PUBLIC LECTURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF HOKKAIDO

On October 26, Dr. Mykola Riabchuk, a Senior Research Fellow of the Department of Political Culture and Ideology, delivered a guest lecture in Sapporo, at the Slavic Research Center of the University of Hokkaido. In his presentation, entitled „Return of Geopolitics? Russian War in Ukraine and the Prospects for the New Global Order”, he outlined the challenges that the Russian aggression poses not only to its primary victim, Ukraine, but also to global politics and economy, international law, institutions and fundamental liberal values and principles.

In speaker’s view, the antiquated concept of „geopolitics”, promoted in Russia and supported by some „political realists” in the West, assigns overblown importance to the nations’ hard power which entitles them arguably to special rights and exclusive „geopolitical” interests, and ignores the role of soft power of alternative concepts – of freedom, dignity and sovereignty, which determine resilience of minor and presumably „non-historical” nations who reject the role of political pawns on the global chessboard and assert their own political agency and will.

Mykola Riabchuk

Ukraine provides a graphic example of such a resilience in its national-liberation, essentially de-colonial war, and ushers in a new global order that would be certainly more just and stable in the case of Ukraine’s much-coveted, though not inevitable victory.