RSS FeedUpcoming EventsShock Without Therapy: The Political Economy of the Postsocialist Mortality Crisis, March 20https://events.berkeley.edu/iseees/event/240481-shock-without-therapy-the-political-economy-of-the

Foreshadowing today’s epidemic of deaths of despair hitting the United States, an unprecedented mortality crisis ravaged Eastern Europe 30 years ago as the region transitioned to capitalism. In the first 15 years after the fall of Communism, Russia lost more than three times as many people as during World War I, with male life expectancy dropping 5.7 years from 1991-1994. Over the first decade, this translated into 7.3 million excess deaths in Eastern Europe. This mortality crisis represents one of the largest demographic catastrophes seen outside famine or war in recent history and offers insightful parallels with today’s America. Case and Deaton highlight that “it is no exaggeration to compare the long-standing misery of these Eastern Europeans with the wave of despair driving suicides, alcohol, and drug abuse among less-educated white Americans.” Leveraging the biggest data-gathering project on the postsocialist mortality crisis, the research underlying the lecture presents new quantitative and qualitative evidence on the role of deindustrialization, privatization, and welfare intervention in the post-socialist mortality crisis. The central thesis is that the varieties of economic shocks and policy therapies explain the intensity of the mortality crisis. The bigger the economic shock, the more people die from stress and despair. The better the therapy, the fewer people die from stress and despair. The lecture will conclude with a transatlantic comparison of deaths of despair and the future of democracy, focusing on the health crises in Hungary, Russia, and the United States.

https://events.berkeley.edu/iseees/event/240481-shock-without-therapy-the-political-economy-of-the
Šumit Ganguly & Marianne Riddervold | Comparing EU and India Perspectives on Russia’s War in Ukraine, April 4/live/events/237009-umit-ganguly-marianne-riddervold-comparing-eu-and-ind

As Russia’s war in Ukraine nears the two year milestone, distinctive approaches between governments in the Global North and Global South have come into focus. On the one hand, the EU has voiced strong rebuke of the Russian invasion, embargoed trade and diplomatic relations in an effort to isolate Russia while extending military aid and EU membership to Ukraine. On the other hand, India has maintained a deafening silence on the Russian invasion of Ukraine largely because of its acute dependence on Russian weaponry and to a lesser degree, Russian petroleum. Some within India’s foreign policy establishment also believe that avoiding public criticism of Russia might prevent it from aligning too closely with the People’s Republic of China, India’s long-term adversary. Join us for a discussion with Professor Marianne Riddervold and Professor Sumit Ganguly to explore the geopolitical interests at stake in EU and India’s stances on Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Šumit Ganguly is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science and holds the Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilizations at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author, co-author editor or co-editor of over twenty books on contemporary South Asian politics. His most recent book with Manjeet Pardesi and William R. Thompson is, The Sino-Indian Rivalry: Implications for Global Order. (Cambridge University Press, 2023) Professor Ganguly is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Marianne Riddervold is Professor of Political Science at Innlandet University Norway, research professor at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, and a senior fellow at the Institute of European Studies at UC Berkeley. She has published extensively on European integration, European foreign and security policy, EU crises, transatlantic relations and international relations in the global commons. Recent publications include special issues in International Relations and Politics and Governance (with Akasemi Newsome), and the Palgrave Handbook on EU crises (with Akasemi Newsome and Jarle Trondal).

If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Ray Savord at rsavord@berkeley.edu or (510) 642-4555 with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days before the event.

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The Future is History: Restorative Nationalism and Conflict in Post-Napoleonic Europe, April 4https://events.berkeley.edu/iseees/event/240961-the-future-is-history-restorative-nationalism-and

As illustrated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the recent revival of nationalism has triggered a threatening return of revisionist conflict. While the literature on nationalism shows how nationalist narratives are socially constructed, much less is known about their real-world consequences. Taking nationalist narratives seriously, we study how past “golden ages” affect territorial claims and conflict in post-Napoleonic Europe. We expect nationalists to be more likely to mobilize and initiate conflict if they can contrast the status quo to a historical polity with supposedly greater national unity and/or independence. Using data on European state borders going back to 1100, combined with spatial data covering ethnic settlement areas during the past two centuries, we find that the availability of plausible golden ages increases the risk of both domestic and interstate conflict. These findings suggest that specific historical legacies make some modern nationalisms more consequential than others.

https://events.berkeley.edu/iseees/event/240961-the-future-is-history-restorative-nationalism-and
Masha Salazkina | Building the High Dam: the genre of socialist industrial documentary and the ill-fated history of Youssef Chahine’s Soviet-Egyptian coproduction “People on the Nile” (1968-1972), April 17https://events.berkeley.edu/iseees/event/243639-masha-salazkina-building-the-high-dam-the-genre

The talk will center on the problem of industrial modernization and development as an integral part of a shared post-colonial and socialist ethos, as expressed in the variety of cinematic genres of the 1950s-1970s globally. It will take as its case study a failed Soviet-Egyptian coproduction about the building of the Aswan High dam directed by Youssef Chahine (The People on the Nile [al-Nass wa’l-Nil], 1968 and 1972).

 

Masha Salazkina is Professor of Film Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. She is author of Romancing Yesenia: How a Mexican Melodrama Shaped Global Popular Culture (University of California Press, forthcoming 2024), World Socialist Cinema: Alliances, Affinities, and Solidarities in the Global Cold War (University of California Press, 2023) and InExcess: Sergei Eisenstein’s Mexico (University of Chicago, 2009). She is currently co-editing a special issue of Feminist Media Histories journal on developmentalism, gender and media, and a volume on cinemas of global solidarity with Oxford University Press.

https://events.berkeley.edu/iseees/event/243639-masha-salazkina-building-the-high-dam-the-genre
Nicole Eaton | German Blood, Slavic Soil: How Nazi Königsberg Became Soviet Kaliningrad, April 26/live/events/237683-nicole-eaton-german-blood-slavic-soil-how-nazi-knigsb

In the wake of the Second World War, the German city Königsberg, once the easternmost territory of the Third Reich, became the Russian city Kaliningrad, the westernmost region of the Soviet Union. Königsberg/Kaliningrad is the only city to have been ruled by both Hitler and Stalin as their own—in both wartime occupation and as integral territory of the two regimes. During the war, this single city became an epicenter in the apocalyptic battle between Nazism and Stalinism.

Eaton’s book German Blood, Slavic Soil: How Nazi Königsberg Became Soviet Kaliningrad reveals how Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, twentieth-century Europe’s two most violent revolutionary regimes, transformed a single city and the people who lived there. Drawing on archival documents, diaries, letters, and memoirs from both sides, this talk presents an intimate look into the Nazi-Soviet encounter during World War II and shows how this outpost city, far from the centers of power in Moscow and Berlin, became a closed-off space where Nazis and Stalinists each staged radical experiments in societal transformation and were forced to reimagine their utopias in dialogue with the encounter between the victims and proponents of the two regimes.

Nicole Eaton received her PhD at UC Berkeley is now Associate Professor of History at Boston College. She teaches courses on the Soviet Union, Imperial Russia, modern Europe, authoritarianism, and mass violence. Her research interests include nationalism, communism, fascism, ethnic cleansing, borderlands, urban history, the Second World War, environmental history and the history of medicine in East-Central Europe and Eurasia. German Blood, Slavic Soil is her first book.

If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Ray Savord at rsavord@berkeley.edu or (510) 642-4555 with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days before the event.

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