Podcast appearances and mentions of alexander etkind

What is the connection between oil, war, and climate crisis? In a long article “Oil, climate and war: The curse of the petrostate”, Alexander Etkind explores the tendency of authoritarian petrostates, such as Russia and Iran, to launch wars and downplay climate change. ---------- SPEAKER: Alexander Etkind is a historian and cultural scientist. Alexander Etkind was born in 1955 in St. Petersburg, Russia, and is a professor at CEU Vienna. He was formerly a professor of history and the Chair of Russia-Europe relations at the European University Institute in Florence. He is fellow of the European Institute for International Law and International Relations. Etkind's research focuses on European and Russian intellectual history, memory studies, natural resources and the history of political economy, empire and colonies in Europe, and Russian politics, novels, and film in the 21st century. His has written many compelling books, including Russia Against Modernity, Rethinking the Gulag and Nature's Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources. Links will be added to the video description. ----------   LINKS: Alexander Etkind on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sasha_Etkind Alexander Etkind on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Etkind Alexander Etkind at the Moscow Times: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/author/alexander-etkind-2 ---------- BOOKS: Russia Against Modernity (2023) Rethinking the Gulag: Identities, Sources, Legacies (2022) Nature's Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources (2021) Eros Of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis In Russia (2019) Development and Dystopia: Studies in Post-Soviet Ukraine and Eastern Europe (2018) War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus (2017) Cultural Forms of Protest in Russia (2017) Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (2013) Internal Colonization: Russia's Imperial Experience (2011) Remembering Katyn (2013) ---------- SUPPORT THE CHANNEL: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/siliconcurtain https://www.patreon.com/siliconcurtain ---------- TRUSTED CHARITIES ON THE GROUND: Save Ukraine https://www.saveukraineua.org/ Superhumans - Hospital for war traumas https://superhumans.com/en/ UNBROKEN - Treatment. Prosthesis. Rehabilitation for Ukrainians in Ukraine https://unbroken.org.ua/ Come Back Alive https://savelife.in.ua/en/ Chefs For Ukraine - World Central Kitchen https://wck.org/relief/activation-chefs-for-ukraine UNITED24 - An initiative of President Zelenskyy https://u24.gov.ua/ Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundation https://prytulafoundation.org ---------- WATCH NEXT: Julia Tymoshenko https://youtu.be/mLqB7ShA2l4 Anastasiya Shapochkina https://youtu.be/AUbSEiqJk1o Luke Harding https://youtu.be/YRgCJ4HqIbo Yuri Felshtinsky https://youtu.be/_Jhj4Z32e_Q Ian Garner https://youtu.be/j9l4PYBD0_o ---------- PLATFORMS: Twitter: https://twitter.com/CurtainSilicon Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/siliconcurtain/ Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/4thRZj6NO7y93zG11JMtqm Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finkjonathan/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/siliconcurtain ---------- Welcome to the Silicon Curtain podcast. Please like and subscribe if you like the content we produce. It will really help to increase the popularity of our content in YouTube's algorithm. Our material is now being made available on popular podcasting platforms as well, such as Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

In this conversation, Alexander Etkind sets out the reasons why environmental challenges are largely ignored in Russia, by public authorities and more generally by society. If this is largely explained by the weight of fossil fuels in Russia's income, there are other factors to take into account, such as state ideology, education and demography. Alexander Etkind also presents his conception of the Anthropocene, based on the thinking of Bruno Latour on Gaia modernity. Alexander Etkind, Professor of international relations at the Central European University. He has now launched a major project : “Politics of Anthropocene Interdisciplinary Hub”, jointly conducted by CEU and Sciences Po.  Additionnal ressources Russia Against Modernity, April 2023, Polity  Nature's Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources, Wiley, Oct. 2021    Recorded on 14 June 2023 Talk with Sergei is a podcast by Sciences Po. Hélène Naudet supervised the production of this series, accompanied by Anaelle Vergonjeanne. The Sciences Po audio department produced and mixed it.  Hosted by Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Welcome to the Peaceful Political Revolution in America PodcastThe Anthropocene will be a doozy from what I'm hearing. Even if new technologies and new systems replace the ones currently falling apart, it will be a bumpy ride. It looks as if severe climate-related events will be occurring much more frequently. Monthly events could turn into weekly events, until eventually, those might even become daily events somewhere in the world.Megatrends appear to be rather obvious at first glance. Autocracies are on the rise. Democracies are being tested. There is a genuine contest of political systems being played out on the global stage, Freedom is being contested. Is it even necessary? So how much better than being at the mercy of a tyrant or a mere autocrat? Maybe not, at least that's how it all appears to be going.Russia remains a shining example of what can go wrong in a constitutional democracy. After all, reforms were once a thing in Russia, political lines were actually shifting for a brief moment in time. But then Putin rose to power, with imperialist ambitions, and a desire for supreme power and wealth. Corruption is not foreign to the former USSR. It runs rampant, and the concentration of wealth in Russia today is as bad if not worse as in the US.Inequality remains a serious problem in the world, regardless of the political system. For the vast majority of human beings, daily life is a struggle, while a small if not tiny fraction of society remains engorged on the fat of excess of wealth and power, mobility, and security.Alexander joined the Department of International Relations at Central European University in 2022. He previously taught at the European University Institute at Florence (2013-2022), the University of Cambridge (2004-2013), and the European University at St Petersburg (1999-2004). His current interests are the political aspects of the Anthropocene, global decarbonization, and security in Eastern Europe. A Fellow of King's College Cambridge, Etkind was the Leader of Memory at War: Cultural Dynamics in Poland, Russia, and Ukraine, a European research project (2010-13). He is the author of Eros of the Impossible. The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia (Westview Press 1996); Internal Colonization: Russia's Imperial Experience (Polity Press 2011); Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (Stanford University Press 2013); Roads not Taken. An Intellectual Biography of William C. Bullitt. (Pittsburgh University Press 2017); and Nature's Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources (Polity Press 2021). Alexander coedited Remembering Katyn (Polity 2012), Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe (Palgrave 2013), and Cultural Forms of Protest in Russia (Routledge 2017). His new book, Russia Against Modernity, was released by Polity in April 2023.

Show Notes Episode Summary Yewleea has a conversation with Rory Finnin, Ph.D, Professor of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge. He launched the Cambridge Ukrainian Studies programme in 2008. He is also co-organiser of the Disinformation and Media Literacy Special Interest Group at the University of Cambridge. In 2015 he won a Teaching Award for Outstanding Lecturer from the Cambridge University Students' Union (CUSU), the representative body for all students at the University. Rory and Yewleea spend today's Brief talking about russian imperialism, the failure of the West to recognize russia for the death cult that it is, and what we can do to prevent something like the War in Ukraine from ever happening again. Yewleea's article "Why is the West So Eager to Consume Russian Propaganda?" Yewleea's article "What Are the Pillars of Russification?" Buy Rory's book Blood of Others and the book he co-authored with Alexander Etkind, et al Remembering Katyn Linnea and Yewleaa will be back tomorrow to bring you the latest Brief. Have you listened to our sister podcast, FAQ-U: Ukraine Explained? Hosted by our own Yewleea and produced for Svidomi Media, FAQ-U explores popular misconceptions about Ukraine. Help Our Podcast: Rate, Review, and Give Feedback. This podcast is brand new, and every review helps others find it. If you enjoy the podcast, we'd (obviously) love a 5-star review! If we haven't quite earned your 5-star review, reach out and let us know at social@borlingon.media so we can continue to grow and improve! Thank you! Support Our Work and Receive Benefits. For just $10/month, paid subscribers on Substack receive an ad-free podcast, along with the Written Brief. Founding Members get to go behind the scenes and see how we produce the podcast. Subscribe here: substack.com/@borlingonmedia. Learn More Listen to our sister podcast we co-produce with Ukrainian media company, Svidomi Media, called FAQ-U: Ukraine Explained on Apple, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. Follow Linnea and Yewleea on social media.   Copyright 2023, Borlingon Media Group, LLC. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Much of Russian history was shaped by the “imperial experience”. Alexander Etkind suggests the process was a simultaneous of internal colonization as well as the more obvious external one. The characteristic phenomena of colonialism, such as missionary work, exotic journeys, and ethnographic scholarship, were directed inwards toward the interior provinces of the Russian empire – villages and timeless peasant lifestyles, as well as outwards and overseas. To an extent Russia is still an ‘undiscovered country' from the perspective of its urban elites, and we see this starkly in the current war – with the burden of fighting and dying falling on minorities and the impoverished. We also see a radical lack of empathy for other people within the empire experiencing violence, whether that be Belgorod or Buryatia. It even leads us to ask, can Russia even be compared to the modern nation states of Europe? #alexanderetkind #colonisation #ukraine #ukrainewar #russia #zelensky #putin #propaganda #war #disinformation #hybridwarfare #foreignpolicy #communism #sovietunion #postsoviet ---------- SPEAKER: Alexander Etkind is a historian and cultural scientist. Alexander Etkind was born in 1955 in St. Petersburg, Russia, and is a professor at CEU Vienna. He was formerly a professor of history and the Chair of Russia-Europe relations at the European University Institute in Florence. He is fellow of the European Institute for International Law and International Relations. Etkind's research focuses on European and Russian intellectual history, memory studies, natural resources and the history of political economy, empire and colonies in Europe, and Russian politics, novels, and film in the 21st century. His has written many compelling books, including Russia Against Modernity, Rethinking the Gulag and Nature's Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources. Links will be added to the video description. ----------   LINKS: Alexander Etkind on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sasha_Etkind Alexander Etkind on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Etkind Alexander Etkind at the Moscow Times: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/author/alexander-etkind-2 ---------- BOOKS: Russia Against Modernity (2023) Rethinking the Gulag: Identities, Sources, Legacies (2022) Nature's Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources (2021) Eros Of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis In Russia (2019) Development and Dystopia: Studies in Post-Soviet Ukraine and Eastern Europe (2018) War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus (2017) Cultural Forms of Protest in Russia (2017) Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (2013) Internal Colonization: Russia's Imperial Experience (2011) Remembering Katyn (2013) ----------

Vandringssägner skapade flera gånger hysteri i den sovjetiska vardagen. Morris Wikström spårar myter vars ekon hörs än idag. ESSÄ: Detta är en text där skribenten reflekterar över ett ämne eller ett verk. Åsikter som uttrycks är skribentens egna.Den 19 december 1937 utbröt panik i Sovjetunionen. Det fanns såklart gott om skäl att vara rädd, åren då Stalins terror nådde sin kulmen. Men paniken som bröt ut just den 19 december 1937 handlade inte om tvångsförvisningar och avrättningar utan om de nya omslagen till de sovjetiska skolelevernas skrivböcker. Omslagen var framtagna för att högtidlighålla den ryske nationalskalden Aleksandr Pusjkins dödsdag och gestaltade olika scener ur poetens liv. Men när eleverna kom till skolan i slutet av december blev de genast beordrade att riva bort omslagen. Det hade uppdagats att flera av dem innehöll symboler som inte alls tycktes högtidlighålla minnet av Pusjkin, utan tvärtom antingen kritiserade sovjetmakten genom dolda budskap som ”Ner med säkerhetspolisen”, eller hyllade det tyska nationalsocialistiska partiet genom att linjerna i teckningarna bildade en svastika.Denna ”skrivbokspanik” är ett av många fall av kollektiv, sovjetisk hysteri som triggades av vandringssägner, och som studerats av de ryska antropologerna Aleksandra Archipova och Anna Kirzjuk. I deras bok som i ungefärlig svensk översättning skulle kunna heta ”Farliga sovjetiska föremål: vandringssägner och rädslor i Sovjetunionen” skriver de fram en alternativ 1900-talshistoria. En historia som pågår, ja, närmast svävar omkring, på gator och torg, i köken och på fabrikerna. En historia vars skugga fortfarande går att få syn på i det ryska samhället.Författarna jämför den kollektiva psykosen med den individuella psykosen, så som den beskrevs av den tyske psykiatern Klaus Conrad 1958. Enligt Conrad inleds en schizofren psykos med att det som annars förstås som en bakgrund framträder som bärare av ett budskap. De prasslande löven tycks prassla onaturligt starkt. Och lyssnar man noga tycks de också säga något. Detta är en djupt obehaglig känsla, som lindras först när man lyckats avkoda det budskap som förmedlas, Conrad kallar det för en aha-upplevelse. Då avtar ångesten, innan den efter ett tag återvänder. Problemet i det sovjetiska samhället på 30-talet var att det inte fanns en plats att vila på. För när Stalins terror pågick var bäraren av de dolda symbolerna enligt den sovjetiska logiken själv smittad – ja, rent av farlig för sin omgivning. Det enda sättet att frigöra sig från smittan var att slå larm. Och när larmet gick var alla som bar på symbolen antingen agenter – eller i sin naivitet ett redskap för fienden. Därmed utbröt ett slags tävling om vem som kunde hitta symbolerna först. Det var i en tid av statlig terror lika farligt att inte se symboler, som att faktiskt se dem.Det sovjetiska imperiets politiska logik, dess långlivade särskildhet och totala anspråk, är en intressant kontext för studier av vandringssägner. Det är mardrömmar om röda atomvapenknappar i märkligt bekanta portföljer, det är svarta KGB-bilar som kör runt på gatorna sent på kvällen och tillfångatar barn som inte sitter hemma, det är förgiftade amerikanska tuggummin, ja faktiskt alla slags gåvor från utlänningar inför Moskva-olympiaden 1980. Det är hemliga arkitektoniska budskap, riktningsanvisningar som bara syns från bombplanen i luften, det är fotoapparater med röd film som kan se genom väggar och kläder - och det är en obscen mängd antisemitiska blodsmyter. På väggarna i de sovjetiska hemmen hänger kinesiska bonader som om nätterna visar sig vara förhäxade i tider av geopolitiska spänningar mellan de röda stormakterna. Och så den där låten, som tycktes förebåda ännu ett krig. Den okända tyskan i Dschinghis Khans kitschiga schlagerdänga från 1979 tycktes kommunicera hotfulla meddelanden om att tyskarna skulle komma tillbaka och bomba sönder Moskva.”Farliga sovjetiska föremål” är inte bara en studie om hur vandringssägner påverkade de sovjetiska medborgarnas vardag. Det är också forskning som gör det möjligt att orientera sig i dagens Ryssland. Själv minns jag hur jag, i en gammal lägenhet i Sankt Petersburg, blev beskylld för att vara det mest skrämmande en äldre generation ryssar kan tänka sig: ”du är en främling!” skrek en upprörd äldre kvinna som bodde permanent i en kollektivlägenhet jag hyrde ett rum i. ”Jag är ingen främling”, sa jag, ”jag är gäst här”. ”Du är ingen gäst, du är en främling, och imorgon kommer jag ringa polisen så får de ta reda på vem du egentligen är!”. Förutom ilskan och rädslan i hennes röst minns jag ordvalet. Hon skulle inte ringa polisen: politsija, utan militsija. Den heter inte så i dagens Ryssland. Men den hette så i Sovjet. Replikskiftet var en tidsresa in i ett medvetande som jag inte själv har tillgång till, men ändå blev en deltagare i. På samma sätt blev flera generationer sovjetiska medborgare deltagare i en historia de aldrig genomlevt. Flera av de som delar med sig av sina minnen i ”Farliga sovjetiska föremål” minns hur rädslor och beteenden traderades från äldre släktingar. Framtidens krig var en föreställning om det krig som varit, rädslan för ett kärnvapenkrig var lika mycket rädslan för de atombomber som redan exploderat mot 1900-talets jord, och det var i denna bördiga jord som nya mardrömmar och myter blomstrade – ett tillstånd som den ryska kulturvetaren Alexander Etkind har beskrivit som att minnet av ett trauma i det förflutna till slut blir omöjligt att skilja från en tvångsmässig rädsla för dess upprepning.Även om flera av de sovjetiska vandringssägnerna var specifika till sitt innehåll, är deras struktur ofta generell: Många är vi som någon gång fått för oss att sätta en klisterlapp över linsen på datorns webbkamera. Dövat ångesten, tillfälligt lindrat den skrämmande insikten om att allt vi gör övervakas. Det tycks inte spela någon roll att det inte är våra eventuella t-shirtmotiv som intresserar de globala teknikföretagen. Klisterlappen över webkameran fyller alltså samma funktion som de sovjetiska vandringssägnerna gjorde när de lindrade en kontrollförlust. Fantasin är både barnets och den vuxnes sällskap när verklighetens rädslor tränger sig på.Men det är också i fantasins domäner som lärofilmer och varnande förmaningar ibland förvandlas och antar nya skepnader – på ett sätt som förvandlar det skrämmande till det åtråvärda. Så berättar en av deltagarna i forskningsstudien att han som skolelev fick se en instruktionsfilm om det förestående kärnvapenkriget. Filmen var tänkt att varna eleverna för den totala katastrofen, men fick nya innebörder i nattens fantasieggande mörker. För det som stannade kvar i minnet var inte den fasansfulla explosionen, utan en scen där bombens tryckvåg på ett erotiskt sätt fick en tjejs klänning att ”fullständigt klibba fast mot huden”.Morris Wikström, kulturjournalist och doktorand i rysk litteratur Litteratur Archipova, Aleksandra & Kirzjuk, Anna (2020). Opasnye sovetskie vešči: gorodskie legendy i strachi v SSSR. Moskva: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. Ėtkind, Aleksandr Markovič (2013). Warped mourning: stories of the undead in the land of the unburied. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Russia is tearing itself away from modern civilization and its associated values, norms and comforts. Putin and his coterie of incompetent sycophants seem to be happily destroying the foundations of everything that has been built in the past 30 years. Instead, he's embracing an alternative future tied to eastern despotism as a vassal state of China – a source of assets to be mined, without any value-added production. What demons have resurfaced from Russia's past, and what is driving a form of sado-masochistic self-destruction and flagellation, that seems to be propelling Russia backwards in a painful civilisational decline. And where will this out-of-control Troika stop – possibly at an era that pre-dates Peter the Great's efforts to punch a window onto Europe in the façade of Russia's feudal-military despotism, established by the khans of the Mongol Horde. But what is the role of such a state in the modern world? ---------- SPEAKER: Alexander Etkind is a historian and cultural scientist. Alexander Etkind was born in 1955 in St. Petersburg, Russia, and is a professor at CEU Vienna. His book Russia against Modernity is forthcoming with Polity Press. He was formerly a professor of history and the Chair of Russia-Europe relations at the European University Institute in Florence. He is fellow of the European Institute for International Law and International Relations. He completed his B.A. and M.A. in 1978 in Psychology and English at Leningrad State University. Etkind taught at the European University at St. Petersburg then at Cambridge University where he was also a fellow of King's College. He was a visiting fellow at New York University, Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, and other places. Etkind's research focuses on European and Russian intellectual history, memory studies, natural resources and the history of political economy, empire and colonies in Europe, and Russian politics, novels, and film in the 21st century. His has written many compelling books, including Russia Against Modernity, Rethinking the Gulag and Nature's Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources. ---------- LINKS: Alexander Etkind on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sasha_Etkind Alexander Etkind on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Etkind Alexander Etkind at the Moscow Times: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/author/alexander-etkind-2 ---------- BOOKS: Russia Against Modernity (2023) Rethinking the Gulag: Identities, Sources, Legacies (2022) Nature's Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources (2021) Eros Of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis In Russia (2019) Development and Dystopia: Studies in Post-Soviet Ukraine and Eastern Europe (2018) War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus (2017) Cultural Forms of Protest in Russia (2017) Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (2013) Internal Colonization: Russia's Imperial Experience (2011) Remembering Katyn (2013) ----------

Alexander Etkind joined the Department of International Relations at Central European University in 2022. He previously taught at the European University Institute in Florence, and at several other institutions. His research looks at the extreme challenges of global decarbonization and security in Eastern Europe. Much of his past writing is concerned with the question of memory, of European intellectual history, and of empires and decolonization. He's the author of many books, including Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia, Internal Colonization: Russia's Imperial Experience, Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied, Nature's Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources, and a really interesting new book called Russia Against Modernity which comes out in April. Here we talk about the war in Ukraine, but in the longue durée of various societies' relationship to the natural resources they use and abuse for the purpose of development. Etkind says that the patterns that we see play out in terms of what is sometimes called the “oil curse” are not totally new. This is a big part of the argument of Nature's Evil: he sees the “resource curse” unfold at a number of points in human history with other sources of energy, like wood and peat. There are ways that oil is unique, though. The “paradigmatic relationship,” for Etkind is between resource-rich and resource-dependent states, when it comes to oil. And he sees that division in terms of degrees of democracy. In the resource-rich state of Russia, the current regime sees the need to maintain a monopoly on information in order to perpetuate its unequal command of the revenue from the carbon-intensive resources it is founded on. Etkind writes about the dilemma of confronting autocratic petrostates on the problem of climate change, and confronts the seemingly unsolvable problem of how the state—which, he states, is actually the only entity that “stands between the energy barons and the tragedy of drowned cities”—can be made to radically disentangle itself from fossil fuels. He senses that, in Russia, the monopoly on information is weakening. That within the country there is an intergenerational war taking place over the future of the federation, given that a mass exodus of young people fled to what he says are “not very hospitable environments” rather than accept the propaganda and suppression that staying in the country would have meant. While, for him, this is admittedly a “modest grounds for hope,” it is still a source. The persistent problem, though, is that reducing emissions and saving the atmosphere from the death-dealing effects of CO2 will require a sustained period of peace. Once war breaks out, energy transition becomes inconceivable. Forms of feminist organizing and protest, the environmental movement, organized groups who refuse the trauma of war and the tragedy of drowned cities, these are sites of hope for Etkind, but the ongoing “asymmetrical sacrifice” is still, at the moment, stunning us into a kind of clarity.

Climate Denialism and Putin's War in the Ukraine In his upcoming book Russia against Modernity the historian Alexander Etkind traces the historical entanglements of climate change, energy transition and military aggression. He suggests that the war against the Ukraine should be seen as part of a wider attack on modernity. Refusing to accept the imperatives of climate change, the dying Energy Empire undermines the global effort of preventing ecological collapse. The inescapable demand to move away from fossil fuels has long constituted an existential threat to Russia, as one of the world's largest oil and gas exporters. Its wealth and military might depend on the ruthless extraction of energy and raw materials which it has exploited for decades at the expense of the health and livelihood of the population at large. Against this backdrop, the current attack on Ukraine appears as the latest stage in a long ongoing war against nature, environment, people and bodies. Alexander M. Etkind is Professor at the Department of International Relations at the Central European University. He has authored, among others, Internal Colonization: Russia's Imperial Experience (Polity Press 2011) and Nature's Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources (Polity Press 2021). His new book, Russia against Modernity, will be released by Polity in April 2023. Monika Halkort is a social scientist and journalist in Vienna. She currently also teaches at the University of Applied Arts as part of the master program ‚Applied Human Rights and the Arts`, under the direction of Manfred Novak. Next to her academic work, she regularly produces contributions for the Ö1 programs Radiokolleg, Hörbilder and Diagonal. From 2011 to 2020, she taught and conducted research at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, Lebanon. The thematic focus of her scholarly and publishing work is the historical interconnections of colonialism, technology and knowledge production and how they continue to shape ideas of sustainability, planetary thinking and environmental justice today.

I'm joined in this episode by Russian historian Alexander Etkind, author of the 2013 book Internal Colonisation to discuss whether the Russian Federation actually could, or, indeed, should break up. Read the episode blog post here: https://therussianempirehistorypodcast.com/blog/special-episode-4-the-russian-federation-could-it-will-it-should-it-break-up-with-alexander-etkind

Black Diplomats host Terrell Starr is in Ukraine, despite President Biden's warning that Americans should leave. He's reporting on the ground, but also spending time with loved ones and friends. Like everyone else in the country he's keeping an eye on the Russian troops at the border but trying not to let the situation get to him. With so much focus on what Russia is doing in Eastern Ukraine, it's easy to forget why they're doing it. Today on Black Diplomats we have two keen observers of the Russian model of colonialism - journalist Maksym Eristavi and historian Alexander Etkind. They cover the history of Ukrainian/Russian relations going back to Catherine the Great, compare the American “frontier” with Russias takeover of Siberia, and talk about Putin's sense of a Slavic peoples that is distinct from other Europeans. Thank you for listening!

In Nature′s Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources (Polity Press, 2021), Alexander Etkind views the history of humankind through the prism of natural resources – how we acquire them, use them, value them, trade them, exploit them. History needs a cast of characters, and in this story the leading actors are peat and hemp, grain and iron, fur and oil, each with its own tale to tell. The uneven spread of available resources was the prime mover for trade, which in turn led to the accumulation of wealth, the growth of inequality and the proliferation of evil. Different sorts of raw material have different political implications and give rise to different social institutions. When a country switches its reliance from one commodity to another, this often leads to wars and revolutions. But none of these crises goes to waste – they all lead to dramatic changes in the relations between matter, labour and the state. Our world is the result of a fragile pact between people and nature. As we stand on the verge of climate catastrophe, nature has joined us in our struggle to distinguish between good and evil. And since we have failed to change the world, now is the moment to understand how it works. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In Nature′s Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources (Polity Press, 2021), Alexander Etkind views the history of humankind through the prism of natural resources – how we acquire them, use them, value them, trade them, exploit them. History needs a cast of characters, and in this story the leading actors are peat and hemp, grain and iron, fur and oil, each with its own tale to tell. The uneven spread of available resources was the prime mover for trade, which in turn led to the accumulation of wealth, the growth of inequality and the proliferation of evil. Different sorts of raw material have different political implications and give rise to different social institutions. When a country switches its reliance from one commodity to another, this often leads to wars and revolutions. But none of these crises goes to waste – they all lead to dramatic changes in the relations between matter, labour and the state. Our world is the result of a fragile pact between people and nature. As we stand on the verge of climate catastrophe, nature has joined us in our struggle to distinguish between good and evil. And since we have failed to change the world, now is the moment to understand how it works. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Nature′s Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources (Polity Press, 2021), Alexander Etkind views the history of humankind through the prism of natural resources – how we acquire them, use them, value them, trade them, exploit them. History needs a cast of characters, and in this story the leading actors are peat and hemp, grain and iron, fur and oil, each with its own tale to tell. The uneven spread of available resources was the prime mover for trade, which in turn led to the accumulation of wealth, the growth of inequality and the proliferation of evil. Different sorts of raw material have different political implications and give rise to different social institutions. When a country switches its reliance from one commodity to another, this often leads to wars and revolutions. But none of these crises goes to waste – they all lead to dramatic changes in the relations between matter, labour and the state. Our world is the result of a fragile pact between people and nature. As we stand on the verge of climate catastrophe, nature has joined us in our struggle to distinguish between good and evil. And since we have failed to change the world, now is the moment to understand how it works. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

In Nature′s Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources (Polity Press, 2021), Alexander Etkind views the history of humankind through the prism of natural resources – how we acquire them, use them, value them, trade them, exploit them. History needs a cast of characters, and in this story the leading actors are peat and hemp, grain and iron, fur and oil, each with its own tale to tell. The uneven spread of available resources was the prime mover for trade, which in turn led to the accumulation of wealth, the growth of inequality and the proliferation of evil. Different sorts of raw material have different political implications and give rise to different social institutions. When a country switches its reliance from one commodity to another, this often leads to wars and revolutions. But none of these crises goes to waste – they all lead to dramatic changes in the relations between matter, labour and the state. Our world is the result of a fragile pact between people and nature. As we stand on the verge of climate catastrophe, nature has joined us in our struggle to distinguish between good and evil. And since we have failed to change the world, now is the moment to understand how it works. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

In Nature′s Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources (Polity Press, 2021), Alexander Etkind views the history of humankind through the prism of natural resources – how we acquire them, use them, value them, trade them, exploit them. History needs a cast of characters, and in this story the leading actors are peat and hemp, grain and iron, fur and oil, each with its own tale to tell. The uneven spread of available resources was the prime mover for trade, which in turn led to the accumulation of wealth, the growth of inequality and the proliferation of evil. Different sorts of raw material have different political implications and give rise to different social institutions. When a country switches its reliance from one commodity to another, this often leads to wars and revolutions. But none of these crises goes to waste – they all lead to dramatic changes in the relations between matter, labour and the state. Our world is the result of a fragile pact between people and nature. As we stand on the verge of climate catastrophe, nature has joined us in our struggle to distinguish between good and evil. And since we have failed to change the world, now is the moment to understand how it works. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

In Nature′s Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources (Polity Press, 2021), Alexander Etkind views the history of humankind through the prism of natural resources – how we acquire them, use them, value them, trade them, exploit them. History needs a cast of characters, and in this story the leading actors are peat and hemp, grain and iron, fur and oil, each with its own tale to tell. The uneven spread of available resources was the prime mover for trade, which in turn led to the accumulation of wealth, the growth of inequality and the proliferation of evil. Different sorts of raw material have different political implications and give rise to different social institutions. When a country switches its reliance from one commodity to another, this often leads to wars and revolutions. But none of these crises goes to waste – they all lead to dramatic changes in the relations between matter, labour and the state. Our world is the result of a fragile pact between people and nature. As we stand on the verge of climate catastrophe, nature has joined us in our struggle to distinguish between good and evil. And since we have failed to change the world, now is the moment to understand how it works. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Last week, at a press conference with 500 journalists, Vladimir Putin reiterated his suspicions about American intentions toward Russia, recalling that one of President Woodrow Wilson's advisers once endorsed the partition of Russia, writing more than a century ago: "It would be better for the whole world if a state in Siberia and another four states emerged in the European part of what is now greater Russia." The quotation is real -- it belongs to Edward House, Wilson's informal chief adviser on European politics and diplomacy during World War I. To find out more about America's proposal to carve up the Russian Empire (and to get some much-needed historical context), Meduza turned to historian Alexander Etkind, who recently authored a book about William Bullitt, the U.S. diplomat sent to negotiate with Lenin on behalf of the Paris Peace Conference. It was Bullitt who devised the plan in 1918 to partition Russia. Original Article: https://meduza.io/en/feature/2021/12/28/better-off-without-russia

Georgios Giannakopoulos and Dina Gusejnova in conversation with Alexander Etkind, Professor of History at the European University Institute at Florence, and Maria Mälksoo, Senior Lecturer in International Security at the Brussels School of International Studies, University of Kent. Taking the protests in Belarus which began in August 2020 as a cue, this episode reexamines some of the pivotal scholarship in Eastern European history and international relations through conversations about ways in which the past comes alive in present crises. The episode aims to contextualise the past of Belarus and the region of Kresy in the light of an open future, centring around issues of the cultural and economic histories of borderlands, memory and security, forgotten and obliterated groups. We also discuss how interdisciplinary groups using new media could foster new insights into the history and memory of this region.

Guest: Alexander Etkind on Roads not Taken: An Intellectual Biography of William C. Bullitt published by Pittsburgh University Press. [spp-player] The post William C. Bullitt in the USSR appeared first on The Eurasian Knot.

Guest: Alexander Etkind on Roads not Taken: An Intellectual Biography of William C. Bullitt published by Pittsburgh University Press. [spp-player] The post William C. Bullitt in the USSR appeared first on SRB Podcast.

Theoretical and historical accounts of postcatastrophic societies often discuss melancholia and trauma at length but leave processes of mourning underexplored. In Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (Stanford UP, 2013), Alexander Etkind shows why mourning is more conducive to cultural analysis. Where trauma is... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Theoretical and historical accounts of postcatastrophic societies often discuss melancholia and trauma at length but leave processes of mourning underexplored. In Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (Stanford UP, 2013), Alexander Etkind shows why mourning is more conducive to cultural analysis. Where trauma is unsymbolized and melancholia is contained within the self, mourning is often an address to the other.Mourning might entail attempts to remember, creatively work through, and make manifest losses in poetry, memorials, histories, painting, and other art forms.Without access to the unconscious, cultural historians can only engage what has already been represented and written — that which has materiality and symbolic richness.Individual and mutigenerational testaments and rituals of mourning — warped, haunted, and incomplete — are all that scholars have available. Warped Mourning is about how three generations spanning the Soviet and post-Soviet periods have mourned the millions who perished in the Terror, the Stalinist political repressions of the 1930s.Etkind peruses a broad array of writings and artifacts, offering interpretations inflected by insights from psychoanalysis and critical theory.Autobiographies, fiction, film, visual art, academic writings, and sites of memory like monuments contribute to a complex rendering of the work and evolution of mourning: from the mimetic and demetaphorized (potentially deadly) performative acts in the 1950s by those who directly experienced the gulag, to the still traumatized and politicized mourning by their children in the 1960s and 1970s, and, finally, to the more estranged or distanced remembrances of the post-Soviet years and today. Etkind argues that the killings and torture of the Soviet period were not fully worked through for a number of reasons: the gulag was state violence (and the state controlled public mourning), the division between perpetrators and victims was far from clear, and mourning the persecuted eventually became entwined with mourning the ideas of communism.Unfinished mourning and consequent improper burial and recognition of purge victims produced a culture replete with specters and uncanny monsters.The unpaid debt to the dead also created a strange temporality.Until recently, perhaps, Russia's present has been flooded by the past.In the absence of proper monuments or sufficient memory making, history haunts Russia, propelling its politics and shaping its narratives with an immediacy and force unknown in the West. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis

Theoretical and historical accounts of postcatastrophic societies often discuss melancholia and trauma at length but leave processes of mourning underexplored. In Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (Stanford UP, 2013), Alexander Etkind shows why mourning is more conducive to cultural analysis. Where trauma is unsymbolized and melancholia is contained within the self, mourning is often an address to the other.Mourning might entail attempts to remember, creatively work through, and make manifest losses in poetry, memorials, histories, painting, and other art forms.Without access to the unconscious, cultural historians can only engage what has already been represented and written — that which has materiality and symbolic richness.Individual and mutigenerational testaments and rituals of mourning — warped, haunted, and incomplete — are all that scholars have available. Warped Mourning is about how three generations spanning the Soviet and post-Soviet periods have mourned the millions who perished in the Terror, the Stalinist political repressions of the 1930s.Etkind peruses a broad array of writings and artifacts, offering interpretations inflected by insights from psychoanalysis and critical theory.Autobiographies, fiction, film, visual art, academic writings, and sites of memory like monuments contribute to a complex rendering of the work and evolution of mourning: from the mimetic and demetaphorized (potentially deadly) performative acts in the 1950s by those who directly experienced the gulag, to the still traumatized and politicized mourning by their children in the 1960s and 1970s, and, finally, to the more estranged or distanced remembrances of the post-Soviet years and today. Etkind argues that the killings and torture of the Soviet period were not fully worked through for a number of reasons: the gulag was state violence (and the state controlled public mourning), the division between perpetrators and victims was far from clear, and mourning the persecuted eventually became entwined with mourning the ideas of communism.Unfinished mourning and consequent improper burial and recognition of purge victims produced a culture replete with specters and uncanny monsters.The unpaid debt to the dead also created a strange temporality.Until recently, perhaps, Russia’s present has been flooded by the past.In the absence of proper monuments or sufficient memory making, history haunts Russia, propelling its politics and shaping its narratives with an immediacy and force unknown in the West. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Theoretical and historical accounts of postcatastrophic societies often discuss melancholia and trauma at length but leave processes of mourning underexplored. In Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (Stanford UP, 2013), Alexander Etkind shows why mourning is more conducive to cultural analysis. Where trauma is unsymbolized and melancholia is contained within the self, mourning is often an address to the other.Mourning might entail attempts to remember, creatively work through, and make manifest losses in poetry, memorials, histories, painting, and other art forms.Without access to the unconscious, cultural historians can only engage what has already been represented and written — that which has materiality and symbolic richness.Individual and mutigenerational testaments and rituals of mourning — warped, haunted, and incomplete — are all that scholars have available. Warped Mourning is about how three generations spanning the Soviet and post-Soviet periods have mourned the millions who perished in the Terror, the Stalinist political repressions of the 1930s.Etkind peruses a broad array of writings and artifacts, offering interpretations inflected by insights from psychoanalysis and critical theory.Autobiographies, fiction, film, visual art, academic writings, and sites of memory like monuments contribute to a complex rendering of the work and evolution of mourning: from the mimetic and demetaphorized (potentially deadly) performative acts in the 1950s by those who directly experienced the gulag, to the still traumatized and politicized mourning by their children in the 1960s and 1970s, and, finally, to the more estranged or distanced remembrances of the post-Soviet years and today. Etkind argues that the killings and torture of the Soviet period were not fully worked through for a number of reasons: the gulag was state violence (and the state controlled public mourning), the division between perpetrators and victims was far from clear, and mourning the persecuted eventually became entwined with mourning the ideas of communism.Unfinished mourning and consequent improper burial and recognition of purge victims produced a culture replete with specters and uncanny monsters.The unpaid debt to the dead also created a strange temporality.Until recently, perhaps, Russia’s present has been flooded by the past.In the absence of proper monuments or sufficient memory making, history haunts Russia, propelling its politics and shaping its narratives with an immediacy and force unknown in the West. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Theoretical and historical accounts of postcatastrophic societies often discuss melancholia and trauma at length but leave processes of mourning underexplored. In Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (Stanford UP, 2013), Alexander Etkind shows why mourning is more conducive to cultural analysis. Where trauma is unsymbolized and melancholia is contained within the self, mourning is often an address to the other.Mourning might entail attempts to remember, creatively work through, and make manifest losses in poetry, memorials, histories, painting, and other art forms.Without access to the unconscious, cultural historians can only engage what has already been represented and written — that which has materiality and symbolic richness.Individual and mutigenerational testaments and rituals of mourning — warped, haunted, and incomplete — are all that scholars have available. Warped Mourning is about how three generations spanning the Soviet and post-Soviet periods have mourned the millions who perished in the Terror, the Stalinist political repressions of the 1930s.Etkind peruses a broad array of writings and artifacts, offering interpretations inflected by insights from psychoanalysis and critical theory.Autobiographies, fiction, film, visual art, academic writings, and sites of memory like monuments contribute to a complex rendering of the work and evolution of mourning: from the mimetic and demetaphorized (potentially deadly) performative acts in the 1950s by those who directly experienced the gulag, to the still traumatized and politicized mourning by their children in the 1960s and 1970s, and, finally, to the more estranged or distanced remembrances of the post-Soviet years and today. Etkind argues that the killings and torture of the Soviet period were not fully worked through for a number of reasons: the gulag was state violence (and the state controlled public mourning), the division between perpetrators and victims was far from clear, and mourning the persecuted eventually became entwined with mourning the ideas of communism.Unfinished mourning and consequent improper burial and recognition of purge victims produced a culture replete with specters and uncanny monsters.The unpaid debt to the dead also created a strange temporality.Until recently, perhaps, Russia’s present has been flooded by the past.In the absence of proper monuments or sufficient memory making, history haunts Russia, propelling its politics and shaping its narratives with an immediacy and force unknown in the West. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

While Europeans talk about the “mnemonic age” and the obsession with the past around the globe, Russians complain about the historical “amnesia” in their country. My current project reveals that Russian authors and filmmakers have been obsessed by the work of mourning. They do so in novels, films, and other forms of culture that reflect, shape, and possess people’s memories. I believe that the asymmetry of Memory Studies across Europe should be understood as a political challenge rather than a natural divide. Russia’s leaders are shifting the country’s ‘chosen trauma’ away from the crimes of Stalinism to the collapse of the USSR, which Vladimir Putin called ‘the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century’. This shift at once casts the millions of victims of Soviet terror as unworthy of mourning (or ‘ungrievable,’ in Judith Butler’s parlance) and invites Russians to mourn the state that murdered them. The uncanny scenery of post-Soviet literature and film signals the failure of other, more conventional ways of understanding social reality. This failure and this scenery are nothing new, though post-Soviet conditions exacerbated the wild character of these phantasms. No Iron Curtain has separated Russians from their past. The trauma of the Great Terror of the 1930s, which was essentially a collective suicide of the political and cultural elite of the country, produced cyclical after-shocks that marked the subsequent decades of Russian history. From the return of the Gulag prisoners in the 1950s to the first dissidents of the 1960s, to the grand Soviet film-making of the 1970s, to the archival revelations of the 1980s, to what I call the “magical historicism” of post-Soviet culture, the ghosts of Stalinism and its victims have been stubbornly haunting Russian culture. Inhabiting culture as their ecological niche, the undead constitute a particular kind of collective memory, which becomes prominent when more reliable forms of this memory, such as museums, monuments, or historical textbooks, betray the dead. Etkind is MAW Project Leader and Principal Investigator and Reader in Russian Literature and Cultural History in the Department of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge. His current research interests include internal colonization in the Russian Empire, narratology from Pushkin to Nabokov and comparative studies of cultural memory. He is author of "Post-Soviet Hauntology: Cultural Memory of the Soviet Terror"; "Constellations. An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory" (16/1 (2009): 182-200); Bare Monuments to Bare Life: The Soon-to-Be-Dead in Arts and Memory in "Gulag Studies" (Volume1, 2008: 27-33); "Soviet Subjectivity: Torture for the Sake of Salvation?" in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History" (6, 1 winter 2005: 171-186); Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia (translated by Noah and Maria Rubens), published in Russian and translated into French, German, Swedish, Hungarian, Serbian and Bulgarian. Dr. Etkind's current group project is Memory at War, an international collaborative project investigating the cultural dynamics of the "memory wars" currently raging in Poland, Russia and Ukraine. Employing a collaborative methodology grounded in the analytical and critical practices of the humanities, the project seeks to explore how public memory of 20th century traumas mediates the variety of ways in which East European nations develop in post-socialist space. The University of Cambridge is leading this project, which will be accomplished in association with the Universities of Bergen, Helsinki, Tartu and Groningen. The project was launched in 2010 and will run for three years.