Will Ukraine Join the EU?

About Speakers:

Klaus Brummer holds the chair of International Relations at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Germany. He served as co-editor-in-chief of the journal “Foreign Policy Analysis” (2018-2020) and was president of the Foreign Policy Analysis section of the International Studies Association (2015-2016). As guest lecturer/professor, he has taught at Duke University, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Strasbourg, the University of Helsinki, and the Autonomous University of Barcelona. His main research interests include: leadership profiling, domestic drivers of foreign policy, European integration, and foreign policy making in non-Western contexts. He has published in peer-reviewed journals such as Acta Politica, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, German Politics, Foreign Policy Analysis, Government and Opposition, International Affairs, International Politics, International Studies Review, and Journal of European Public Policy, and is co-editor of Foreign Policy Analysis Beyond North America (Lynne Rienner, 2015) and Foreign Policy as Public Policy? (Manchester University Press, 2019). In 2021-2022, Klaus Brummer has been the Hannah Arendt Visiting Chair for German and European Studies at CERES.

Oleksandr Sushko is an Executive Director of the International Renaissance Foundation since January 2018, (Open Society Network) based in Kyiv, Ukraine. Prior to that he worked as a Research Director of the Institute for Euro-Atlantic Cooperation (2006-2017), and Director of the Center for Peace, Conversion and Foreign Policy of Ukraine (2000-2006). Since January 2011, he has served as Chairman of the Board of the International Renaissance Foundation (IRF), Ukraine . Oleksandr Sushko was a first Co-Chair of the EU-Ukraine Civil Society Platform (2015-2016) – the bilateral insitution established within the frames of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement to facilitate civil society cooperation and policy impact. Areas of expertise: Ukraine, EU, Civil Society.

Professor Milada Anna Vachudova (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) specializes in European politics, political change in postcommunist Europe, the European Union and the impact of international actors on domestic politics. Her recent articles explore the trajectories of European states amidst strengthening ethnopopulism and democratic backsliding – and how these changes are impacting party systems and the European Union. She is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is also part of the core team of the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) on the positions of political parties across Europe. She served as the Chair of the Curriculum in Global Studies at UNC from 2014 to 2019. Her book, Europe Undivided: Democracy, Leverage and Integration After Communism (Oxford University Press) was awarded the Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research.

Kataryna Wolczuk (Professor of East European Politics, Centre for Russian, European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Birmingham) specialises in East European politics. Currently she is researching relations between the EU and the post-Soviet countries within the framework of the European Neighbourhood Policy and the Eastern Partnership. She is also conducting research on Russia’s role in the ‘shared neighbourhood’ and any potential impact for EU’s role and policies in the post-Soviet space. Previously she studied the dynamics of state-building in Ukraine, as well as the conception of nationhood and national identity in Central and Eastern Europe. Professor Wolczuk contributed to numerous policy-related initiatives and cooperated with and advised a number of UK governmental bodies, international organisations and think-tanks on East European politics, the consequences of EU enlargement and the relations between the EU and its eastern neighbours. She has extensive media experience, including TV and radio interviews, as well as publications in the British and international press.

Lucan Way’s research focuses on democratization and authoritarianism in the former Soviet Union and the developing world. His most recent book (with Steven Levitsky), Social Revolution and Authoritarian Durability in the Modern World (forthcoming Princeton University Press) provides a comparative historical explanation of the extraordinary durability of autocracies born of violent social revolution. Professor Way’s solo authored book, Pluralism by Default: Weak Autocrats and the Rise of Competitive Politics (Johns Hopkins, 2015), examines the sources of political competition in the former Soviet Union. His book, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (with Steven Levitsky), was published in 2010 by Cambridge University Press. Way’s work on competitive authoritarianism has been cited thousands of times and helped stimulate new and wide-ranging research into the dynamics of hybrid democratic-authoritarian rule.

Sponsored by Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine and co-sponsored by Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies.