What drives Russia's violence in and against Ukraine from the 19th century to 2024?

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is the single most important event in Europe since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It is also arguably the major global geopolitical development since 9/11. My main argument is that violence and repression are deeply rooted in the history of Russo-Ukrainian relations. Since the mid-19th century, dominating Ukraine and denying Ukrainians an independent identity, let alone a state, has been the cornerstone of Imperial, Soviet and eventually, post-Soviet Russian policies.

More specifically, I show that Russian and Soviet policies were driven by two factors: identity and security. The idea of the shared origin and fraternity of Russians and Ukrainians is a staple of Russian self-perception and historiography. The second key factor is security. Western powers often passed through Ukraine to attack Russia; Ukraine’s fertile soil was crucial to feeding and funding the Russian and Soviet Empires. Even more than geopolitics, it was regime stability that drove Moscow and St. Petersburg’s obsessive focus on Ukraine. Nothing scares a Russian autocrat more than a democratic Ukraine, because if Ukrainians can build a democracy, then the supposedly fraternal Russian people might too. Thus, combined, identity, security, and the interaction between the two drive Russia’s policies towards Ukraine since the 19th century.

Eugene Finkel is the Kenneth H. Keller Associate Professor of International Affairs, School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on how institutions and individuals respond to extreme situations: mass violence, state collapse, and rapid change.

Finkel's most recent book is Intent to Destroy: Russia's Two-Hundred-Year Quest to Dominate Ukraine (Basic Books, 2024). He is also the author of Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust (Princeton University Press, 2017), Reform and Rebellion in Weak States (Cambridge University Press, 2020, co-authored with Scott Gehlbach) and Bread and Autocracy: Food, Politics and Security in Putin’s Russia (Oxford University Press, 2023, co-authored with Janetta Azarieva and Yitzhak M. Brudny). His articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, East European Politics and Societies, Slavic Review, and several other journals and edited volumes. Finkel has also published articles and op-eds in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs, The Spectator and other outlets.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by April 11, 2024.

Event Details: The Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies is proud to present:

“How Multiracial Identity Shapes Citizenship“, part of the 1891 Lectures in the Humanities. Michelle Mercer and Bruce Golden Family Professor in Feminist and Gender Studies, Rachel Jean-Baptiste will be speaking on her book Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa, (Cambridge UP, 2023).

Please join us for what will be a lively and eventful talk at the Stanford Humanities Center on February 26th, 2024 at 4:30 PM PST at Levinthal Hall in the Stanford Humanities Center.

There will be a reception to follow! We encourage you to RSVP with this form for logistics and planning purposes by February 19th! RSVP’s are encouraged but not required!

This event is sponsored by The Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and is cosponsored by Stanford Humanities Center, Department of African & African American Studies, Center for African Studies, France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies and The Europe Center Freeman Spogli Institute Stanford Global Studies.

More about the author and book: 

Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa is a groundbreaking history of EurAfricans or métis, people of African and European parentage, and how their conceptions of racial identity shaped notions of citizenship and childhood in Africa and Europe. Despite increasingly hardened visions of racial difference in colonial governance in French Africa after World War I, interracial sexual relationships persisted – mainly between African women and European men – and resulted in the births of thousands of children in West and Equatorial Africa. Drawing on public and private archives, photos, and oral history research in Senegal, France, Gabon, Germany, and Congo Jean-Baptiste traces the little-explored history of francophone métis. Crucially, this history analyzes how multiracial people made claims to access French social and citizenship rights amidst the refusal by European fathers to recognize their children and in the context of changing racial thought and practice in varied African societies. In this innovative and transcontinental history of race-making, belonging, and family Jean-Baptiste reveals the complexities and interconnected nature of identity-making in Africa and Europe. 

Do citizens' perceptions of parties' multidimensional issue positions shape partisanship? Dassonneville, Fournier and Somer-Topcu use survey data from 11 countries to study this question.

There is a growing consensus in the field of party politics that new political fault lines are emerging and scholars increasingly characterize party competition as multidimensional. However, the level and nature of change differ widely between countries, resulting in variation in the extent to which new ideological dimensions structure oppositions between parties, and important differences in the extent to which new fault lines cross-cut existing ideological oppositions. It has been argued that such differences are important, because the cross-cuttingness of parties’ positions on different ideological dimensions determines the clarity of parties’ brands and in this way shapes party attachments (Dassonneville, Fournier and Somer-Topcu 2022). 

Most of what we know about the connection between parties’ position, brand clarity and partisanship relies on expert- or manifesto-based estimates of the positions that parties take, forcing scholars to assume that voters are perfectly informed about parties’ positions on multiple dimensions and about the oppositions between parties. To address this limitation, we rely on an original data collection of surveys in 11 countries in which we asked respondents to position parties on six different issues, capturing economic, social, and cultural divisions. Our design allows connecting citizens’ perceptions of the space of party competition in their country to their views about the clarity of parties’ ideological brands and measures of partisanship. Using this novel dataset, we provide unique individual-level insights into the ways in which party positions and the restructuring of party competition shape party attachments.

Ruth Dassonneville is an Associate Professor in the political science department at the Université de Montréal, where she holds the Canada Research Chair in Electoral Democracy.

Her research interests include electoral behaviour, dealignment, economic voting, compulsory voting, and women and politics. Her work on these topics has been published in, amongst others, the American Journal of Political Science, the British Journal of Political Science, the European Journal of Political Research and the Journal of Politics. In 2023, she published Voters Under Pressure with Oxford University Press.

*If you need any disability-related accommodation, please contact Shannon Johnson at sj1874@stanford.edu. Requests should be made by February 29, 2024.