EUROPE IN FLUX DECEMBER 6-7, 2019 The European Studies Graduate Fellows Conference
HENRY R. LUCE HALL 34 HILLHOUSE AVE, NEW HAVEN
EUROPE IN FLUX Day 1 9:15 AM
December 6, 2019 Breakfast & Registration, Luce Hall, Common Rm
Welcome Remarks by Edyta Bojanowska, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures; and Chair of the European Studies Council at the MacMillan Center, Yale University 10:00 AM
Defining Culture in Eastern Europe: Production and Destruction in Putin’s Russia, Luce Hall, Rm 202 Chair: Ana Berdinskikh, Yale University Presenters: Dante Matero (Columbia University), Ekaterina Mizrokhi (University of Cambridge), Valeriia Mutc (Yale University) Discussant: Edyta Bojanowska, Yale University
11:30 AM
Lunch, Luce Hall, Common Rm
12:30 PM
Environmental Transitions in Europe and Russia: Public Discourse, Social Movements, and Policies, Luce Hall Rm 202 Chair: Elena Adasheva-Klein, Yale University Presenters: Rebecca Galpern (Columbia University), Katherine McNally (Yale University), Anders Plambæk (University of Copenhagen), Jan Zdralek (Johns Hopkins University SAIS) Discussant: Edward Snajdr, Associate Professor, John Jay College, CUNY
2:15 PM
Break, Luce Hall, Common Rm
2:30 PM
Growing European Economic Challenges, Luce Hall, Rm 202 Chair: Ryan Nabil, Yale University Presenters: Ivana Damjanovic (Australian National University), Noe Hinck (University of Oxford), Ryan Nabil (Yale University) Discussant: David Cameron, Professor of Political Science, Yale ty
4:15 PM
Keynote Address: Contemporary Security Challenges for Europe Her Excellency Ambassador Milica Pejanovic-Djurisic, Permanent Representative of Montenegro to the United Nations Luce Hall, Auditorium
5:15 PM
Reception, Luce Hall, Common Rm
7:30 PM
Dinner for Invited Guests
Day 2
December 7, 2019
9:00 AM
Breakfast, Luce Hall, Common Rm
9:30 AM
Fault Lines in European and Eurasian Security, Luce Hall, Rm 203 Chair: Sarah Holzworth, Columbia University Presenters: Sarah Holzworth (Columbia University), Hansong Li (Harvard University), Maria Snegovaya (Johns Hopkins University SAIS), Calvin Chang (Yale University) Discussant: Ivan Safranchuk, Visiting Professor, Yale University
11:15 AM
Break, Luce Hall, Common Rm
11:30 AM
Shifting Lines: Migration in Europe Today, Luce Hall, Rm 203 Chair: Rachel Farell, Yale University Presenters: Joseph Cerrone (George Washington University) Maria Khan (University of Cambridge), Rachel Farell (Yale University) Discussant: Professor Zareena Grewal, Yale University
1:15 PM
Lunch & Closing, Luce Hall, Common Rm
Livestream available: https://yale.zoom.us/j/4397809192
ABSTRACTS SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES Dante Matero Dante Matero is from Los Angeles and first began studying Russian during his BA at UCLA. After doing a Fulbright ETA Fellowship in Kaliningrad, he moved to New York to study at the Harriman Institute at Columbia. He is at work on an ethnographic project documenting the asylum process for LGBT Russian-speakers in NYC fleeing domestic and state violence. "Russians in Los Angeles," a chapter of a forthcoming Routledge collection, Multilingual Los Angeles (2020), was co-authored with former professors Susan Kresin(UCLA) and Susie Bauckus (UCLA Russian Flagship). Weaponization of Identity: The effect of Soviet-era legal, political, and social structures on the Russian lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) community’s cultural production The fate of Russia’s LGB1 community is currently at the forefront of our global imagination, and this has prompted many commentators to point the finger of blame, or bellow their praise, at actors who have only been on the politicalstage for a decade or two. Such shortsightedness fails to recognize the behemoth ofthe shifting Soviet legal code and its implication in modern LGB cultural history and production. Throughout the years, the Russian LGB community has developed various forms of armor—from political and nonprofit organizationsto countless works of literature and film—to protect their right to form their own historical narratives. In order to pinpoint the ways in which the Russian LGB community’s Soviet past has shaped theirpresent societal positionand cultural production, I will: first, present a historical account of the group’s treatment in the pre-Soviet and Soviet regimes; then, I discuss prominent artists’ workin the framework of the Kremlin’s current legal and political rhetoric; finally, I connect the dots between Soviet and Russian LGB art, interrogating these legacies through queer and imperialist theory. *
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Ekaterina Mizrokhi Ekaterina Mizrokhi is a Cambridge Trust Scholar and a second year PhD Candidate in the Centre for Urban Conflict Research (UCR) at the Department of Architecture. Her doctoral research is focused on urban change and demolition in the five-storey Soviet housing districts of Moscow. She investigates the experience of everyday domestic and urban life on Moscow’s periphery, as well as the politics, aesthetics, materiality and spatiality of transition inthe post-Soviet era. The given case equally lends itself to investigations on the intersections of spatial, social and temporal marginalization rooted insuch districts. Before beginning her PhD, Ekaterina completed an MPhil in Architecture and Urban Studies (Distinction) from the University of Cambridge. She also holds an Honours BA (High Distinction) with a major in Urban Studies and a double minor in Human Geography and Slavic Studies from theUniversity of Toronto, Trinity College. Aesthetic Regimes of Destruction and Reconstruction: The UnreconciledHistories Behind Moscow’s Urban Façade Examining cultural production as a reflection of the current realitiesand future ambitions in Putin’s Russia today would be incomplete withoutan analysis of arguably the most visible and directly-influential form of cultural production: the destruction, devaluation and reconstructionof a city’s architectural landscape. This paper positions the recent,contentious mass demolition campaign of the post-war, five-storey standardized housing blocks in Moscow as an integral element of contemporary Russia’s aesthetic regime in Moscow. From ethnographic interviews in Moscow’s Northern Izmailovo district, this paper will argue that the Moscow municipality’s aesthetic regime — from the demolition of supposedly unsightly buildings to persistent urban beautification campaigns — aims at sanitizing urban spaces ofinconvenient and difficult traces of both the Soviet past and of thepost-Soviet 1990s - a period of all-pervasive crisis, strife and disorder.
The current aesthetic order that is being staged, performed and inaugurated culturally, is one that only selectively engages withRussia’s difficult pasts. Rather, it performs the role of acontemporary, “European,” world-class city, through the window dressings of its capital. The urban landscape, in particular that of a capital asinfluential as Moscow, is quite literally the stage upon which all othercultural productions are interlaced and projected. And it is this stage that currently finds itself on the crux of substantial and unreflexivere development. This paper, therefore, will largely question how suchurban aesthetic regimes reflect or neglect treatments of the past,contentious histories and unreconciled traumas, and pose furtherquestions on the cultural consequences and reverberations that we mayexpect in return. * * *
Valeriia Mutc Valeriia Mutc is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Her research explores the intersections between Russian fin-de-siècle literature and theatre, with a particular focus on performance studies, theatre studies, and cultural histories of theatrical practice in Russia. In her dissertation, “The Dramatic Turn: Chekhov, Gorky, and Tolstoy at the End of the 19th Century,” she examines a turn of Russia’s famous prose writers to drama and applies transmedial narratology to analyse their prose writing alongside their plays, and to discuss its impact on questions of realism and modernism during that time.
Reconstructing Russian Theatre in Yurii Butusov's The Seagull This paper analyses a famous production of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull (1895) at Satirikon theatre in Moscow. The play, produced by an acclaimed director Yurii Butusov in 2011, lasts for more than four hours and presents an unorthodox way of approaching Chekhov's text. The Seagullis transformed into an explosive comedy with unexpected fits of hysteria, passionate love-making, and careless dancing. The characters are emotionally disconnected from the action, resulting in an underwhelming ending, in which the text on stage fails to be representational. The spectator, however, is expected to have a strong emotional response upon seeing a careful reorganisation of the traditional staging. I argue that by juxtaposing the action and the spectator, the production is drawing on previously overlooked aspects of Chekhov's play and serves as a metacommentary on performative conditions of contemporary Russian theatre. In reexamining the play's genre –a comedy –and driving it to its grotesque extremes, Butusov offers a new model of Russian theatre in the 21st century. This theatre no longer ends with the foot lights, subverting traditional relationships with the audience and blending into the reality of the disconnected world beyond its walls.
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Rebecca Galpern Rebecca Galpern is a second-year MA student in Russian, Eurasian, and Eastern European Regional Studiesat Columbia University. Her research interests include environmental politics, European Union law, and past and present Eastern European borderlands. Most recently, she interned withan environmental NGO in Kyiv, Ukraine.Prior to her master’s, Rebecca worked at the Center for Jewish History in New York and Forum for Dialogue in Warsaw, Poland. She holds a BA in Jewish Cultural History from Macaulay Honors College at the City University of New York.
Past, Present, No Future: Environmental Policy and Activism in Poland This paper examines the influence of twentieth century Polish environmental law in Poland’s early implementation of Natura 2000. Formed through the European Union Birds and Habitats Directives, Natura 2000 is a network of protected environmental sites across the EU.When selecting sites for preservation, the Polish government initially sought the expertise of academics and NGOs, but later changed course, submitting a much shorter list of sites than experts recommended. Public backlash ensued over the opacity of the process as well as over competing interests, such as conservation vs. development of local communities. This paper will analyze the Polish response to Natura 2000 conservation policy in the context of three prior eras of Polish history: the interwar period (Second Polish Republic), the communist period (Polish People’s Republic), and the years of shock therapy. Starting chronologically with the experimental democracy of the Second Republic, and culminating with the free market reforms of the 90s, this paper will apply theories of legacy to measure the validity of arguments regarding the different eras and their influence on mid-late 2000s Polish views on environmental conservation policy. * * *
Katherine McNally Katherine McNally is an environmental anthropologist and PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at Yale University. She has worked in fishing communities across the North Atlantic: on the coast of Maine, on the island of Grand Manan in the Canadian Maritimes, on the Shetland Islands in Scotland, and in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. During fieldwork, McNally works aboard fishing boats and interviews community members about the ways fishermen use marine resources to create meaningful lives and strong communities. She is especially interested in using art to communicate diverse local perspectives on resource use, urbanization, and climate change. Her current work focuses on both Shetland and Newfoundland, where she is researching the relationships between fishermen, scientists, and policy makers and talking to residents of rural towns about the different futures they imagine for their resourcedependant communities. This Boat is a Machine; This Boat is my Family In the late 20th century, whitefish stocks began to collapse around the Shetland Islands. In 1992, in an effort topreserve whitefish in the North Sea and the northeast Atlantic, the European Council instituted a series of fishing fleet structural adjustment programs. Through these programs, the European Union provided funds to Atlantic-facing member states to reduce the size of their fishing fleets by paying fishermen to decommission their fishing boats. By examining both government documents outlining the logic of the fleet structural adjustment programs and accounts from Shetland fishermen who experienced decommissioning, I show that the state (defined as the combined governing force of the UK and the EU) and the Shetland fishermen I interviewed had different understandings of decommissioning as an event. For the state, decommissioning was a marginally successful attempt at reducing fishing effort. For Shetland fishermen I interviewed, decommissioning was a traumatic event in an economically precarious time. In this paper, I argue that disjuncture hinged critically on different understandings of what a boat “is.” Moreover, I show how this difference in understanding has continued to influence politics among Shetland fishermen, many of whom voted for Brexit. *
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Anders Plambæk Anders Plambæk, Bachelor of Political Science at University of Copenhagen with exchange at Exeter University, UK. Post graduate student of International Relations, specializing in international political economy at University of Copenhagen with exchange at University of Tasmania, AUS. Background in trade and diplomacy with work experience in the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs; The Danish Trade Council; internship at TheRoyal Danish Embassy in Korea.
While Nations Talk, Cities Act -A Transition of the Climate Change Regime Stagnant interstate negotiations on combating climate change have left a void in governance to be filledby other actors. Based on a review of recent literature, this paper addresses the question of how atransition in climate governance is occurring from state-to city-level, especially in resourceful cities ofthe global North. A comparative analysis of the effects of an ideal model of a polycentric regime againstthe current work done by major European cities part of the C40 network is provided to explore threequestions, “would a polycentric governance system be advantageous in terms of reducing carbonemissions, theoretically speaking?”, “do we see such a transition of governance from state to city?”, and“do cities deliver practical results where states fail?”. By answering these questions, the theories ofpolycentric governance systems and system transitions are measured against the governance practices ofmajor European cities to test their applicability and limitations. * * *
Jan Zdrálek Jan Zdrálek is a graduate student of International Economics and European and Eurasian Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University. His work focuses on Central and Eastern Europe, both inside and just outside of the European Union. He has completed his BA and MA at the Charles University in Prague, which is his favorite city. EU Agricultural Policies Gone Wrong: Corruption and Degradation of Farmland in Postsocialist Europe Prior to their accession to the European Union (EU) in 2004, many farmers in postsocialistEuropean countries were anxious about the introduction of EU Common Agricultural Policy(CAP). Its system of sometimes dubiously redistributed subsidies, they argued, could economicallyharm the agricultural sector. Now, 15 years later, their worries about CAP took a different,environmental, form. Due to the nature of CAP subsidies redistribution in post-socialist Europe,which is dominated by large agricultural businesses connected to the top political levels, thefarmland in these countries is degrading and the system is viewedas corrupt. This developmenthas far-reaching political consequences in Central and Eastern Europe as will be shown on the caseof the Czech Republic.This paper will first succinctly overview the purpose of CAP, explain its main objectivesand provide the EU side of the argument which is naturally strongly in favor of CAP. It will alsohighlight the main points of criticism expressed by post-socialist EU countries. The main analysisof CAP in post-socialist Europe focus on the Czech Republic. The Czech prime minister AndrejBabiš, who has up until recently owned the largest agricultural business in the country Agrofert,had greatly benefited from EU subsidies in the past. He is currently under EU-wide as well asdomestic political pressure for both allegedmisuse of EU funding and conflict of interests. His casedemonstrates the hypothesis that EU agricultural subsidies today underpin a system of quasimodern feudalism in Central and Eastern Europe. In addition to corruption, the exploitation of CAPcan lead to irreversible environmental damage caused by the cultivation of monocultures and usageof chemicals which degrade the soil in the long term. *
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Ryan Nabil Ryan Nabil is an M.A. student at the Yale Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, where he studies diplomacy, international security, and comparative law. Ryan’s current research interests include Chinese diplomacy in Europe, Russia-China relations, and Brexit trade negotiations. Prior to Yale, Ryan worked at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he researched European and global macroeconomy, international trade, and agricultural policy issues. During Ryan’s tenure of three years at AEI, he published more than 40 articles in outlets including the Washington Post, U.S. News and World Report, and Foreign Affairs. Most recently, Ryan served as a Harold W. Rosenthal Fellow in U.S. Congress, where he worked on U.S. foreign policy toward China and Russia. He also served on the Washington, D.C. board of America’s Future Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to developing the next generation of conservative and liberty-minded leaders. Ryan speaks English, French, German, and Bengali. Ryan was educated at Oxford University and Kenyon College, where he earned a B.A. in economics.
Trends in Chinese Investment in Central and Eastern Europe As China expands its economic presence, European leaders need to evaluate critically the opportunities and challenges that Chinese investment poses to the continent. This paper explores the key trends in China’s economic relations with Central and Eastern European countries(CEE)First, the Chinese economic presence in the CEE countries has grown substantially since 2008—although this amount remains small compared to Chinese investment in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Second, growing evidence suggests that Chinese companies have been targeting their investment in critical and dual-use sectors, like energy and technology, for which Europe needs a unified investment framework. Third, the Chinese government uses a “16+1” framework to strengthen its trade relations with CEE countries, which is a framework on which European countries remain divided. Fourth, while Chinese financing allows the Balkan and Visegrad countries to build much-needed infrastructure and promote economic growth, the debt associated with Chinese infrastructure projects is becoming an increasingly difficult issuefor smaller economies like Montenegro. Finally, European companies do not enjoy the same access to the Chinese markets that Chinese companies enjoy in Europe. In the future, European leaders need to advocate broader Chinese market access for European companies and ensure a level-playing for Chinese and European companies. * * *
Ivana Damjanovic Ivana Damjanovic commenced her PhD at the Centre for European Studies, Australian National University in March 2017. Her research is interdisciplinary, examining the role of the EU in the global reform of international investment governance anddispute settlement. Ivana has qualified as a lawyer in Australia and her native Croatia, and has expertise in international law and international relations. She holds multiple degrees and has won several prizes for her achievements as a law student in Australia. Currently she holds an Australian Government Scholarship for her PhD research project. Ivana’s professional background encompasses nine years as a career diplomat for the Government of Croatia, with diplomatic postings in Europe and Australia, as well as research and policy roles for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where she participated in tasks related to Croatia’s accession to the EU. Ivana also works as an Assistant Lecturer in law at the University of Canberra and has taught law as a guest lecturer at universities in Asia (China, Bhutan) and Europe (Belgium, Croatia). EU trade and investment agreements with ‘like-minded’ partners: acting together in facing global challenges? The European welfare state model has fostered social, environmental, health and consumer policies, achieving a high level of protection. Sustainable development (Art. 3 TEU) that balances economic growth, environmental protection and social justice is one of the key objectives of the EU, implemented also in EU external trade and investment policy (CJEU Opinion 2/15). The EU is currently negotiating progressive FTAs with Australia and New Zealand. Already concluded comprehensive FTA with Canada includes sustainable development commitments and a new adjudication system for investment disputes, replacing the controversial investor-State dispute settlement (ISDS). In implementing new standards in its bilateral agreements, the EU acts as an entrepreneur of norms in the field of international trade and investment, intending to strike a balance between free trade and protections for investors, and the values and protective standards enshrined in EU treaties. FTAs offer for the EU an opportunity to influence the trade agenda of its ‘like-minded’ partners, which has been primarily focused on trade. This paper explores how are political messages of like-mindedness implemented in respective legal standards and what are the potential implications of the existing differences between the EU and its like-minded partners in addressing emerging global challenges, such as climate change. *
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Noe Hinck Noe Hinck is the Oxford Kobe Scholar and isstudying towardsan M.Phil. in European Politics and Societyat the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford. Her research interests include E.U. foreign policy, diplomacy, and institutions. She also works as a research assistant for the E.U. Horizon 2020 Project SCHOOLPOL, compiling data on education in Japan. Before moving to Oxford, she double-majored in History and International Relations at Boston University, specialising in 19th and 20th century European social and political history. She received the Hermann Eilts Thesis Award for her honours thesis,“The Multicultural Test: German Identity Development Since 1945 in the Wake of the 2015 Syrian Refugee Crisis”, and has published an article“Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee: The Parade that Restored the British Monarchy” in the Columbia Journal of History. The EU’s Institutional Advantages in Negotiating Agreements: A Case Study of the Negotiations of the EU-Japan Economic and Strategic Partnership Agreements In the last decade, the EU has significantly expanded its trade network through a series of political and economic agreements to defend itself against the increasing trend of protectionism and unilateralism. Against the broader claim of EU inefficiency in the foreign policyrealm, this study answers the question why, despite its multi-level nature, the EU can successfully secure politico-economic agreements with third states. Conducting a case study of the EU-Japan Economic and Strategic Partnership Agreements, the study claims that EU Institutions and Member States can support each other in negotiation efforts with Japan. More specifically, it finds that some Member States are more invested in pushing EU-Japan negotiations forward than others. In a mixed methods approach, descriptive analysis of data on high-level bilateral meetings between Japanese and Member State officials shows an intensification of selective investment in the EU-Japan partnership. Further, qualitative analysis of summaries of these meetings, complemented by insights from interviews with participants, highlight the extent to which EU-Japan negotiations take place outside the formal framework. These findings call for greater attention to the actions of Member States and their coordination with EU institutions in EU trade policy. *
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Ambassador Milica Pejanović-Đjurišić, Permanent Representative of Montenegro to the United Nations Keynote Lecture - Contemporary Security Challenges for Europe Born on April 27, 1959. in Niksić, Montenegro. After graduating from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering in Podgorica, she received first the MSc degree and then in 1987 PhD in Telecommunications at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering in Belgrade. Since October 1982, she has been engaged at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Montenegro, where she got the title of a full professor in the field of Telecommunications in December 1998. She also performed the duty of the Vice-Dean and the President of the Council at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering. Founder and director of the Research Centre for ICT, Prof. Dr. Pejanović-Đurišić has been cooperating with numerous foreign universities and research centers as a visiting researcher and lecturer. In her research work she is focused on the area of wireless communications, where she has achieved notable results that were published in several hundred scientific papers in international journals and international conferences, in scientific and professional papers in domestic journals and conferences, as well as in a numer of books. She is a member of the professional associations of IEEE, IEICE, the Telecommunications Society of Serbia and Montenegro. Professional engagement of prof. Pejanović also includes expert activities in the field of new generations wireless systems and implementation of Internet technologies, within the ITU (International Telecommunication Union), the UN organization in Geneva. She gained significant experience also while worked as a consultant for industrial companies in the field of mobile communications, as evaluator of FP6, FP7 and HORIZON2020 projects of the European Commission and a member of global professional associations and initiatives in the field of ICT.. She also served as President of the Managing Board of Telekom of Montenegro (1999-2002), as well as the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the first Montenegrin Internet Provider. *
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Sarah Holzworth Sarah Holzworth received a MA in Russian and East European Studies from Yale University and is currently continuing her study of Russia and the post-Soviet states in the MA Anthropology program at Columbia University. Prior to this, she worked as an intelligence analyst for the U.S. Army. Her research concernsthe interaction between Russian foreign and domestic policy, ideological production and reproduction in post-Soviet societies,how global economic trends and political institutions affect local communities in those societies, and how modes of cultural production and memory mediate between the global, the state, and the local. Do It for Your Country: Russia’s Demographic Crisis and Risk-Taking Engagements For centuries, scholars have argued over the connection between population and power for states. The enduring assumption was that limiting population size was the key to maintaining security, but recent scholarship has challenged this, considering depopulation to be the new security threat for great powers of the 21stcentury.In the political demography literature, some scholars claim that if a stateis insecure in its population size, it may be less prone to risk-taking behavior that could reduce that population even further, while others argue that this insecurity may resultin the opposite, especially if great power status aims are involved. In Russia, a state severely affected by this problem and particularly interested in great power status, does ademographic crisis correspond to more risk-averse or risk-taking behavior?This paper explores Russia’s demographic troubles, notablyfertility rates, one of the main factors in this crisis, and state solutions. This paper then usesRussian population statistics, UN records andother foreign policy accounts to analyze different dimensions of depopulationtrendsin Russia with trends in risky engagements.This analysis indicates that the Russian government’s solutions to resolving the demographic crisis have sofar been insufficient; the continued and increasing problem of this demographic crisis corresponds to a higher likelihood of risk-taking engagements because of compensation, preventative action, and the anticipationof a shifting world order. This study will contribute to the political demography and international relations literature and shed light on an overlooked dimension of security for and between states. *
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Hansong Li Hansong Li is a political theorist with research interests in global intellectual history, now a PhD candidateat Harvard University (formerly at the University of Cambridge and University of Chicago). His works on the history of legal thought on the law of war and peace, customs and commerce in early-modern Europe have been published inHistory of European Ideas and Global Intellectual History. And his currently researchconcerns the reception and reimagination of ancient laws, rhetoric and geography in the making of modern international relations. The ‘Indo-Pacific’: Intellectual Origins and International Receptions in Global Contexts The ‘Indo-Pacific’ as a term has gained popularity in public discourses since the high-profile renaming of the U.S. Pacific Command, but has so far remained poorly understood as anidea, due to inadequate scholarly surveys of its intellectual origins and creative receptions across time and space. This paper first traces this alternative vision to the ‘AsiaPacific’ to German spatio-political thought of Karl Haushofer, who designates the IndoPacific as an organic and integral political space stretching from the Madagascar to the Polynesian islands, in parallel to the Eurasian continental block. Haushofer’s theory of the Indo-Pacific is formed in two sets of interlocked contexts: his inflected receptions of earlymodern oceanography and the Prussian Enlightenment, and his intellectual and political investments in South, East, and Southeast Asia. The second part of this paper explains how this synthesis has been re-imagined through different landscapes and seascapes across state boundaries, especially in India and Japan. What was in the interwar period a forced attempt to map expedient bio-climatological designations to the fault lines of Eurasian geopolitics from the perspective of landlocked Germany, proved to be a critical idea to a generation of political thinkers and practitioners on ‘sea-locked’ Japan, from WWII to postwar and till very recent years, both in academic scholarship and in popular cultural imaginations. A careful consideration of first how this concept has arisen in its continentalEuropean contexts, and then how it has been transferred and transformed into political languages in Asia, would shed important lighton how the ‘Indo-Pacific’ reflects new global political realities today. *
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Maria Snegovaya Maria Snegovaya (Ph.D., Columbia University) is a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and an Adjunct Fellow at Center for European Policy Analysis.She is a comparative politics, international relations, and statistical methods specialist. The key focus of her research is democratic backsliding and the spread of populist and radical right actors across Europe, as well as Russia’s domestic and foreignpolicy. Her research results and analysis have appeared in policy and peer-reviewed journals, including Problems of Post-Communism and the Journal of Democracy. Her articles and papers have been included as required reading for courses at Science-Po, Syracuse University, The University of California, Los Angeles, and Columbia University among others. Guns to Butter: Sociotropic Concerns and Foreign Policy Preferences in Russia Scholars on “rally ’round the flag” often argue that by invoking the danger of external threats in times of economichardship, leaders can rally the public around the government in a way that would otherwise be impossible. Alternative streams of literature suggest that a darkening economic reality (“butter”) may weaken the impact ofpatriotic euphoria (“guns”). I conducted an experimental survey to measure changes in foreign policy preferences among respondents exposed to negative economic priors in Russia. In line with the earlier findings on this topic, my analysis shows that participants who encounter negative economic primes report significantly less support for assertive foreign policy narratives. These results suggest that continuing economic strain may limit the Kremlin’s ability to divert public attention from internal problems through the use of assertive rhetoric. *
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Calvin Chang Calvin Chang is a master's student in Yale Macmillan Center's European and Russian Studies program with a focus on the politics and international relations of Russia and the former Soviet states, as well as on developments in US-Russia relations. Private Military Firms as a Component of Russian Non-Linear Strategy As part of its broader non-linear geopolitical strategy, Russia has increasingly been utilizing privatized military firms (PMFs) as a tool to achieve its geopolitical and economic goals around the world. My research primarily focused on the development of the wider PMF industry, the differences between Russian and Western firms, and the function of Russian PMFs in Russia's wider geopolitical strategy. My research points to Russian PMFs operating with goals and characteristics that set them apart from their Western counterparts in multiple ways, including: being far more integrated into the Russian state apparatus, and having a more unofficial legal status under Russian domestic law. The unofficial legal status affords the Russian government a degree of plausible deniability --being able to deploy them while denying any links between the Kremlin and any adverse actions of these firms abroad. There is an increasing need for the U.S. and its allies to further recognize Russian PMFs as a potential threat, and to conduct more research into these firms as they relate to Russian geopolitical strategy in order to better formulate an accurate and updated strategy to more effectively counter it going forward. *
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Rachel Farell Rachel is a fourth-year medical anthropology PhD student. She is interested in forced migration to Europe and the provision of mental healthcare services to migrant populations, especially in the Netherlands and France. Her dissertation research examines a Dutch-led pilot program of a new World Health Organization low-intensity psychological intervention for Syrian refugees in France and the Netherlands. Previous research includes fieldwork at an outpatient mental health clinic for migrants in Paris.
Managing the Manager: Social Interactions Between Syrian Refugees and ir French 'Humanitarian' Counterparts
Based on six months of doctoral fieldwork in Paris, this paper analyzes how Syrian refugees are navigating humanitarian schemes ofsupport as they begin to chart new lives in France. Fieldwork research is conducted within the context of a humanitarian housing center providing temporary housing assignments for Syrian refugees in a Parisian suburb. While adding to ethnographic scholarship on Middle Eastern refugee lived experience, I complicate the notion that humanitarian “governmentality” (Fassin 2012; Ticktin 2011) tends to “silence” refugee voices (Malkki 1995)by evidencing ways in which Syrian refugees in France have advantageously navigated relationships with humanitarians and renegotiated thenorms of humanitarian engagement in their own lives. This research is situated during a tense time in France, where far-right politics, national unrestand protest, anti-migration sentiment, and rising rates of Islamophobia have created a socially tenuous mélange. Despite these social factors, this paper argues that the power dynamics between humanitarians and refugees can be shifted and negotiated by strategic management among refugees. This research hopes to encourage further theoretical discussions of refugees in humanitarian settings as being “structurally vulnerable”(Bourgois 2017) while also using social, cultural, and material resources to become “structurally resilient” (Panter-Brick & Eggerman 2012) *
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Joseph Cerrone Joseph Cerrone is a Ph.D. student in Political Science at George Washington University. In his research, he explores the nexus between identity,migration, and democracy in contemporary Europe. His current focus is on the role of elite rhetoric in influencing public perceptions of so-called"others," including migrants and ethnic minorities. How do parties frame their opposition to immigration and why do the xenophobic Narratives they employ change over time? While scholars have devoted considerable attention to anti-immigrant sentiment among citizens andelites, not enough has been done to disentangle the various frames employed to animate public opposition to immigration. Anti-immigrant frames tend to be rooted in one of five distinct logics— security, economic, legal-normative, cultural, and civic. These logics are associated with specific threats allegedly posed by immigrants and are communicated through a rhetorical process of identity ascription. Reflecting the insight of Maslow’s hierarchyof needs, parties tend to favor frames that concentrate on material threats rather than nonmaterial threats. Nevertheless, they may vary theirxenophobic rhetoric in response to the political news cycle, particularly when using less common frames to link external events to immigration enhances their issue ownership. The dynamics of this process are illustrated through an analysis of Tweets from the French National Rally. This study contributes to the study of anti-immigrant politics by uncovering considerable variation in elite xenophobic rhetoric and providing a frameworkof logics to underpin future research.
Maria Khan Maria Khan is a PhD student at Cambridge University. She is writing her doctorate in Performance Studies and Eighteenth century German literature. Maria received her first bachelor's in Economics from Kinnaird College for Women Lahore, Pakistan, where she is from. She received her second bachelor's degree in Humanities, the Arts and Social Thought from Bard College Berlin, Germany, specializing in Literary Theory and Politics and Ethics. Her MPhil in Cambridge was based at the Faculty of Education where she studied Arts Education researching the impact of museum-based education for the integration of Syrian and Iraqi refugees in Germany.Throughout her academic career, she has been the recipient of the Fulbright Scholarship, British Council Germany IELTS Award, Santander-Cambridge Trust Scholarship, and St. Edmund’sCollege Paul Luzio Scholarship. She is an actress and a theatre director and has performed at venues such as Shakespeare's Globe Theatre at the Globe to Globe Festival 2012.
Cultural Integration of Muslims in Germany: Turkish-German identity and Goethe’s Faust
I will discuss cultural integration of long-term Muslim migrants in Germany. My research examines how individuals from Muslim backgrounds respondto Western literary culture. By taking a prototypical German text i.e. Goethe's Faust(Part I), I studied how Turkish-German secondaryschool students engage with the idea of German identity and ideas ofmodernity present within the text. Over a period of six months andthrough a performance-based treatment of the text, the students expressed issues related to their own identity. Emerging themes included religion, politics, the role of family, socioeconomic statusand lastly sexuality. The findings of my research suggest that while identity is a complicated construct, Turkish cultural values,inspired by Islam add another dimension to the students' perception ofthemselves and the dominant culture. My research emphasizes the importance of performance-based teaching and literature-based education in increasingly complex discussions on Turkish-Germanor Muslim integration in Germany. The findings of the research have implications for the settlement of newly arrived Muslim refugees in Europe.
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