has been referenced in publications such as the New York Times, Bloomberg, the Economist, and Foreign Policy. Throughout her career Snegovaya has collaborated with multiple US research centers and think tanks to develop policy recommendations designed to address the challenges of democratic backsliding. These include the Brookings Institution, the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Freedom House, among others.

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Join us for another virtual meeting of the New York-Russia Public Policy Seminar. This panel is co-hosted by Columbia University’s Harriman Institute and the New York University Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia.

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.

Watch the event recording on YouTube here. 

 

PANELISTS

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

BIOS

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.

Nargis Kassenova is Senior Fellow and director of the Program on Central Asia at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies (Harvard University) and Associate Professor at the Department of International Relations and Regional Studies of KIMEP University (Almaty, Kazakhstan). She is the former founder and director of the KIMEP Central Asian Studies Center (CASC) and the China and Central Asia Studies Center (CCASC). Kassenova holds a PhD in International Cooperation Studies from the Graduate School of International Development, Nagoya University (Japan). Her research focuses on Central Asian politics and security, Eurasian geopolitics, China’s Belt and Road Initiative and governance in Central Asia, and the history of state-making in Central Asia. Kassenova is a member of the Advisory Board of the Open Society Foundations (OSF) Eurasia Program, the Advisory Committee of the Human Rights Watch (HRW) Europe and Central Asia Division, the UN High-level Advisory Board on Economic and Social Affairs, the Advisory Group of the EU Central Asia Monitoring (EUCAM) program, and the Academic Council of the European Neighbourhood Council (ENC). She is on the editorial boards of Central Asian Survey, Central Asian Affairs, and REGION: Regional Studies of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia journals.

Ivan Safranchuk is Director of the Center of Euro-Asian Research and Senior Fellow with the Institute for International Studies at MGIMO University (Moscow) and an Associate Professor at National Research University Higher School of Economics (Moscow). He is also a member of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy and an expert of the Valdai Club. As visiting professor he has lectured at Yale University and Beijing University. Safranchuk previously worked at the PIR Center for Policy Studies (1997-2001), headed the Moscow Office of the Center for Defense Information (2001-2007), and served as deputy director at the Institute of Contemporary International Studies of the Russian Diplomatic Academy (2011-2014). From 2015 to 2017 he also served as an adviser to the President of the Diplomatic Academy of Kyrgyzstan under the Kyrgyz Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He has published on international relations and security, U.S.-Russian relations, Central Asia and Afghanistan. Safranchuk recently published a journal article on Afghanistan’s political future for India Quarterly and “The Taliban Enigma and the Polycentric World” for Russia in Global Affairs.

Ekaterina Stepanova heads the Peace and Conflict Studies Unit and is a lead researcher at the National Research Institute of the World Economy & International Relations (IMEMO), Moscow.  Her publications in English on Afghanistan include ‘Russia and the search for a negotiated solution in Afghanistan’, Europe-Asia Studies (2021), and research reports Russia’s Afghan Policy in the Regional and Russia-West Contexts (Paris, 2018), Russia’s Concerns Relating to Afghanistan and the Broader Region in the Context of the US-NATO Withdrawal (Barcelona, 2013), The Afghan Narcotrafficking: A Joint Threat Assessment (New York, 2013), and Afghanistan After 2014: The Way Forward for Russia (Paris, 2013). Her books include ISIS and the Phenomenon of Foreign Terrorist Fighters in Syria and Iraq (IMEMO, 2020) and Terrorism in Asymmetrical Conflict (Oxford Univ. Press, 2008). She was a member of two joint US-Russia expert groups on counterterrorism in Afghanistan, 2017-20, and on the Afghan nacrotrafficking, 2011-15, and has participated in several Track 2 international consultations on Afghanistan. She serves as a contact point at IMEMO for the UN Counterterrorism Committee Executive Directorate’s Global Research Network and as a member of the expert panel of Global Peace Index. In 2007-09, she led Armed conflicts and conflict management program at Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

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Join us for another virtual meeting of the New York-Russia Public Policy Seminar. This panel is co-hosted by Columbia University’s Harriman Institute and the New York University Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia.

Please join us for our first annual meeting of the Columbia-NYU Russia Public Policy series to discuss the results and importance of Russia’s Duma elections for parliament that were held on September 19,2021. The ruling United Russia party is widely expected to maintain its majority in Parliament, even though it is was polling at its lowest level of support among Russian voters in over a decade prior to the vote. At the same time, the Russian government has been accused of cracking down on prominent members of the political opposition– including anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny and members of his network– as well as weakening the capacity of domestic watchdogs to monitor the election. A cross-professional panel of leading scholars of Russian domestic politics and journalists will discuss these controversies and likely repercussions of the vote.

This event is supported by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Register for the Zoom webinar or watch the event on the YouTube livestream. 

PANELISTS

Jake Cordell, Business Reporter, The Moscow Times

Felix Light, Reporter, The Moscow Times

Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, Professor of Political Science, Russia Institute, King’s College London

Regina Smyth, Professor of Political Science, Indiana University

David Szakonyi, Assistant Professor of Political Science, George Washington University

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

BIOGRAPHES

Jake Cordell is a reporter covering the Russian economy and business world for The Moscow Times. Originally from the U.K., he previously worked in London as an economics correspondent, and in Prague for an organization supporting independent media and civil society across the former Soviet Union. Twitter: @JakeCordell

Felix Light is a reporter covering politics, culture and society in Russia and the former Soviet Union for The Moscow Times. Outside work, he enjoys history, languages and yoga. Twitter: @felix_light

Gulnaz Sharafutdinova is Professor of Political Science at Russia Institute, King’s College London. She pursues research on issues of post-communist political economy, authoritarianism and social psychology with a specific focus on Russia. She has previously worked at Miami University, Ohio. She is the author of The Red Mirror: Putin’s Leadership and Russia’s Insecure Identity (2020) and Political Consequences of Crony Capitalism Inside Russia (2010). Sharafutdinova is currently working on a new book, The Afterlife of the ‘Soviet Man’: Rethinking Homo Sovieticus.

Regina Smyth is Professor of Political Science at Indiana University. Her primary research interest is in the dynamics of state-society relations in transitional and electoral authoritarian regimes. She has written extensively on political development in the Russian Federation, including her recent book Elections, Protest, and Authoritarian Regime Stability: Russia 2008–2020 (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Her research, largely based on original data collection and analysis, has been funded by the National Science Foundation, International Research and Exchanges Board, US – Russia Foundation, National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, the National Security Education Program, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Russian and East European Center, Ostrom Workshop, Department of Political Science, and College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University. At Indiana University she teaches graduate and undergraduate classes on comparative politics, protest movements, and Russian politics.

David Szakonyi is Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University and co-founder of the Anti-Corruption Data Collective. His academic research focuses on corruption, clientelism, and political economy in Russia, Western Europe, and the United States. He has led numerous investigations into political corruption and opacity in the private equity and real estate industries, which have been published in the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, the Daily Beast, and the Miami Herald, among other outlets. In addition, he is a Research Fellow at the International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.

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The New York-Russia Public Policy Series is co-hosted by the Harriman Institute at Columbia University and the New York University Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia.

The forced landing of a Ryanair flight by Belarusian authorities and coerced detention of dissent journalist Roman Protasevich has spotlighted the practice of transnational repression: the targeting of political exiles and opposition figures abroad by authoritarians and their security services. President Lukashenko’s brash act has been referred to as a “state-sponsored” hijack and has prompted the EU to terminate flights by Belarsus’s national carrier, avoid the use of Belarusian airspace, and consider adding more sectoral and individual sanctions. At the same time, Russian Present Vladimir Putin has strongly supported Lukashenko and Western condemnation appears to be further driving Minsk into the political embrace of Moscow. Our expert panel of professionals from journalism, academia, and the human rights community will discuss why Protasevich was targeted, why these acts of transnational repression are growing more common, and what implications the Ryanair incident will have for US and EU relations with Belarus and Moscow.

This event is supported by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Watch the event recording on YouTube. 

SPEAKERS

Hanna Liubakova, freelance journalist and researcher; Nonresident Fellow at the Atlantic Council

Tatyana Margolin, Regional Director of the Open Society Foundations Eurasia Program

Nate Schenkkan, Director of Research Strategy at Freedom House

Yuval Weber, Bren Chair of Russian Military and Political Strategy at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Future Warfare, Marine Corps University; Research Assistant Professor at Texas A&M’s Bush School of Government and Public Service

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

BIOGRAPHES

Hanna Liubakova is a freelance journalist and researcher from Belarus and a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council. She also works as a journalism trainer and mentor. She started her career at the only independent Belarusian TV channel where she worked as a correspondent and TV presenter. Liubakova has reported from various countries and regions, including Belgium, UK, Poland, France, and Chechnya. She was a recipient of the Václav Havel Journalism Fellowship at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Czechia, as well as a World Press Institute Fellowship in the United States. She received a degree in Art History from The Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland in 2010 and a Master of Art with distinction in International Journalism from Brunel University in London in 2017. Liubakova was awarded the Peter Caws Prize for best postgraduate dissertation.

Tatyana Margolin is regional director for the Open Society Eurasia Program. Margolin was previously a division director for the Eurasia Program, leading the program’s work on responding to the reactionary backlash and closing civic space in the Eurasia region. Prior to joining the Eurasia Program, Margolin was a program officer for the Open Society Public Health Program, where she developed innovative approaches to integration of legal aid and harm reduction initiatives, and published and spoke widely on issues of access to justice for the most marginalized groups. An attorney by training, Margolin was previously a foreign law clerk at the Supreme Court of Israel and a staff attorney at the Women’s Law Project, a nonprofit legal advocacy organization committed to fighting discrimination against women.

Nate Schenkkan is the Director of Research Strategy at Freedom House. He previously served as the Director for Special Research at Freedom House, overseeing Freedom House’s research portfolio outside of its annual reports. He also previously served as the Project Director for Nations in Transit, Freedom House’s annual survey of democratic governance from Central Europe to Eurasia, and as Senior Program Officer for Freedom House’s Eurasia programs, covering Central Asia and Turkey. He was the lead researcher and co-author of two Freedom House special reports, The Struggle for Turkey’s Internet and Democracy in Crisis: Corruption, Media and Power in Turkey. He is the co-author of Freedom House’s special report on transnational repression, Out of Sight, Not Out of Reach. Prior to joining Freedom House in 2012, he worked as a journalist in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. He has been published in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, Eurasianet, World Politics Review, and Russian Analytical Digest. Read his opinion piece about transnational repression in the Washington Post (Feb. 3, 2021).

Yuval Weber is the Bren Chair of Russian Military and Political Strategy at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Future Warfare at Marine Corps University, and is also a Research Assistant Professor at Texas A&M’s Bush School of Government and Public Service. He has previously served as the Kennan Institute Associate Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies at Daniel Morgan Graduate School, at Harvard University as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department on Government, and as an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of World Economy and International Affairs at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. Weber has held research positions at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, and the Carnegie Moscow Center. He has published on a range of Russian and Eurasian security, political, and economic topics in academic journals and for the popular press in the United States and Russia. He is currently working on two projects, one that develops a tool to measure hierarchy and resilience in international affairs to chart the course and conduct of great power competition, and a second that examines the tension between demands of economic modernization and the security state in Russian political economy. The latter manuscript is scheduled for publication in 2021 (Agenda/Columbia UP).

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The New York-Russia Public Policy Series is co-hosted by the Harriman Institute at Columbia University and the New York University Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia.

After weeks of growing regional tensions as Russia amassed more than 100,000 troops next to Ukraine’s borders, on April 22, 2021, Russian defense officials ordered troops back to their bases, with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu commenting that the forces had “demonstrated their ability to provide a credible defense for the country.” What were the drivers behind this large Russian military build-up, and did they achieve their objectives? Did reactions by EU and US officials play a positive role in encouraging a de-escalation, or should we expect new tensions to arise over the course of the year? How have the Russian and Ukrainian publics reacted to the prospect of a renewed regional conflict?

Please join us as we examine these important questions surrounding the 2021 crisis, with leading security and political researchers from academia, think tanks and the policy world.

Watch the event recording on YouTube. 

PANELISTS

Timothy Frye, Marshall D. Shulman Professor of Post-Soviet Foreign Policy at Columbia University; Director of the International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow

Michael Kofman, Senior Research Scientist in the Russia Studies Program at CNA; Fellow at the Kennan Institute, Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, DC

Olga Oliker, Program Director for Europe and Central Asia at the International Crisis Group in Brussels; Adjunct Professor of European and Eurasian Studies at SAIS Europe

Polina Sinovets, head of the Odessa Center for Nonproliferation (OdCNP) and Associate Professor in the International Relations Department at the Odessa I. I. Mechnikov National University (ONU), Ukraine

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

BIOGRAPHIES

Timothy Frye is the Marshall D. Shulman Professor of Post-Soviet Foreign Policy at Columbia University and Director of the International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. He is the author of Brokers and Bureaucrats: Building Markets in Russia, which won the 2001 Hewett Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies; Building States and Markets after Communism: The Perils of Polarized Democracy, which won a Best Book Prize from the APSA Comparative Democratization section in 2010; and Property Rights and Property Wrongs: How Power, Institutions, and Norms Shape Economic Conflict in Russia (2017). His newest book is Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin’s Russia (Princeton University Press, April 2021).

Michael Kofman serves as a Senior Research Scientist in the Russia Studies Program at CNA and as a Fellow at the Kennan Institute, Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, DC. His research focuses on Russia and the former Soviet Union, specializing in Russian armed forces, military thought, capabilities, and strategy. Previously, he served as a Program Manager and subject matter expert at National Defense University, advising senior military and government officials on issues in Russia and Eurasia. Kofman is also a Senior Editor at War on the Rocks, where he regularly authors articles on strategy, the Russian military, Russian decision-making, and related foreign policy issues. He runs a personal blog on the Russian armed forces. Kofman has published numerous articles on the Russian armed forces, security issues in Russia/Eurasia, and analyses for the US government.

Olga Oliker is Program Director for Europe and Central Asia at the International Crisis Group in Brussels. Oliker’s research interests center on the foreign and security policies of Russia, Ukraine, and the Central Asian and Caucasian successor states to the Soviet Union, domestic politics in these countries, U.S. policy towards the region, and nuclear weapon strategy and arms control. Prior to joining the International Crisis Group, Oliker directed the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and held various research and management roles at the RAND Corporation, including as Director of the Center for Russia and Eurasia. Early in her career, she served at the U.S. Department of Defense. She is an Adjunct Professor of European and Eurasian Studies at SAIS Europe and a member of the Deep Cuts Commission.

Polina Sinovets is the head of the Odessa Center for Nonproliferation (OdCNP) at the Odessa I. I. Mechnikov National University (ONU), Ukraine. She is also Associate Professor in the International Relations Department at ONU. Previously, Sinovets served as senior research associate at Ukraine’s National Institute for Strategic Studies, as well as a fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies and NATO Defense College. She is an expert in nuclear weapons policy and has published articles in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Russia in Global Politics, NATO Defense College Research Papers, and others.

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The collapse of socialist regimes during 1989-1991 profoundly affected the conditions of knowledge production about the former socialist countries. The “transition to liberal democracy and capitalism” substituted the “know-your-enemy” paradigm, but hardly rescued the scholarship on the Soviet Union and other socialist countries from the area-studies model of knowledge production and had little impact on the core, “universal” disciplines focused on the West. At the same time, the epistemological subordination of the former socialist countries to the West- and capitalism-centered ideological consensus, introduced a neat division of labor: local scholars received acknowledgement for the soundness or meticulousness of their empirical research, but their locally embedded knowledge was rarely credited with novel ideas and perspectives, deemed the purview of the “neutral” experts with positions in Western academic institutions. Over the course of the last decade, however, the situation has changed dramatically. The politically motivated interest in the socialist past has been on the rise, the paradigm of “transition” has been questioned, and new cohorts of scholars from the post-socialist space have taken advantage of the possibilities for academic mobility, getting degrees in prestigious Anglo-American institutions, while maintaining the connection of their research to their place of origin and life experience. Starting from the assumption that the pursuit of global historiography entails not simply a distinct methodology, but also a set of different and truly global experiences and points of view, the symposium seeks to reflect on this new epistemological situation and analytical possibilities it opens for understanding historical lives of socialism. By bringing together historians, anthropologists, literary scholars, art historians, and philosophers with global academic careers and personal backgrounds in the former socialist countries, this event aims to create a space where a more pluralized form of academic knowledge – aware of its limitations and skeptical of claims to singularity – is both theorized and practiced.

This event will consist of two sessions. Session 1 will run from 11:00 am to 1:00 pm. Session 2 will run from 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm.

Watch the event recording on YouTube here.

PARTICIPANTS

Session One: 11:00 am to 1:00 pm

Serguei Oushakin, Professor of Anthropology and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University

Artemy Magun, Director of the “Stasis” Center for Practical Philosophy, European University in St. Petersburg

Zinaida Vasilyeva, Postdoctoral Researcher, Munich Center for Technology in Society, Technical University of Munich

Zukhra Kasimova, Ph.D. candidate at University of Illinois at Chicago, Jordan Center Visiting Scholar

Galin Tihanov, George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London

 

Session Two: 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm

Elidor Mëhilli, Associate Professor of History and Public Policy at Hunter College, City University of New York

Ivana Bago, Independent Scholar and Writer based in Zagreb, Co-Founder of Institute for Duration, Loation and Variables (Delve)

Alexey Golubev, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Houston, Joy Foundation Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute

Botakoz Kassymbekova, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Liverpool John Moores University

Kate Brown, Professor of Science, Technology and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

 

BIOS

Serguei Oushakin is a Professor of Anthropology and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. He has conducted fieldwork in the Siberian part of Russia, as well as in Belarus and Kyrgyzstan. His research is concerned with transitional processes and situations: from the formation of newly independent national cultures after the collapse of the Soviet Union to post-traumatic identities and hybrid cultural forms. His first book The Patriotism of Despair: Loss, Nation, and War in Russia focused on communities of loss and exchanges of sacrifices in provincial post-communist Russia. His current project explores Eurasian postcoloniality as a means of affective reformatting of the past and as a form of retroactive victimhood. Oushakine’s Russian-language publications include edited volumes on trauma, family, gender and masculinity. Prof. Oushakine is Director of the Program in Russian and Eurasian Studies at Princeton.

Artemy Magun was born in Leningrad in 1974 to a family of social scientists (in 1960s, the members of Komsomol youth “communes”). He studied in Moscow at the Math-focused School #57 and in the Psychology Department at the MGU, later pursued lengthy political philosophy studies in the USA and France, and finally returned to his native city to teach at the EUSP. He received PhD degrees from the University of Michigan and the University of Strasbourg. Following his PhD dissertations, Prof. Magun wrote his book Negative Revolution: On Deconstruction of the Political Subject, which was published in Russian, French, and English by 2013. In English, he is also the editor of the edited volumes “Politics of the One” (2013) and “The Future of the State” (2020) In 2013, Artemy Magun founded a bilingual peer-reviewed journal “Stasis” in social and political philosophy. Magun has organized and co-organized various international conferences and seminars, including: Intellectual Heritage of the 1917 revolution (EUSPb), Politics of the One (SPbGU and EUSPb), “How do you say no?”, The Social Mission of a University, Revolutions and Protest Movements (all three at SPbGU), and many others. He has authored many articles on philosophy both political and general, published in such journals as: “Constellations,” “South Atlantic Quarterly”, “Modern Language Notes,” “History of Political Thought,” “Temps Modernes,” “Telos,” and others.

Zinaida Vasilyeva is a postdoc at the Munich Center for Technology in Society of the Technical University of Munich, Germany. She was trained in History (2004) and in Anthropology (2006) in St.Petersburg, Russia, and completed her PhD at the Institute for Social Anthropology at the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland. In her doctoral dissertation entitled “From Skills to Selves: Recycling ‘Soviet DIY’ in Post-Soviet Russia” she studied DIY material culture, narratives and practitioners and demonstrated how meanings and values attributed to DIY practices and skills under the Soviet order have been challenged and transformed after the fall of the Soviet empire. From 2005 to the present, she focused and published on a variety of issues including the social histories and ethnographies of academic and technical communities, everyday technologies, infrastructures of knowledge, and popular and professional narratives that mediate scientific and engineering knowledge. Her field of expertise includes Anthropology of Knowledge, Russian and Post-Socialist Studies, Material Studies, and Science and Technology Studies. From 2013 to 2015, she served as executive director of the project “Russian Computer Scientists at Home and Abroad” at the STS Center of the European University in St. Petersburg. In 2018, she joined the Munich Center for Technology in Society of TUM, where she now works on the European outer-space politics.

Zukhra Kasimova holds an MA in Comparative History (2016) from Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. Currently, she is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a visiting researcher at the New York University’s Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia. The tentative title of her dissertation is “Uzbek, Karakalpak, and Soviet: Multinational in Form, Hybrid in Content, 1941–1981”.

Galin Tihanov is the George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London and recurrent invited professor of intellectual history at the Higher School of Economics (HSE) in Moscow. He is the author of five books and (co)editor of eleven volumes of scholarly essays. His most recent book is The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond (2019) which won the 2020 AATSEEL Prize for “Best Book in Literary Scholarship”. Tihanov has held visiting appointments at universities in Europe, North and South America, and Asia; his work has been widely translated. He is elected member of Academia Europaea and co-winner of the 2012 Efim Etkind Prize. He is currently completing Cosmopolitanism: A Very Short Introduction, commissioned by Oxford UP.

Elidor Mëhilli was born under the Albanian dictatorship and came to the US as an exchange student on a one-year visa, two years after his country of birth erupted in armed conflict. He received a PhD from Princeton University and has held fellowships at Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, as well as in London and Potsdam. He is Associate Professor of History and Public Policy at Hunter College, City University of New York. His research is on authoritarian regimes and the diplomatic, economic, political, and cultural dimensions of the Cold War. His book From Stalin to Mao received three prizes. His work has been featured on the BBC, The Washington Post, Quartz, The Voice of America, The Conversation, Salon, The Wire (India), and in a dozen Albanian-language newspapers, blogs, and television stations.

Ivana Bago  is art historian, writer and curator based in Zagreb. She holds a PhD in Art History and Visual Culture from Duke University, and is the co-founder (with Antonia Majaca) of Delve | Institute for Duration, Location and Variables (www.delve.hr). She has published extensively – on contemporary art, including conceptual art, history of exhibitions and curating, performance, feminism, (post)Yugoslav art, and post-1989 art historiographies – and is on the editorial board of the journal ARTMargins. She is the recipient of the Igor Zabel Award Grant 2020. She is currently working on her book manuscript Yugoslav Aesthetics: Monuments to History’s Bare Bones, and developing Meeting Points: Documents in the Making, a research project on Sanja Iveković’s work and personal archive.

Alexey Golubev received his kandidatskaia degree in history from Petrozavodsk University in 2006 and taught there for five years at the Department of History of Northern Europe before enrolling in the PhD program at the University of British Columbia, which he completed in 2016. He was a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto before joining the Department of History at the University of Houston in 2017. During the current academic year he is serving as a Joy Foundation Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. His first book, The Search for a Socialist El Dorado (Michigan State University press, 2014, with Irina Takala) is a history of immigration from Finnish-American and Finnish-Canadian communities to Soviet Russia during the Great Depression. His second book, The Things of Life: Materiality in Late Soviet Russia, just came out last December with Cornell University Press.

Botakoz Kassymbekova is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Liverpool John Moores University. Her first book on Stalinism in Central Asia Despite Cultures. Early Soviet Rule in Tajikistan was published with the Pittsburgh University Press. She is currently working on history of aging in post-war Soviet Union.

Kate Brown is Professor of Science, Technology and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of several prize-winning histories, including Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford 2013). Her latest book, Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (Norton 2019), translated into nine languages, won the Reginald Zelnik and Marshall D. Shulman Prize from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. The book was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pushkin House Award, the Laura Shannon Prize, and the Ryszard Kapuściński Award for Literary Reportage.

 

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Join us for another virtual meeting of the New York-Russia Public Policy Seminar. This panel is co-hosted by Columbia University’s Harriman Institute and the New York University Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia.

Many argue that politically independent and economically resilient private sector and economic actors are solutions to various problems in contemporary Russia. However, the Russian private sector has faced a double burden from an authoritarian government and flawed economic system. Restrictions related to the Covid-19 crisis exacerbated the challenges encountered by Russian businesses. This meeting of the NY Russia Public Policy Seminar brings together experts in the Russian private sector to discuss the challenges Russian businesses face due to state policies, economic factors, and the pandemic and to examine potential for future development.

Watch the event recording on YouTube. 

Read the event recap here. 

PANELISTS

Simeon Djankov, Director of Development Economics at the World Bank

Dinissa Duvanova, Associate Professor of International Relations at Lehigh University

Alena Ledeneva, Professor of Politics and Society at University College London

Ivan Nechepurenko, Moscow bureau reporter, The New York Times

Andrei Yakovlev, Director of the Institute for Industrial and Market Studies and the International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development at the Higher School of Economics

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

BIOGRAPHIES

Simeon Djankov is a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Prior to joining the Institute, Djankov was deputy prime minister and minister of finance of Bulgaria from 2009 to 2013. Prior to his cabinet appointment, Djankov was chief economist of the finance and private sector vice presidency of the World Bank, as well as senior director for development economics. In his 17 years at the Bank, he worked on regional trade agreements in North Africa, enterprise restructuring and privatization in transition economies, corporate governance in East Asia, and regulatory reforms around the world. He is the founder of the World Bank’s Doing Business and Women, Business and the Law projects. He is author of Inside the Euro Crisis: An Eyewitness Account (2014), author of the World Development Report 2002, co-author of Europe’s Growth Challenge (2016) and director of World Development Report 2019. He is also coeditor of The Great Rebirth: Lessons from the Victory of Capitalism over Communism (2014) and Covid-19 in Developing Economies (2020).

Dinissa Duvanova is Associate Professor in the Department of International Relations at Lehigh University. Her research interests include international and comparative political economy, political economy of corruption, political institutions, regulatory politics, technology-enabled forms of political participation, and the politics of Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia. She is the author of Building Business in Post-Communist Russia, Eastern Europe and Eurasia: Collective Goods, Selective Incentives, and Predatory States (Cambridge University Press, 2013), which won the Ed A. Hewett Book Prize. Her articles have appeared in various publications, including Comparative Politics, the British Journal of Political Science, World Development, and the Journal of Comparative Economics.

Alena Ledeneva is Professor of Politics and Society at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies of University College London in the United Kingdom. She is an internationally renowned expert on informal governance in Russia. Her research interests include corruption, informal economy, economic crime, informal practices in corporate governance, and role of networks and patron-client relationships in Russia and around the globe. Ledeneva’s books Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking, and Informal Exchange (Cambridge University Press, 1998), How Russia Really Works: Informal Practices in the 1990s (Cornell University Press, 2006), and Can Russia Modernize? Sistema, Power Networks and Informal Governance (Cambridge University Press, 2013) have become must-read sources in Russian studies and social sciences. Currently, she is the pillar leader of the multi-partner ANTICORRP.eu research project.

Ivan Nechepurenko has been a reporter with the Moscow bureau of The New York Times since 2015, covering politics, economics, sports, and culture in Russia and the former Soviet republics. Before working at The Times, Nechepurenko was a correspondent for The Moscow Times, where he covered Moscow’s Crimea annexation and the Winter Olympics in Sochi. Nechepurenko also wrote for a number of Russian publications, including Slon and GQ. Born and raised in St. Petersburg, Russia, he spent five years in Canada, earning a bachelor’s degree in international relations and French from the University of Calgary. This was followed by a master’s degree in international relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Andrei A. Yakovlev is Director of the Institute for Industrial and Market Studies and the International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development at the Higher School of Economics University, Moscow. He is also Professor in the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences, the School of Politics and Governance, and the Department of Theory and Practice of Public Administration, as well as a member of the HSE Academic Council. His professional interests include industrial policy, corporate management, political economy in a transition period, state-business relations, and public procurement.

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Join us for another virtual meeting of the New York-Russia Public Policy Seminar. This panel is co-hosted by Columbia University’s Harriman Institute and the New York University Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia.

Vladimir Putin’s announcement in August 2020 that Russia had become the first country to grant regulatory approval to a COVID-19 vaccine—Sputnik V—generated much fanfare domestically but was initially met with skepticism among expert global scientific communities. Now, with more published results from trials, we see wider acceptance of the claims of the vaccine’s efficacy and a surging global demand for the vaccine from around the world. Please join this distinguished panel of researchers and commentators as we explore how the vaccine was developed in Russia, the issues surrounding its scientific review, and how the Kremlin is now incorporating “vaccine diplomacy” into its broader foreign policy strategy.

Watch the event recording on YouTube. 

PANELISTS

Enrico Bucci, Adjunct Professor of Biology; Director of the System Biology program of the Sbarro Health Research Organization, Temple University

Judyth Twigg, Professor of Political Science at Virginia Commonwealth University

Joshua Yaffa, correspondent for The New Yorker based in Moscow

Alexandra Yatsyk, University of Tartu

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

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Join us for another virtual meeting of the New York-Russia Public Policy Seminar. This panel is co-hosted by Columbia University’s Harriman Institute and the New York University Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia.

Watch the event recording on YouTube. 

Read the event recap here. 

The arrest of opposition politician Alexei Navalny has generated a political crisis in Russia. Upon his arrest, Navalny’s allies released a video investigation into alleged corruption by President Vladimir Putin and his allies and mobilized supporters for mass demonstrations against the Kremlin in order to force his release. In this special session of the New York-Russia Public Policy Series, we consult with leading journalists, academics and communications scholars to analyze the latest political developments, media coverage, and the evolving role of social media in Russia’s protests and opposition.

PANELISTS

Yana Gorokhovskaia, Research Fellow at the Institute of Modern Russia; former postdoctoral scholar at the Harriman Institute

Pjotr Sauer, Journalist at the Moscow Times

Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, Reader in Russian Politics at King’s College London

Aleksandra Urman, Postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Communication and Media Studies, University of Bern; Social Computing Group, University of Zurich

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

BIOGRAPHIES

Dr. Yana Gorokhovskaia is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Modern Russia and a former postdoctoral scholar at the Harriman Institute. She researches Russian civil society and her work has appeared in Post-Soviet Affairs, Russian Politics, Democratization, Russian Analytical Digest, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and The Moscow Times among other outlets.

Pjotr Sauer is a reporter covering Russian politics and society at The Moscow Times. A Moscow native with a Dutch background, Pjotr previously worked in political risk consultancy and diplomacy.

Dr. Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, a Reader in Russian Politics at King’s College London, is the author of The Red Mirror: Putin’s Leadership and Russia’s Insecure Identity (2020) which inquires into Putin’s leadership strategy and relies on social identity theory to explain his success, and Political Consequences of Crony Capitalism Inside Russia (University of Notre Dame Press, 2011) which studies the mechanisms through which informal practices of political and economic power have shaped contemporary Russia.

Dr. Aleksandra Urman is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Communication and Media Studies of the University of Bern and Social Computing Group, University of Zurich. In her research, Aleksandra employs computational methods to examine various aspects of political communication on social media, with a particular focus on polarization, authoritarian regimes and far-right groups. In addition, she is interested in algorithmic biases in web search. Examples of her work include research on far-right communities on Telegram, comparative analysis of political polarization on Twitter, social media-based polarization in Russia, and the distribution of information related to COVID-19 in web search results.

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Featuring:
Aliaksandr Herasimenka, postdoctoral researcher at the Computational Propaganda Project, University of Oxford
Olga Onuch, Associate Professor in Politics at the University of Manchester
Katsiaryna Shmatsina, Rethink.CEE fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the U.S.
Gerard Toal, Professor of Government & International Affairs, Virginia Tech

Drawing on current and ongoing research, our distinguished panelists will discuss what the several months long movement may mean for the political future of Belarus, Russia, and other countries in the region.

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Featuring:

Nicu Popescu, Director of the Wider Europe Programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations
Samuel Greene, Director of the Russia Institute at King’s College London
Maria Snegovaya, Visiting Scholar at George Washington University and Postdoctoral Scholar at the Virginia Tech PPE Program
Andrey Kortunov, Director General of the Russian International Affairs Council
Viktoriya Zhuravleva, Head of the Center for North American Studies at the Primakov National Research Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO)

In the wake of the 2020 US presidential election, please join us for a discussion involving academic and policy perspectives from the US, Russia, and Europe on the future of the bilateral relationship.

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Featuring:

Evelyn N. Farkas, President, Farkas Global Strategies; former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia
Rose Gottemoeller, Payne Distinguished Lecturer at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Freeman Spogli Institute, Stanford University; former Deputy Secretary General of NATO
Thomas Graham, Distinguished Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations; Senior Advisor, Kissinger Associates
David J. Kramer, Senior Fellow in the Vaclav Havel Program for Human Rights and Diplomacy, Steven J. Green School of International and Public Affairs, Florida International University

In this webinar, a distinguished group of academics and former diplomats will debate the current state of US-Russia relations and offer their recommendations for dealing with the Russian government.

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Featuring:

Renée DiResta, Technical Research Manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Elizabeth Ware Packard Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication of the University of Pennsylvania, Director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center
David Shimer, Author of Rigged: America, Russia, and One Hundred Years of Covert Electoral Interference, PhD Candidate at Oxford University

In the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, one of the most enduring stories has been the scale with which Russia exploited weaknesses in the digital information environment to interfere with foreign elections, both domestically and abroad.

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Featuring:

Sarah Lindemann-Komorova, Scholar and Community Development Activist based in Novosibirsk
Andrey Semenov, Associate Research Scholar at the MacMillan Center at Yale University and Senior Researcher at the Center for Comparative History and Politics
Valerie Sperling, Professor of Political Science at Clark University
Elena Topoleva-Soldunova, Director of the Agency for Social Information, Moscow
Denis Volkov, Deputy Director of the Levada Center, Moscow

Our distinguished panelists will discuss what civil society efforts look like in Russia in the time of COVID-19, how challenges that existed before the pandemic have manifested and been exacerbated, and what the future is for Russian civil society post-COVID.

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Featuring:

Roman Badanin, editor-in-chief of the investigative media outlet Proekt
Shelby Grossman, Research Scholar at the Stanford Internet Observatory
Kimberly Marten, Professor & Chair of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University
Khadeja Ramali, independent social data analyst and researcher

Over recent years, Russia has played an increasingly active role in influencing the domestic politics of African countries, including Central African Republic, Madagascar and Libya. Russia’s influence activities have grown in their intensity and range, from mounting online social media campaigns, to soliciting economic contracts and even conducting security operations. This distinguished panel of scholars and journalists will share their experiences and insights about Russia’s new toolkit of influence in Africa.

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