Venue: seminar room 2Q-EG-27, Institute for Eastern European History, Spitalgasse 2, Campus of the University of Vienna, Hof 3.2
This keynote lecture is part of the International Conference "600 Days of the All-Out War. Fighting for Freedom, Fighting for Democracy", co-organised by the Institute of International Studies, Charles University, the IMS Ukraine In A Changing Europe Research Centre and the Research Center for the History of Transformations, University of Vienna, with the support of Friedrich Naumann Foundation For Freedom
Following the large-scale invasion on 24 February 2022, Russia has occupied significant parts of Ukrainian territory – in addition to the annexed Crimea and parts of Donbas where since 2014 a de-facto occupation had been disguised as "separatist republics". While by the end of 2022, Russian troops were forced to withdraw from northern Ukraine, the Kharkiv oblast and even the city of Kherson, Ukrainian territories in the south-east remain under Russian control. Following sham referendums and the annexation of four Ukrainian regions in autumn 2022, Moscow works on their integration into the Russian political system and economy. Combining targeted terror, propaganda, passportization and economic incentives to collaboration, the occupational authorities seek to reshape the loyalties and identities of the local population. At the same time, on the de-occupied territories, the Ukrainian state and society face difficult challenges ranging from reconstruction to transitional justice.
Tatiana Zhurzhenko completed degrees in Political Economy (1989) and Philosophy (1993) at the V.N. Karazin Kharkiv National University (Ukraine), where she subsequently taught as Associate Professor. In 2002, her academic career brought her to Austria. From 2002 to 2004, she was a Lise Meitner Research Fellow at the Department of East European History, University of Vienna with a project on the Ukrainian-Russian Border in National Imagination, State Building and Social Experience. From 2007 to 2011, she was an Elise Richter Research Fellow at the Department of Political Science, University of Vienna with a project on the Politics of Memory and National Identity in Post-Soviet Borderlands: Ukraine/Russia and Ukraine/Poland. Both projects were supported by the Austrian Science Fund. She has been teaching East European Politics at the Department of Political Science, University of Vienna since 2005. From 2014 to 2018, she was in charge of the Ukraine and Russia programmes at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna. Zhurzhenko was a visiting scholar at the Universities of Helsinki and Toronto as well as Harvard University and London Metropolitan University. She joined ZOiS as a researcher in July 2021.
The keynote lecture will be commented on by Dr. Anton Shekhovtsov.
Anton Shekhovtsov received his PhD from University College London (UK) in 2018. Today he is Director of the Centre for Democratic Integrity (Austria), Associated Fellow at the Research Center for the History of Transformations at the University of Vienna (Austria), and an expert at the European Platform for Democratic Elections (Germany). He is the author of the books New Radical Right-Wing Parties in European Democracies (2011) and Russia and the Western Far Right (2017). He also published numerous op-eds in international media, and several academic articles in Journal of Democracy, Russian Politics and Law, Europe-Asia Studies, Nationalities Papers, and Patterns of Prejudice, among others.
