RUCARR scholars participated in ICLD roundtable meeting

RUCARR scholars Bo Petersson, Derek Hutcheson, Erika Svedberg and Karina Vamling participated in a roundtable meeting held by the Swedsh International Center for Local Democracy (ICLD, http://www.icld.se/eng/start.pab) in Malmö, December 12-13.

The goal of the roundtable was to bring together Russian and Swedish researchers experienced in studying local governance.

Prof. Bo Petersson and Dr. Derek Hutcheson gave the presentation “Master-planning, local involvement and sustainable urban development in Scandinavia and Russia”.

RUCARR Inaugural conference, December 8–9 2016

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Opening addresses
Prof. Kerstin Tham, Vice-Chancellor of Malmö University.
Ambassador Ingrid Tersman, Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Chair of RUCARR Advisory Board.
RUCARR Co-directors, Prof. Bo Petersson and Prof. Karina Vamling

Keynote1 – Prof. Vladmir Gel’man (European University at Saint-Petersburg & University of Helsinki): Authoritarian Russia: Analyzing Post-Soviet Regime Changes.
Discussant: Dr. Carolina Vendil Pallin (Swedish Defence Research Agency, Stockholm)

Keynote 2 – Prof. Stephen Jones (Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts): Can the South Caucasian States Break with their Past?
Discussant: Senior lecturer, Dr. Märta-Lisa Magnusson (Malmö University)

Roundtable discussionAuthoritarianisms Past and Present: What Prospects Ahead?
Prof. Vladmir Gel’man, Prof. Stephen Jones, Dr. Märta-Lisa Magnusson, Dr. Carolina Vendil Pallin, Dr. Jeremy Morris (Aarhus University), Dr. Derek Hutcheson (Malmö University) and others. Moderator is Dr. Katrine Gotfredsen (Malmö University).

Perspectives on fieldwork in the Caucasus, late 1980s–early1990s

A workshop was held on November 24-25 at the Section for Caucasus Studies, with support from the research platform RUCARR. The focus of the workshop was to discuss perspectives on fieldwork in the Caucasus during the period shortly before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Participants in the workshop were Lars Funch Hansen, Helen Krag, Märta-Lisa Magnusson, Søren Theisen and Karina Vamling, who all conducted research in different parts of the Caucasus during this period of transition (Ib Faurby and Vibeke Sperling were not present at the workshop).

Roundtable – Academic freedoms besieged: Developments in Turkey and Russia

This is a RUCARR/GPS roundtable about the current troubling events in the two countries. Brief presentations on the subject will be made by Professors Umut Özkirimli (Lund University) and Bo Petersson (Malmö University) after which a general discussion on the wider implications of the developments will follow. The event will be moderated by Professor Oscar Hemer (Malmö University). Further participants may be added to the roundtable.

When? November 23, 1-3 pm
Where: NIC0826, 8th floor in the Niagara building (new room)

Seminar on the 2016 parliamentary elections in Russia and Georgia

d4RUCARR & Caucasus Studies will organize a joint web and campus seminar on November 8, 5 pm: The 2016 parliamentary elections in Russia and Georgia.
Dr. Derek Hutcheson, Department of Global Political Studies, Malmö University will offer his perspective on the Russian elections and Prof. Alexandre Kukhianidze, Department of Political Sciencce, Tbilisi State University will analyse the outcome of the Georgian elections.
Students and staff are invited to attend the seminar, at Malmö University campus (NIC0502) or online

Sign-up: send your name, email and affiliation, mark: web or campus to caucasus.studies@mah.se.

Visit from the Swedish Institute

Markus Boman and Madeleine Mattsson from the Swedish Institute visited RUCARR on September 20. Programme manager Markus Boman (to the right on the photo) gave a presentation about the Visby programme and interesting new developments in the coming year.

Version 2The programme includes a number of different types of scholarships (both to and from Sweden) for students, researchers and experts and targets the following countries: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine.

Chapter in book on mega-events

Professors Bo Petersson and Karina Vamling (Malmö University) are the authors of the chapter “Vanished in the Haze: White Elephants, Environmental Degradation and Circassian Marginalization in Post-Olympics Sochi” that recently appeared in a topical volume on mega-events in the series Mega Event Planning.

img_0861-768x768As the text on the cover states: “The edited volume explains why sport mega events can be discusssed from the viewpoint of politics and power, and what this discussion can add to the existing scholarship on political regimes, international norms, national identities, and cultural narratives.”IMG_0860

Editors of the book Mega events in Post-Soviet Eurasia. Shifting Borderlines of Inclusion and Exclusion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) are Andrey Makarychev (Tartu University, Estonia) and Alexandra Yatsyk (Kazan University, Russia). More info about the book.