The Centre for Advanced Study Sofia is pleased to invite you to the discussion
Venezuela is not Ukraine? Reflections on the Emergent Protest Movements in the Post/Socialist World
(in English)
Convened by Dr. Mariya Ivancheva and Dr. Simone A. Bellezza,
CAS Advanced Academia Fellows
The event will take place at the CAS conference hall
on 20 March 2014 (Tuesday) at 17:00h on 7B, Stefan Karadja Str. Sofia
In a statement about the recent rebellions in Caracas, which took the lives of scores of people, President Nicolas Maduro insisted that "Venezuela is not Ukraine." Yet, neither him, nor further commentators on the current events on either side have engaged in an analysis of what are the differences between the two protest waves, or what similarities can be found among them. Moreover, this kind of comparison is often considered irrelevant: Ukraine and Venezuela have been separated by a taxonomy of knowledge which locates them in two different blocks of the Cold War "area studies" paradigms. Against this background, we would like to prompt a debate looking for venues of comparison. We would like to pose some questions and give some tentative answers according to which historical, political, and economic parallels between Venezuela and Ukraine can be drawn. Starting with brief presentations by two CAS fellows, who worked extensively on each of these countries, we would like to open a larger discussion on the current global protest wave and the ways in which the Ukrainian and Venezuelan protests can be thought of in its conjuncture.
Simone Attilio Bellezza holds two PHDs, from the University Ca'Foscari of Venice and from the University of the Republic of San Marino. In 2008 he was Shklar visiting fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. From 2010 he works at the University of Trento. He is interested in the forms of national belonging in the XX century, especially in the Ukrainian case. He is now working at a project on the national feelings of the Italian POWs of the Habsburg army during WWI in Russia.
Mariya Ivancheva recently defended a PhD dissertation in Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Central European University in Budapest. She worked on the higher education reform in Bolivarian Venezuela. In 2013 Mariya was a “Tsvetan Stoyanov” Junior Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna. Her interests are in the fields of the history and legacy of socialism, dissent, welfare, and social movements. Mariya is a member of the Social Centre Xaspel collective.