Mykola Riabchuk
dates de séjour
discipline
Fonction d’origine
Institution d’origine
pays d'origine
projet de recherche
The ‘Ukraine Crisis’ Revisited: Values, Interests, and a Rebirth of the ‘Geopolitics’
The ‘Ukraine crisis’ that lasts since 2014 and affects the entire European politics, is examined as a complex interaction and, in some cases, mutual reinforcement of four different crises: the crisis of Ukrainian identity and of state-nation building; the crisis of Russian identity and of building a modern nation out of the redundant empire; the crisis of traditional Western Orientalizing views of Eastern Europe, often accompanied by a residual Russo-centrism; and the crisis of international, primarily the EU institutions, unable to produce a common foreign policy and respond adequately to external challenges.
As the project is in advance and its first two parts are largely completed, the study is focused now on the international (mis)representations of the ‘crisis’: how it is named and framed in the media, official statements, scholarly and think-tank publications. What these discursive representations imply for the Western policies? The particular challenge is a study of the institutional ‘black-box’ where specific policies and decisions result from complex interactions of various agents who promote their own values, interests, and, as a rule, insufficient knowledge. At this stage, the research requires personal communication and semi-structured interviews with experts, former and actual politicians, and diplomats.
The main outcome of the study should be a book, produced in two language versions – for both a Ukrainian and an international publisher.
biographie
Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies, Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Mykola Riabchuk graduated from the Lviv Polytechnic Institute and Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow. He wrote three monographs and dozens of scholarly articles in Ukrainian and English, as well as several popular books and collections of essays, translated eventually into Polish, French, German, Serbian, and Hungarian.
Mykola Riabchuk is a member of the editorial board of “Vsesvit”, “Krytyka”, “New Eastern Europe” and “Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society”, the honorary president of PEN Ukraine and the jury head of the Angelus international award (Wroclaw), a member of the Program Council of the International Cultural Center (Cracow) and member of the advisory board on the Ph.D. Scholarships in Humanities at Die Zeit Stiftung (Hamburg).
He was distinguished with the Antonovych Prize for the outstanding achievements in humanities; “Bene merito” medal of the Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs for the significant contribution in Polish-Ukrainian reconciliation and a medal “For Professional Achievements” (2018) at the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
Mykola Riabchuk was a Petro Jacyk visiting professor at Columbia Unversity in 2006 and a Ramsay Tompkins visiting professor at the University of Alberta in 2007/2008, and he is a recurrent visiting lecturer at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, University of Warsaw and University of Regensburg. He won a number of fellowships, including Fulbright (1994-96, 2016), Kennan (1999), Reuters (2000), Milena Jesensky (2001), CEU (2002, 2005), Reagan-Fascell (2011), EURIAS (2013-14), and the Ukrainian Studies Research Fellowship at Harvard University (2019).
