Negotiating Borders: Comparing the Experience of Canada, Europe, and Ukraine

A conference organized by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada

Wild Rose Room, Lister Centre, U of A campus

16–17 October 2014

Program

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This event will be broadcast via Livestream, commencing 9:00am MST. Please click here to watch.

Thursday, 16 October

9:00 a.m. Opening & welcome
Bohdan Harasymiw, Acting Coordinator for Political and Regional
Studies, CIUS
Lesley Cormack, Dean, Faculty of Arts
Peter Goldring, MP Edmonton East
Linda Duncan, MP Edmonton Strathcona

9:45 a.m. Break

10:00 a.m. Session 1: Keynote Address
Dr. Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly, University of Victoria, “Border Disputes
around the World: The Case of Ukraine”

11:30 a.m. Discussion

12:00 noon Lunch 

2:00 p.m. Session 2: North America and Europe
Chair: Bohdan Klid, Assistant Director, CIUS

Papers:

Heather Nicol, Trent University, “Critical Observations on Regional Cooperation in North America: Implications for European ‘Edges.’ ”

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”

3:15 p.m. Break

3:30 p.m. Discussant:
Bohdan Harasymiw, Acting Coordinator for Political and Regional
Studies, CIUS

5:00 p.m. Adjourn

Friday, 17 October

9:00 a.m. Session 3: Ukraine and Its Neighbours
Chair: Roman Petryshyn, MacEwan University

Papers:

James Wesley Scott, Karelian Institute, University of Eastern Finland,
“The Dialogical Production of Geopolitical Identities: The EU as
Viewed by Ukrainian NGOs”

Volodymyr Kulikov, Karazin National University of Kharkiv, “Borders
within Borders: Foreign Industrialists and the Transformation
of the Landscape in the Donbas (Late Nineteenth–Early
Twentieth Centuries)”

Stanley Fedun, University of Toronto, “Does a Divide Exist? Putin’s
Fabrication of an Alternative Regional Reality as Justification
for Neo-Soviet Expansionism”

10:15 a.m. Break

10:30 a.m. Discussants:
Peter Roccia, MacEwan University; Valerii Chalyj, Razumkov Center,
former Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine (via Skype)

12:00 noon Lunch

1:30 p.m. Session 4—Ukraine’s Dilemmas
Chair: Volodymyr Kravchenko, Director, CIUS

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
the Donbas: A Violent Break-Up of Ukraine?”

3:15 p.m. Break

3:30 p.m. Discussant:
Derek Fraser, University of Victoria, former Ambassador of Canada to Ukraine

4:30 p.m. Closing Remarks:
Volodymyr Kravchenko, Director, CIUS

5:00 p.m. Adjourn

Participants

Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly studied Law and Political Science at Paris IV-Sorbonne and did a PhD in Political Science at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. He has taught at the University of Notre Dame (USA) and is now Professor of Public Administration at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, where he is also Jean Monnet Chair in European Urban and Border Region Policy and Director of the European Studies Program, the European Union Center of Excellence, and Jean Monnet Center of Excellence. He is the editor of the Journal of Borderland Studies (Taylor and Francis/Routledge). He is the author of 65 articles and chapters and 8 books and special issues of scholarly journals in urban and border studies. His recent publications include Borderlands (2007) and Local Government in a Global World (2010). He is currently completing the ABC/Clio-Praeger Encyclopaedia of Border Disputes (2014).

James Wesley Scott is Professor of Regional and Border Studies at the Karelian Institute, University of Eastern Finland. Professor Scott obtained his Habilitation (2006), PhD (1990), and MA (1986) at the Free University of Berlin and his BSc at the University of California Berkeley (1979). Among his research interests are: urban and regional development policy, geopolitics, border studies, transboundary regionalism in Europe and North America, and changes and spatial implications of Eastern and Central European transformation processes. He has recently coordinated European research projects on cross-border cooperation within the EU’s Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Framework Programmes.

Heather Nicol is a professor in the Geography Department at Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario. She received her BA from the University of Toronto, her MES from York University, and her PhD from Queen’s University. Her northern research interests lie in the critical geopolitics in the circumpolar North and the relationship between the interests of nation-states and peoples of the North. The geopolitical context of the North and the contemporary issues raised there, which create puzzles for sovereignty and governance, have fuelled Dr. Nicol’s interest in the North. Dr. Nicol is also involved in the Thematic Network on Geo-politics and Security through the University of the Arctic and the Northern Research Foundation and is associate editor of the Northern Series at Athabasca University.

Ilkka Liikanen works as Professor of Border and Russian Studies at the Karelian Institute, University of Eastern Finland. He is director of the UEF Doctoral Programme and Research Centre for Russian and Border Studies. Having studied social movements, nationalism, and post-Soviet politics, as well as European integration and European borders, he is currently participating in comparative European research on conceptual change of political language related to borders, border areas, and cross-border interaction. His recent publications in English focus on European integration and EU policies, as well as borders in the European neighbourhood. Liikanen is co-editor and co-author of European Neighbourhood through Civil Society Networks (London: Routledge, 2011) and The EU-Russia Borderland: New Contexts for Regional Co-operation (London: Routledge, 2013).

Ignacy Jóźwiak is a Research Assistant at the Centre of Migration Research, University of Warsaw (Poland). He holds BA and MA degrees in ethnology from the same university and is working on a PhD in sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences. His research interests cover issues of borders, borderlands, migration, and transformation in Central Europe. He has worked as a researcher and analyst in migration-related projects conducted by the Institute of Public Affairs (Warsaw, Poland), the Centre for Migration Studies (Poznań, Poland), and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity (Göttingen, Germany). He has held scholarships from the International Visegrad Fund (2009–10) and the Open Society Institute (2011), both in cooperation with Uzhhorod National University (Uzhhorod, Ukraine). In 2012–13, he was a Research Fellow at the Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies, University of Alberta.

Volodymyr Kulikov holds a PhD in History and is Senior Lecturer (Docent), as well as Deputy Dean of the History Department at the Karazin National University of Kharkiv. Having defended his dissertation at the same university in 2004, he is also the recipient of a grant from the German Historical Institute (Moscow) and of the New Europe College (Bucharest). He served an internship at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. He is a member of the History and Computing Association and the Economic History Association. His research interests include business history, labor history, and digital history.

Stanley Fedun is a graduate student in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. He holds a BA in political science from the same university. His research interests include Canadian and U.S. foreign policy toward Eastern Europe and Russia, as well as social change and political communication in post-Soviet states. His most recent work, “Poroshenko’s Dilemmas,” explores the fine balancing act between Ukraine’s European interests and its Russian interests on the state, regional, and international levels. Outside academia, Stanley is a frequent political commentator on Russia and Eastern Europe, host of the podcast The Eurasia Show, and founder of Osten, a boutique political risk consultancy based in Toronto. You can follow Stanley on Twitter @sfedun.

Tatiana Zhurzhenko is Director of Research for the Russia in Global Dialogue Program at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. Previously an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Karazin National University of Kharkiv, from which she graduated in 1993 with a Candidate of Sciences in Social Philosophy degree, she has held fellowships at Harvard University and the University of Toronto. Her prize-winning book Borderlands into  Bordered Lands: Geopolitics of Identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine was published in 2010. In June 2014 she took part in a conference on “Post-Cold War Borders: Global Trends and Regional Responses” sponsored by the Association for the Study of Nationalities and held in Joensuu, Finland, and St. Petersburg, Russia.

Taras Kuzio is a Research Associate, Centre for Political and Regional Studies, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta and Toronto and a Non-Resident Fellow, Center for Transatlantic Relations (CTR), School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University. His book Ukraine: From the Cold War to the Crimean Crisis and Euromaidan will be published in spring 2015. He is the author and editor of fourteen books, including Open Ukraine: Changing Course towards a  European Future (2011), five think-tank monographs, 25 book chapters, and 75 scholarly articles on post-communist and Ukrainian politics and European studies. Taras Kuzio received a BA in Economics from the University of Sussex, an MA in Soviet and Eastern European Studies from the University of London, and a PhD in Political Science from the University of Birmingham, England. He was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Yale University.

Ivan Katchanovski received his PhD from the School of Public Policy at George Mason University and now teaches at the School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa. Previously he was Visiting Scholar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at the State University of New York at Potsdam, Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto, and Kluge Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. His articles have appeared in Europe-Asia Studies, Journal of Slavic Military Studies, Nationalities Papers, Perspectives on European Politics and Society, Post-Soviet Affairs, and Problems of Post-Communism. He is the author of Cleft Countries: Regional Political Divisions and Cultures in Post-Soviet Ukraine and Moldova, and co-author of Historical Dictionary of Ukraine (2d ed.) and The Paradox of American Unionism: Why Americans Like Unions More Than Canadians Do, But Join Much Less. 

Derek Fraser, now a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for Global Studies and Adjunct Professor for Political Science at the University of Victoria, had a long career with the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. Through postings in Vietnam, Germany, the USSR, Hungary, and Ukraine, as well as in Ottawa, as Director of Relations with Eastern Europe, he gained extensive experience in East-West relations and the communist and post-communist world. He was ambassador to Hungary during the transition to democracy (1988–93), to Greece when the danger of war with Turkey was most acute (1995–98), and to Ukraine as it slipped into authoritarianism (1998–2001). In 2012 he led a four-month observer mission covering the Ukrainian parliamentary elections for the Canada Ukraine Foundation and the Ukrainian World Congress. Mr. Fraser holds BA and JD degrees from the University of British Columbia and a Certificat d’études françaises from the Université de Montpellier.