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.

Join us for an information session to learn more about the new cycle of Migrations grants, open to all PI-eligible faculty across colleges and schools. Faculty-led programs and centers within the university are also welcome to apply.

The Cornell Migrations codirectors will address questions about priorities, selection criteria, budgets, and other guidance on how to prepare a successful application. Proposals are due January 18, 2023.

In this call for proposals, there are opportunities for Cornell faculty from any academic discipline to study migration at both the domestic and international levels. With support from the Mellon Foundation's Just Futures Initiative, we are funding U.S.-focused work that has long-term and discernible benefits addressing racial and immigrant justice on campus and beyond. Research with a broader international focus may apply for multispecies, interdisciplinary Migrations grants on any migration-related subject.

Register for the information session.

Tessy Schlosser, Ph.D. candidate in government at Cornell University, will present "A Decreative I: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the I of Decreation." The paper will be circulated on an email list in advance and participants come prepared to discuss it.

Tessy Schlosser is a Ph.D. candidate in political theory in the Government Department. Tessy’s research draws together political theory and poetry by considering the literary genres of philosophical writing as well as the philosophical aspects of poetic argumentation and relating both to the dialogical relationships and social movements that animate them. Tessy's dissertation, titled “Dreaming Power: The Body, the Kitchen, and the City as Utopian Topoi in the Political Thinking of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,” introduces Sor Juana to the discipline of political theory. Across three core chapters organized around the sites of the body, the kitchen, and the city, the dissertation reconstructs a notion of situated imagination (phantasia), defined as wishful thinking that is neither strictly fixed in place nor outside of place. In the dissertation, Tessy argues that this way of conceiving political imagination offers a helpful if subtle understanding of the relationship between anti-patriarchal and anti-colonial political actions and dreams of emancipation that is not solely defined through the times and places of an oppressive system’s emergence but also by the continual reenacting of the practices of domination that sustain it.

If you have questions or would like to be added to the Workshop’s email list, email Sam Rosenblum, the graduate student coordinator for 2022-23, at smr335 (at) cornell (dot) edu.

To find out more information, go to https://government.cornell.edu/political-theory-workshop.

For the 2022-23 academic year, the Political Theory Workshop is generously supported by the Africana Studies and Research Center, the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program, the American Studies Program, the Department of Anthropology, the Department of Asian Studies, the Department of Classics, the Department of Comparative Literature, the Institute for Comparative Modernities, the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, the Department of German Studies, the Department of Government, the Department of History, the Society for the Humanities, the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, the Jewish Studies Program, the Latina/o Studies Program, the Department of Literatures in English, the Department of Near Eastern Studies, the Department of Performing and Media Arts, the Sage School of Philosophy, the Department of Romance Studies, and the Department of Science and Technology Studies.