Oxana Shevel | Russia's Invasion, Ukraine's Resistance, and Prospects for Peace

The Moynihan Institute’s Center for European Studies presents Oxana Shevel, associate professor of political science at Tufts University and director of the Tufts International Relations Program.

The Russo-Ukrainian full-scale war has now lasted longer than the German-Soviet conflict in World War II and there is no end in sight. Why? This talk will argue that the roots of Russia’s war on Ukraine lie not in NATO enlargement but in the growing identity and regime divergence between the two states since 1991.

Drawing on Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States (Polity 2024), Professor Shevel will explain how Ukraine’s democratic nation-building and European orientation collided with Russia’s return to authoritarian and imperial ambitions, shaping both the outbreak of the war and prospects for its resolution.

This event is co-sponsored by the Russian program within the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics.

Oxana Shevel is an associate professor of political science at Tufts University and director of the Tufts International Relations Program. Her research and teaching focus on the post-communist region, especially Ukraine and Russia, and topics such as nation-building, identity, citizenship and memory politics, church-state relations, and democratization processes.

She is co-author (with Maria Popova) of a book on the root causes of the Russo-Ukrainian war, Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States (Polity, 2024). Her earlier book Migration, Refugee Policy, and State Building in Postcommunist Europe (Cambridge, 2011) won the American Association of Ukrainian Studies (AAUS) prize for best book in the fields of Ukrainian history, politics, language, literature, and culture. Shevel currently serves as the Vice President and President-Elect of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), and as Vice President of the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN).