Transformative Podcast

Development as an approach to policy, as a theoretical paradigm, and as a force that can transform everyday life has been a powerful tool in changing societies on both sides of the Iron Curtain and in the so-called Global South. In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Artemy Kalinovsky (Temple University) discusses these and related topics with Thuc Linh Nguyen Vu (RECET). In their conversation they touch upon development assistance to Central Asia and its role in contemporary geopolitics as well as the various meanings and scales of development.

Artemy Kalinovsky is Professor at Temple University and a historian of Soviet Union, Cold War, Central Asia, foreign policy, and development. He is the author of two monographs: A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Harvard University Press, 2011) and in 2018 he published Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan which won the Davis and Hewett prizes from the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Currently, he is 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.

According to Transparency International's 2021 Corruption Perceptions Index, Ukraine ranked 122nd out of 180 countries in 2021, the second most corrupt in Europe. In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Ukraine's prominent rule of law activist Iryna Shyba talks to Irena Remestwenski, Managing Director at RECET, about the transformations that Ukraine has gone through since 1991, impressive gains made by various anti-corruption bodies, and the state of Ukraine’s court system in times of war.

Iryna Shyba is the former head of Foundation DEJURE, a Ukrainian civil society organization promoting rule of law and reforms in the sphere of justice, and currently Deputy Head of the EU Anti-Corruption Initiative (EUACI). For her fight against corruption in courts and for the development of child-friendly justice, she has been included in the “30 to 30” ranking by Forbes Ukraine and awarded the Georgiy Gongadze Award.

How did anti-globalism give birth to the multinational corporation? And how did complaints about “the global economy” shape mass politics at the very moment of its emergence? In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Tara Zahra (University of Chicago) speaks to Rosamund Johnston (RECET) about the ways in which governments and citizens sought, in the interwar period, to reject global interconnectedness. Zahra charts how anti-globalist ideas were then encoded in the international system following World War II and continue to shape some institutions to this day.

Tara Zahra is Homer J. Livingston Professor of History at the University of Chicago. She is the author of The Great Departure: Mass Migration and the Making of the Free World, The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe's Families after World War II and Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a MacArthur Fellow, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

How did the revolutions around Central and Eastern Europe transform higher education? Less than you might think, suggests Jan Surman (Czech Academy of Sciences). In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, he talks to Rosamund Johnston (RECET) about the disappearance of Marxism-Leninism--if not those who taught it--from universities around the former Eastern Bloc. While often understood as catalysts of revolution, Surman argues that the region’s universities have proved far more resistant to change over the decades that followed than other institutions.

Dr. Jan Surman is a Lumina quaeruntur fellow at the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He is the author of Universities in Imperial Austria 1848-1918: A Social History of a Multilingual Space (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2018).

Who has the power of command over the (in)famous Azov regiment, which until recently defended the Ukrainian city of Mariupol under siege and was, at last, captured by the Russian forces? What kind of ideology is really followed by the Azov fighters? How popular are right-wing ideas in Ukraine in general, and how fascist is Russia? In this episode, Dr. Anton Shekhovtsov (Center for Democratic Integrity) talks to Irena Remestwenski (RECET) about the transformations of right-wing ideas both in Russia and in Ukraine. He explains the ambiguous history of the Azov regiment, breaks down the "de-nazification" narrative followed by Russia in justifying its war of aggression in Ukraine, and questions the ideology of both the Russian regime and its population. 

Anton Shekhovtsov is the Director of the Center for Democratic Integrity, based here in Vienna. He acts an expert for the European Platform for Democratic Elections, edits the book series Explorations of the Far Right for the publishing house ibidem, as well as the open access journal Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies. His last book is titled Tango Noir: Russia and the Western Far-Right (Routledge 2018).