WHEN:

March 12, 2015, 7.00PM

WHERE:

Ukrainian Institute, London, 79, Holland Park, London, W11 3SW

Admission:

FREE

We are delighted to invite to a talk Russia and Crimea before annexation: a perspective from below by Eleanor Knott.

Eleanor Knott is a PhD candidate in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics. She is currently writing up her thesis which analyses Romanian kin-state policies in Moldova and Russian kin-state policies in Crimea and is based on fieldwork she conducted in Crimea and Moldova in 2012 and 2013. She is a teaching fellow at the School of Public Policy, UCL and also teaches comparative politics at the Department of Government, LSE.

This talk will discuss the results of fieldwork Eleanor Knott conducted in Simferopol, Crimea in 2012 and 2013. The research was bottom-up, i.e. non-elite and included over 50 interviews. The talk will discuss three important findings:

1)     that Russian identity was more contested and uncertain in Crimea than has been discussed previously,

2)     that Russian citizenship was unavailable and undesirable in Crimea before 2014,

3)     that separation from Ukraine was seen as undesirable and unlikely.

These three aspects will be discussed also in relation to Crimea’s annexation by Russia in 2014 to argue that the annexation should not be seen as an inevitable or predetermined outcome, because support for Russia and its policies was largely absent among those that Eleanor interviewed.

The talk will be held in English All welcome.