In this virtual panel discussion, Eugene Fishel and Yaropolk Kulchyckyj will provide an insider perspective into Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine. They will bring together documentary evidence and declassified materials dealing with policy deliberation, retrospective articles authored by former policymakers, and formal memoirs by erstwhile senior officials for the first time.

Fishel will examine four key Ukraine-related policy decisions across two Republican and two Democratic administrations and ask whether, how, and under what circumstances Washington considered Ukraine’s status as a sovereign nation in its decision-making regarding relations with Moscow.

Kulchyckyj will focus on the decision-making process of the Obama and Trump administrations regarding providing lethal aid to Ukraine between 2014-2017. Although the two presidents and their administrations were at opposite extremes on domestic and foreign policy matters, the only major difference in their policy towards Ukraine was the decision to arm Ukraine with lethal aid, particularly with the Javelin anti-tank missile.

Cornell government faculty Bryn Rosenfeld will respond to their findings.

Register here

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Panelists

Eugene M. Fishel, author of The Moscow Factor: U.S. Policy Toward Sovereign Ukraine and the Kremlin (Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies, 2022), is a distinguished fellow at the Center for Security Policy Studies, Schar School of Policy and Government, George Mason University.

Yaropolk T. Kulchyckyj completed his doctoral research on “U.S. Foreign Policy Decision-Making: The Obama and Trump’s Administrations’ Decisions Regarding Lethal Aid to Ukraine, 2014-2017" from the School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University.

Bryn Rosenfeld, Assistant Professor, Department of Government, Cornell University

Moderator

Matthew Evangelista, President White Professor of History and Political Science, Department of Government, Cornell University

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Presented by the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, part of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. Co-sponsored by the Institute of Politics and Global Affairs.

It is now widely accepted that the age of decolonization was also a turning point in the history of democracy, as the vast majority of the non-European world replaced imperial rule with democratic republics. Although this fact is taken for granted, scholarly attention so far has been focused on the nationalist aspiration of anticolonial movements and their contesting visions of self-determination. In the moment of its global conquest, democracy, it may seem, was an afterthought—or, at best, a logical corollary—for anticolonial thinkers preoccupied with overcoming empire.

Focusing on colonial India and departing from the standard narratives of anticolonialism, Nazmul Sultan argues that democracy was neither a given ideal waiting to be claimed nor reducible to the concerns of territorial sovereignty. Nazmul suggests that the problem of peoplehood sat at the heart of the monumental clash between the British Empire and the Indian anticolonial movement, inspiring in the process a rethinking of the meaning of democracy for the colonial world. He will also reflect on the place of the anticolonial moment in the global history of democratic thought.

Please join us for this virtual conversation. Register here.

About the Speaker

Nazmul S. Sultan is an Assistant Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Waiting for the People: The Idea of Democracy in Indian Anticolonial Thought (forthcoming with the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press). His research has also appeared in the American Political Science Review, Political Theory, and Review of Politics, among others.

Presented by the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. Co-sponsored by the South Asia Program, and the Gender and Security Sector Lab.

The United States stands at a crossroads in international security. The backbone of its international position for the last 70 years has been the massive network of overseas military deployments. However, the U.S. now faces pressures to limit its overseas presence and spending.

Carla Martinez Machain argues that the U.S. has entered into a "domain of competitive consent," where the longevity of overseas deployments relies on the buy-in from host-state populations and what other major powers offer in security guarantees.

Drawing from three years of surveys and interviews across fourteen countries, her current project demonstrates that a key component of building support for the U.S. mission is the service members themselves as they interact with local community members. Highlighting both the positive contact and economic benefits that flow from military deployments and the negative interactions like crime and anti-base protests, her work shows how U.S. policy on the ground shapes its ability to advance its foreign policy goals.

About the Speaker

Carla Martínez Machain is a professor of political science at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Her research (funded by the Department of Defense’s Minerva Initiative and the Army Research Office, among others) focuses on foreign policy analysis, with a focus on military policy and international conflict.

Presented by the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. Co-sponsored by the American Studies Program and the Gender and Security Sector Lab.