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Headquartered in Riga, Latvia, Meduza.io is the world’s number one independent source for professional reporting on Russia. The site also operates an ambitious translation project, making its content available to the global community at Meduza.io/en. Meduza launched in October 2014 and by August 2017 the monthly readership of Meduza exceeded 7.5 million unique visitors, with more than 700,000 app downloads and more than 2,000,000 followers on social media. Meduza and Buzzfeed recently announced an editorial partnership focused on joint investigative reports. Ilya Krasilshchik, Meduza’s publisher, will explain what it takes to mount such a project in an environment flooded by the Kremlin’s propaganda, and Anna Veduta, Meduza’s global outreach director, will discuss Meduza’s English-language edition.



Meduza is an online newspaper and news aggregator covering Russia and the Eurasian region, headed by Galina Timchenko, the former chief editor of the news website Lenta.ru, which during her tenure became the most popular news outlet on the Russian Internet. Meduza is run by a team of Russian journalists who resigned from their jobs at Lenta.ru, following Timchenko’s unexpected removal from her post by Alexander Mamut, the Putin-connected oligarch who owns the website.

Not long before the annexation of Crimea, Mamut fired Timchenko and replaced her with Alexey Goreslavsky, who had previously managed the pro-Kremlin website Vzglyad and later was a high-level official at the state-run news agency Interfax. The reason given for Timchenko’s dismissal was an official warning issued to Lenta.ru by Russia’s state censor because one of Lenta’s stories (an interview with a Ukrainian nationalist leader) contained a hyperlink to materials deemed extremist. More than 80 editors and reporters – nearly Lenta’s entire newsroom – quit in protest, publishing an open letter calling Timchenko’s ouster “an act of censorship” and a violation of Russia’s media laws. Timchenko and most of the staff who resigned with her went on to found Meduza. Explaining the decision to base Meduza in Latvia and register it outside the .RU domain zone, Timchenko told Forbes: “Right now, establishing an independent Russian-language news outlet in Latvia is possible, while in Russia it is not.”

 

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Ilia Krasilshchik image

Ilya Krasilshchik is Meduza’s publisher. In 2008, after leaving college at 21, Ilya became the chief editor of Afisha, then Moscow’s most influential entertainment and city life magazine. In his five years at Afisha, the magazine published more the 100 issues, including an issue dedicated to “Coming Out” stories (a response to Russia’s criminalization of so-called “gay propaganda”), as well as several special editions, including issues on “the oral history of the Russian media” and “the oral history of the Russian Internet.” In October 2014, he left Afisha and joined two partners to launch Meduza, a groundbreaking Russian-language news outlet based in Riga, Latvia. As of July 2017, Meduza’s monthly readership exceeded 7 million unique visitors, with 750,000 app downloads, and a reach of more than 15,000,000 people on social media. Seventy percent of Meduza’s audience is based in Russia.

 

Anna Veduta image

 

Anna Veduta is Meduza’s global outreach director, and also heads Meduza in English in Washington, D.C. Prior to Meduza, Anna served as Press Secretary to Alexey Navalny, Russia’s leading opposition politician and 2018 presidential hopeful. Anna headed Navalny's press office during his Moscow mayoral campaign in 2013, when he leveraged social media channels to break a blockage by Russia’s traditional media, nearly forcing a runoff vote. Anna holds degrees in political science and international relations from Moscow State University and Columbia University’s School of International Public Affairs.

 

This event is cosponsored by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

Ilya Krasilshchik Meduza.io
Anna Veduta Meduza.io
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The article introduces the All Minorities at Risk (AMAR) data, a sample of socially recognized and salient ethnic groups. Fully coded for the forty core Minorities at Risk variables, this AMAR sample provides researchers with data for empirical analysis free from the selection issues known in the study of ethnic politics to date. We describe the distinct selection issues motivating the coding of the data with an emphasis on underexplored selection issues arising with truncation of ethnic group data, especially when moving between levels of data. We then describe our sampling technique and the resulting coded data. Next, we suggest some directions for the future study of ethnicity and conflict using our bias-corrected data. Our preliminary correlations suggest selection bias may have distorted our understanding about both group and country correlates of ethnic violence.

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Journal of Conflict Resolution
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David Laitin
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Sergei Magnitsky was a thirty-seven year old Russian lawyer and auditor who worked for Hermitage Capital Management, a firm founded in 1996 by Bill Browder, the grandson of the famous leader of the American Communist Party, Earl Browder (1891-1973). Hermitage made tens of millions of dollars in the rush to buy up and sell state assets in the chaotic economic circumstances of Boris Yeltsin’s Russia. Browder’s efforts in the early 2000s to use the emerging Russian legal system to protect his investments and encourage large companies to operate transparently led him to cross swords with the financial and business elite of Putin’s Russia.

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Fox News Opinion
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Norman M. Naimark
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Some of the most moving responses I received after publishing my book Exile and Identity: Polish Women in the Soviet Union during World War II, which focuses on civilian deportees from Eastern Poland to the USSR in 1939-41, came from daughters of women who had been deported. One such daughter, who was born in California after her mother's long journey from a Soviet settlement, through the Middle East, and ending in the US, thanked me for writing the book. "I never understood what was wrong with my mother, why she was so different," she said, "until I read your book." In conversation, she spoke of the great chasm she felt between herself and her mother, whose traumatic past she found a heavy yet inscrutable presence in her home. Her words came to mind as soon as I opened Donna Solecka Urbikas' memoir, My Sister's Mother: A Memoir of War, Exile and Stalin's Siberia. Urbikas is the daughter and sister of Polish exiles. Her father, Wawrzyniec Solecki, was captured and interned by the Soviets as a reserve army officer, while her mother, Janina, and sister Mira (age five at the time) were forcibly deported to the Urals region of Russia in 1940.

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Canadian Slavonic Papers
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Katherine Jolluck
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Not that long ago, debates over politics were anchored in a clear opposition between universalism and relativism. Proponents of an inclusive structure of, at least aspirationally, all states—the new world order—envisioned an unchallenged entrenchment of democratic capitalism everywhere. Where dictatorships endured, as in North Korea, they were treated as bizarre outliers, exceptions that proved the rule of the progress of mankind toward Kant’s perpetual peace. Universalist values held sway; ultimately all rights were to become human rights, due to all humans solely on the basis of their humanity, implying that rights pursuant to national citizenship, to membership in any particular national community, would dwindle in significance: no borders, no sovereignty, no traditions. However this conceptual expression of globalization faced sophisticated critics, variously postmodern, which treated that universalism with disdain and suspicion, insinuating to it an imperial agenda and offering an alternative program of multiplicity, diversity, and multipolarity

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TELOS, Critical Theory of the Contemporary
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Russell A. Berman
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In the month of April, I found myself saying “I agree with Trump” more than anytime ever. On China, Russia, NATO and Syria, President Trump signaled radical changes in policy, nearly the complete opposite of what he said as a candidate. All were changes for the good — that is, new policy positions that advance American security, prosperity and values. The lingering question is whether these recent statements signal a fundamental change in Trump’s thinking about foreign policy or rather short-term reversals that could be reversed again. Is he learning or ad-libbing? It’s too early to tell.

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The Washington Post
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Michael A. McFaul
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After the vote results came in last November, many Russians close to the Kremlin celebrated. “Our Trump” — or #TrumpNash, as they tweeted — had been elected president of the United States... Of course, many factors combined to produce Trump’s victory, but Putin’s intervention most certainly played a contributing role.

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The Washington Post
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Michael A. McFaul
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From the former secretary of state and bestselling author -- a sweeping look at the global struggle for democracy and why America must continue to support the cause of human freedom.

From the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union to the ongoing struggle for human rights in the Middle East, Condoleezza Rice has served on the front lines of history. As a child, she was an eyewitness to a third awakening of freedom, when her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, became the epicenter of the civil rights movement for black Americans.

In this book, Rice explains what these epochal events teach us about democracy. At a time when people around the world are wondering whether democracy is in decline, Rice shares insights from her experiences as a policymaker, scholar, and citizen, in order to put democracy's challenges into perspective.

When the United States was founded, it was the only attempt at self-government in the world. Today more than half of all countries qualify as democracies, and in the long run that number will continue to grow. Yet nothing worthwhile ever comes easily. Using America's long struggle as a template, Rice draws lessons for democracy around the world -- from Russia, Poland, and Ukraine, to Kenya, Colombia, and the Middle East. She finds that no transitions to democracy are the same because every country starts in a different place. Pathways diverge and sometimes circle backward. Time frames for success vary dramatically, and countries often suffer false starts before getting it right. But, Rice argues, that does not mean they should not try. While the ideal conditions for democracy are well known in academia, they never exist in the real world. The question is not how to create perfect circumstances but how to move forward under difficult ones.

These same insights apply in overcoming the challenges faced by governments today. The pursuit of democracy is a continuing struggle shared by people around the world, whether they are opposing authoritarian regimes, establishing new democratic institutions, or reforming mature democracies to better live up to their ideals. The work of securing it is never finished.

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Twelve
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Condoleezza Rice
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Our world is built on links and connections. Roads, railways, supply chains, underwater cables, and social networks are thefoundation of our societies. It was the hope of the late 20th century that these interdependencies would further understanding anddecrease conflict. Like no other organisation, the European Union was based on this idea.
But now, what has brought us together is driving us apart. Instead of bringing us closer, these interdependences are turning sour, causing conflicts – and being used as weapons. The most important battleground of these conflicts will not be the air or ground but rather the interconnected infrastructure of the global economy: disrupting trade and investment, international law, the internet, transport links, and the movement of people. Welcome to the Connectivity Wars. 
 
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Mark Leonard is co-founder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, the first pan-European think tank.  As well as writingand commenting frequently in the media on global affairs, Mark is author of two best-selling books. His first book, Why Europe will run the21st Century, was published in 2005 and translated into 19 languages. Mark’s second book, What does China think? was published in 2008and translated into 15 languages. He writes a syndicated column on global affairs for Reuters.com and is Chairman of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Geoeconomics. In 2016 he published an edited volume on Connectivity Wars and is working on a future book on the same topic.
Previously he worked as director of foreign policy at the Centre for European Reform and as director of the Foreign Policy Centre, a think tank he founded at the age of 24 under the patronage of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. In the 1990s Mark worked for the think tank Demos where his Britain™ report was credited with launching Cool Britannia. Mark has spent time in Washington, D.C. as a Transatlantic Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and in Beijing as a visiting scholar at the Chinese Academy for Social Sciences.
Honoured as a “Young Global Leader” of the World Economic Forum, he spends a lot of time helping governments, companies, andinternational organisations make sense of the big geo-political trends of the twenty-first century. He is a regular speaker and prolific writerand commentator on global issues, the future of Europe, China's internal politics, and the practice of diplomacy and business in a networked world. His essays have  appeared in publications such as Foreign Affairs, The Financial Times, The New York Times, Le Monde, Süddeutsche Zeitung, El Pais, Gazeta Wyborcza, Foreign Policy, the New Statesman, The Daily Telegraph, The Economist, Time,and Newsweek.
 
 
Mark Leonard Director of the European Council on Foreign Relations
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