Ukraine: A Road of Unjust Conflict

Tuesday, April 5, 2022
5:00-6:00 p.m. ET

>More than month into the war in Ukraine, after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his forces over the border, the battles have not unfolded as predicted. The Ukrainian armed forces have fought off their better-equipped aggressors and President Volodymyr Zelensky has become an international hero, but rocket attacks have reduced cities to rubble and sent millions of refugees fleeing into Europe.

Join us for a panel discussion to contextualize the war and look ahead to what comes next, featuring moderator Dan Silverman, IPS Assistant Professor, and subject-matter experts:

• Anna Pechenkina, an Assistant Professor in Utah State University's Political Science department, an expert on Ukrainian history and politics, and a former IPS Postdoctoral Fellow
• Emily Channell-Justice, the Director of the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program in Harvard University's Ukrainian Research Institute
• Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon, a Penn Presidential PhD Fellow in the University of Pennsylvania's Department of History

This event is co-sponsored by the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

About Anna Pechenkina

I am an assistant professor at the Political Science Department at Utah State University. I received my PhD in political science (subfields of international relations and methodology) at Penn State University. Prior to coming to USU, I held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Politics and Strategy at Carnegie Mellon University.

My research focuses on bargaining obstacles to peace processes. My projects employ statistical analysis, survey experiments, and computational modeling to understand how peace emerges out of war and why it succeeds or fails. My research has appeared in Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, Political Research Quarterly, Security Studies, International Interactions, PLoS ONE, Terrorism and Political Violence, Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, and other outlets.

At Utah State, I teach graduate and undergraduate courses in IR and methods.

About Emily Channell-Justice

Emily Channell-Justice is the Director of the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University. She is a sociocultural anthropologist who has been doing research in Ukraine since 2012. She has pursued research on political activism and social movements among students and feminists during the 2013-2014 Euromaidan mobilizations. Her ethnography Without the State: Self-Organization and Political Activism in Ukraine is forthcoming, and her edited volume, Decolonizing Queer Experience: LGBT+ Narratives from Eastern Europe and Eurasia (Lexington Books) was published in 2020. She has published academic articles in several journals, including History and Anthropology, Revolutionary Russia, and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. She received her PhD from The Graduate Center, City University of New York, in September 2016, and she was a Havighurst Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of International Studies at Miami University, Ohio from 2016 to 2019.

About Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon

My work focuses on Russia, the Soviet Union, Central Asia, and East Germany (GDR). 

Currently, I am a PhD student in History at the University of Pennsylvania. Before my doctoral studies, I was a community college history professor and secondary teacher. ​

My public writing analyzes race, foreign policy, and culture in the United States, Russia, and Ukraine. 

I am also a book review editor for H-Ukraine (an H-Net Network).