January 10, 2018

7PM

The French-American Foundation Transatlantic Forum organized a dinner discussion with Professor Elise Giuliano, who analyzed the crisis in the Ukraine.

The war in east Ukraine seems to have turned into another frozen conflict in post-Soviet Eurasia. While the Minsk II agreement has more or less functioned to reduce violence on the ground in the east, neither Russia nor Ukraine has made progress toward implementing the terms of the agreement. Why? This talk will address the causes of the Ukraine crisis and the reasons for its persistence by examining the interests and motives of the key actors: Ukraine, Russia, the E.U., and the U.S.

Elise Giuliano is a Lecturer in the Political Science Department at Columbia University and Director of Graduate Studies of the MA program at The Harriman Institute. Her research focuses on the formation of popular opinion and on ethnic politics. Her award-winning book, Constructing Grievance: Ethnic Nationalism in Russia’s Republics (Cornell University Press, 2011), based on field research in Tatarstan, Russia, examines why some mass populations in Russia’s ethnic republics supported nationalist separatism while others remained quiescent during the transition from Soviet rule. She has also published on Islam in Chechnya, as well as on the popular response to natural disaster in Russia. Currently, Giuliano is researching how the crisis in Ukraine has influenced political opinion among Ukrainian citizens—especially in the understudied eastern regions of the country. She is engaged in ongoing field research in eastern Ukraine. Giuliano’s articles have appeared in World Politics, Comparative Politics, Demokratizatsiya, Ethnopolitics, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, as well as in a series of PONARS Eurasia Policy Memos and a digital roundtable on Ukraine.

Giuliano serves on the Advisory Board of the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN) and is a member of PONARS Eurasia, an international network of scholars from the post-Soviet space and the U.S. She has taught at Barnard College and the University of Miami and was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University, the University of Notre Dame, and Columbia University. She received a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago.