CREECA Lecture Series Podcast

The war conflict in Eastern Ukraine started in 2014 and it is still far from its resolution. One of the most debated questions during all those years was the following: Who joined anti-Kyiv armed groups during the first years of the Donbass war, and why? Some experts claimed that Russian soldiers and paid volunteers constituted the majority of irregular anti-Kyiv forces. Others that observe the civil war find that it was Donbass locals who joined armed groups in the first place. In this presentation, based on interviews with combatants and observations collected in 2016-2017 in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Donetsk and Luhansk, Natalia Savelyeva will discuss mobilization trajectories of anti-Kyiv combatants, different factors which impacted their decision to join the fight, and the role of ideology in the Donbass war.

Rather than treat Soviet dissidents as avatars of Western liberalism, or take their appeals to rights and legal norms as natural, this talk investigates how, as products themselves of the Soviet order, dissidents arrived at a conception of law and human personality so at odds with official norms. Understanding this process – how orthodoxies contain the seeds of their own heresies, and how dissidents promoted the containment of Soviet power from within – promises to illuminate the broader problem of how citizens of authoritarian societies conceive and act on options for political engagement.

Darren Thies will share perspectives and advice on the career of a diplomat, learning foreign languages (particularly Persian dialects), current U.S. policies in Central Asia, and the human geography of the region. Darren can offer insights and answer questions on the cultures of Central Asia, traveling in the region, perceptions of Americans, how language is used in practice, and how the region has developed over the past decade. Darren’s linguistic expertise centers around the three main Persian dialects (Farsi, Dari, and Tajiki), and can offer specific advice to learners of these languages.

What does intersectionality as praxis look like in Kyrgyzstan? Grassroots feminist, LGBTQ and transfeminist groups in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan are creating a unique space for themselves through various community art projects. The 2019 Feminnale Art Exhibit was one such meticulously curated space that provided possibilities for “subaltern voices to speak” (Spivak 1988) on the everyday experiences of women in Kyrgyzstan and throughout the region. By centering the “everyday” experiences of women, this feminist art project challenged the monolithic and homogenized categories of “woman” imposed by both the West and Russia on (post)socialist Central Asia, opening up further insights on race, gender, and sexuality in the socialist past and (post)socialist future.

The Kazakh famine of the 1930s was one of the great crimes of the Stalinist regime. More than 1.5 million people perished, and the disaster transformed a territory, Soviet Kazakhstan, the size of western Europe. But until recently, the crisis was little known in the West. In her talk, which draws from her recently published book, The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan (Cornell University Press, 2018), Sarah Cameron will discuss the causes of Kazakh disaster and its consequences for Kazakh society. Along the way, she will also explore the reasons for why the story of the Kazakh famine has been neglected, as well as how this particular episode should reframe our understanding of violence and nation-building under Stalin.

This presentation seeks to explain both the motivations and justifications for the Chinese state’s mass human rights abuses in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, highlighting how intentions and explanations are inextricably linked. The motivations for what the state is doing are reflective of settler colonial ambitions in this region and an ardently colonial attitude towards Uyghurs and related peoples as inferior and expendable. However, the justifications have their origins in the Global War on Terror and its characterization of ‘terrorists’ as less than human and irrational. Like the ‘savages’ of European colonialism, China’s imagination of Uyghurs as ‘terrorists’ provides a rationalization for carry out destructive harm to a people that is framed as benevolent and in the best interests of those are the victims of that harm.

Artemy Kalinovsky’s Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan (Cornell University Press, 2018) investigates the Soviet effort to make the promises of decolonization a reality by looking at the politics and practices of economic development in central Asia between World War II and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Focusing on the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic, the book places the Soviet development of central Asia in a global context. In this talk, Kalinovsky will review the book’s findings and the questions they raised, and discuss his experience with archives, memoirs, and oral history.

The presentation discusses the stylistic, pragmatic, phraseological, lexical-semantic problems of literary translation from Uzbek into English and introduces the online poetic dictionary as a solution to overcome them. Gulnoza Odilova is an Uzbek scholar of Translation Studies. She did her PhD in 2011 and DSc in 2021. She works as an Associate Professor at Tashkent State University of Uzbek Language and Literature. She has published more than 200 articles, 2 monographs, 2 textbooks, 1 encyclopedia, and patented a mobile app “Dictionary of gastronomic terms”. As a translator, she has translated Erkin Vohidov’s poems into English and poems of Shakespeare, Byron, Tomas Moore, Robert Burns and Edgar Allan Poe into Uzbek. In 2019 her project “www.poetiklugat.uz” achieved the recognition of the President of Uzbekistan and she was awarded the national medal “Shuhrat” (Glory) for her contribution to the science and literature of Uzbekistan. She is the chairperson of the Gastronomy Tourism Association of Uzbekistan and the coordinator of several projects such as “Gastromahalla”, “Delicious Uzbekistan” and “restoservice.uz”.

“Eurasian Responses to the COVID-19 Crisis: Between Fact and Fear” with Caress Schenk, Associate Professor of Political Science, Nazarbayev University. Description: Amid the economic and health crises caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, underlying questions of state-society relations loom large in Eurasia: why do people follow or not follow regulations that the government deems healthy for them? Do people trust the scientific underpinnings of state modernization projects? How do states increase public buy-in or compliance with their policies? This talk will outline the origins of the project and preliminary findings from a study that Schenk conducted, analyzing the linkages between state and society as they together navigate a world of uncertainty and crisis. To empirically study questions related to fear-based and scientific-based decision making during times of crisis and uncertainty, Schenk’s project uses a three-pronged approach. First is an investigation of public attitudes towards health behaviors, including the choice to be vaccinated against COVID-19, using interviews, surveys, and social media analysis. Second, she investigates expert opinion and the construction of official data using interviews, media analysis, and various analyses of available empirical data. Third, Schenk analyzes the policies and policymaker perspectives in addressing COVID-19, using data from the CoronaNet Project, interviews, analysis of policymakers’ rhetoric, and the messaging of public awareness campaigns. This project uses these approaches to probe linkages between political rhetoric, policy, and people’s attitudes and behaviors. Bio: Caress Schenk is an Associate Professor of political science at Nazarbayev University (Astana, Kazakhstan) with teaching and research expertise in the politics of immigration and national identity in Eurasia. Her new book, published with the University of Toronto Press, is called Why Control Immigration? Strategic Uses of Migration Management in Russia. Current and previous research has been funded by the American Councils for International Education, Nazarbayev University and the Fulbright Scholar Program and has been published in Demokratizatisya, Europe-Asia Studies, and Nationalities Papers, and in edited volumes published by Edinburgh University Press and Oxford University Press. Dr. Schenk is a member of the Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia (PONARS Eurasia).

"Technological Solutions for Complex Problems: Emerging Electronic Surveillance Regimes in Eurasian Cities" with Erica Marat, Associate Professor at the College of International Security Affairs, National Defense University Description: ‘Smart city’ is the new buzzword in cities across Eurasia. Most large urban areas in the post-Soviet space have embraced smart city technologies, and those that have not are in the process of finding smart technology solutions to criminal and disorderly behavior. This use of technologies serves the larger ideal of a society in which even minor crimes are meticulously documented, a habit dating back to the Soviet tradition of criminological research. On the example of Kyiv, Almaty and Bishkek, this presentation will discuss how the pursuit of smart cities in Eurasia strives to attain modernity without the burden of deeper political change. It will review how smart city initiatives rapidly emerging across the region on two dimensions: first, local initiatives to modernize law enforcement and, second, global pressures to innovate fueled both by transnational state-controlled firms promoting their own security products. The spread of surveillance technologies in Eurasia shows how cities and countries aspire to follow global trends for smart city technologies. Bio: Dr. Erica Marat is an Associate Professor at the College of International Security Affairs of the National Defense University. Dr. Marat’s research focuses on violence, mobilization and security institutions in Eurasia, India, and Mexico. Her book The Politics of Police Reform: Society against the State in Post-Soviet Countries (Oxford University Press 2018) explores the conditions in which a meaningful transformation of the police is likely to succeed and when it will fail.