An Important and Timely Symposium: “Negotiating Borders: Comparing the Experience of Canada, Europe, and Ukraine”

Recent events in Ukraine, part of which was annexed by Russia, while another part became a war zone owing to the actions of pro-Russian separatists indicated, among other serious consequences a severe crisis of the existing political architecture in Europe, with potentially wider international repercussions. Such principles as international security guarantees, the existing friendship and partnership agreement between Ukraine and Russia, and the “inviolability of sovereign borders” norm were effectively trampled by the Russian government in its pursuit of a dangerous revanchist course.

These events also indicated a glaring need for analysis of the past and the present history and dynamics of border relations, for determining both commonalities and regional peculiarities, and, if possible, foreshadowing the future course of international and regional relations.

On 16–17 October 2014, the Centre for Political and Regional Studies at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies will hold an international scholarly conference, “Negotiating Borders: Comparing the Experience of Canada, Europe, and Ukraine,” featuring both early-career and established scholars, who will present their original papers on such topics as geopolitics and regional politics; all-European, regional and trans-border cooperation; borders and international law.

Among those presenting their papers are:

James Scott, Karelian Institute, University of Eastern Finland, and Heather Nicol, Trent University, “Critical Observations on Regional Cooperation: Geopolitics in North America and Europe”; Ilkka Liikanen, Karelian Institute, University of Eastern Finland, “The Lost Momentum of Wider Europe? Changing Spatial Imaginaries and Sovereignty Concepts of EU External Relations”; Ignacy Jóźwiak, University of Warsaw, “Between Integration and Exclusion. Ukraine and its Western Borders”; James Wesley Scott, Karelian Institute, University of Eastern Finland, “The Dialogical Production of Geopolitical Identities: The EU viewed by Ukrainian NGOs”; Volodymyr Kulikov, V.N. Karazin National University at Kharkiv, “‘Borders within Borders’: International Mobility of Industrialists and the Transformation of the Urban Landscape in the Industrial South of the Russian Empire”; Stan Fedun, University of Toronto, “Does a Divide Exist? Putin’s Fabrication of an Alternative Regional Reality as Justification for Neo-Soviet Expansionism”; Tatiana Zhurzhenko, IWM—Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna, Austria, “Ukraine’s Eastern Borderlands: the End of Ambivalence?”; Taras Kuzio, CIUS, University of Alberta, “The Crimea: From Rhetoric to Annexation, 1991-2014”; Ivan Katchanovski, University of Ottawa, “The Separatist Conflict in Donbas: A Violent Break Up of Ukraine?”; Thomas O. Hueglin, Wilfrid Laurier University, “Border Control – An Extended Federal Solution.”

A keynote address will be delivered by Dr. Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly, University of Victoria.

This event will be held in the Maple Leaf Room (Lister Conference Centre) at the U. of Alberta’ main campus.

All are welcome. Admission is free.

To register in advance, contact cius@ualberta.ca, or call 780-492-2972.