Moderated by Emily Channell-Justice, Director of the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University.
IN-PERSON and ONLINE via Zoom Webinar (live). Registration is required to attend online.
Ukraine has demonstrated a puzzling capacity to persevere in the face of the full-scale Russian invasion since 24 February 2022. Local communities, in particular, continue to provide public services and respond to crises arising from Russian attacks on critical civilian infrastructure and housing and massive internal displacement. This presentation illuminates how local self-government authorities use elements of democratic governance like citizen participation and transparency to ensure the legitimacy and adequacy of their crisis responses. These findings also highlight how a pre-invasion shifting social contract in Ukraine towards partnership between authorities and citizens became a foundation for societal resilience during the war. At the same time, the talk will also illuminate the challenges to local democracy in wartime and ways to support it. The study draws from two surveys of Ukrainian local self-government authorities and a qualitative case study, conducted in waves in 2022, 2023 and 2024 by the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe (2022) and the Kyiv School of Economics (2022-2024).
Please feel free to explore these resources suggested by the speaker for more insight:
National Security in Local Hands? How Local Authorities Contribute to Ukraine’s Resilience
Dr. Oleksandra Keudel is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Policy and Governance at Kyiv School of Economics. She studies democratic transformation and societal resilience in hybrid regimes with specialization in Ukraine’s sub-national politics. Keudel obtained her Ph.D. (2021, magna cum laude) in Political Science from Freie Universität Berlin (Germany), MSc (2016) in International Administration and Global Governance from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, with distinction for the thesis and MA (2009) in International Information, with distinction, from the Kyiv Institute for International Relations. She completed post-doctoral research at Freie Universität Berlin and was a visiting researcher at the George Washington University, NYU and Södertörn University in 2022-2023. She authored How Patronal Networks Shape Opportunities for Local Citizen Participation in a Hybrid Regime: A Comparative Analysis of Five Cities in Ukraine, published with ibidem/Columbia University Press (2022). Her related paper received the 2021 Best Paper Award at the Association for the Study of Nationalities Annual Convention. Her publications appeared in East European Politics, in Eastern European Politics and Societies, and Cultures, and the Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice. Dr. Keudel is a member of PONARS Eurasia and German-Ukrainian Academic Society. She combines academic research with policy consulting on open government and public integrity for international organizations, such as the Congress of Local and Regional authorities of the Council of Europe and IIEP-UNESCO. She has been teaching courses and classes on social science research methods and Ukrainian politics at Kyiv School of Economics, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Central European University and is frequently invited to speak at policy conferences in the EU and the US.
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This event is organized by Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) as part of the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program and the Seminar in Ukrainian Studies event series.
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LOCATION:CGIS-Knafel/North Building, 3rd Floor, Room K-354, 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA, 02138 STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20241002T210000Z DTEND:20241002T223000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR