REDS Seminar Series: RETHINKING EUROPEAN DEVELOPMENT AND SECURITY

The 2026 Hungarian parliamentary election marked a historic turning point in European politics, as the Péter Magyar-led Tisza Party secured a landslide victory and a two-thirds supermajority, ending Viktor Orbán’s 16-year tenure.

Michta focuses on the current condition of European security and defense policy, including the roles played by the US and NATO, and Europe’s attempts to build up an EU-based security architecture. He will explore the hard security/military dimension of the issue in the context of a broader discussion of regionalized security optics and internal political change.

If the EU is a union of democratic states, what happens when its member states are no longer reliably democratic? 

After more than three years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, international support for Ukraine is coming under increasing attack, even as it is more important than ever to safeguard Ukraine’s independence and sovereignty.

There was a huge surge in discussions about a possible “peace deal” in the early months of 2025. As a candidate, U.S. President Donald Trump had promised to end the war in 24 hours, and U.S. policy towards the war shifted drastically. Is an end to the Russo-Ukraine War imminent? This talk will examine Russian and Ukrainian positions regarding a possible peace settlement and discuss the future of the conflict.

I argue that central banks attempt to build public trust in money and monetary governance through the strategic use of what I call a stability narrative, asserting that they can maintain the value of money, can maintain the security of money, represent the nation, and have grown increasingly professional and sophisticated over time. The talk explores the stability narrative by studying its expression in central bank museums.

American University Political Scientist Keith Darden examines how the Russian-Ukrainian war is reshaping European institutions.

Yoshiko Herrera (University of Wisconsin-Madison) considers the relationship between national or imperial identities and conflict using the case of Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Bryn Rosenfeld (Cornell University) discusses how citizens approach political risks in repressive environments like Putin’s Russia. November 14, 2024.

Maria Popova (McGill University) discusses anticorruption reform, corruption perceptions, and measurement debates in Ukraine's quest to join the EU.

What drives Russia's violence in and against Ukraine from the 19th century to 2024? April 18, 2024.

What are the longer-term implications of Russia’s renewed aggression in Ukraine for relations with its Eurasian neighbors it has often referred to as the “near abroad?”

Just how bad is the current danger of democratic backsliding in the US and around the world?

Given the rise of Euroscepticism, illiberalism, and economic nationalism expressed by populist leaders in Eastern Europe over the past decade, did the EU and NATO enlargement support or detract from establishing and sustaining a commitment to liberalism? How will Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shape the trajectory of liberalism in the region?

Ukraine has long been considered a divided society, split between Russia-leaning Russian-speaking south and east and west-leaning and Ukrainian-speaking west and center. This talk will explain why the “divided Ukraine” paradigm no longer captures Ukrainian political and social realities, focusing on profound identity transformation within the Ukrainian society that began following the Euromaidan revolution and the start of Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2014, and further accelerated after the February 2022 full scale Russian invasion.

Over the past decade, illiberal demagogues around the world have launched ferocious assaults on democracy. Embracing high-dominance political styles and a forceful argot of national greatness, they hammer at their supposed superiority as commanders, protectors, and patriots. Bewildered left-liberals have often played to the type their tormentors assign them. Fretting over their own purported neglect of the folks’ kitchen-table concerns, they leave the guts and glory to opponents who grasp that elections are emotions-driven dominance competitions.

A wealth of recent political science research focuses on how media consolidation under state rule can exacerbate democratic erosion, among other things by limiting access to narratives that counter the government's viewpoint. Hungary is one of the most frequently cited examples of this corrosive media effect. We disagree with the corrosion hypothesis, and seek to test the individual-level effects of providing information that counters the government narrative through a survey experiment. This lecture will describe the problem, our proposal, and what we expect to discover.

The past decade has witnessed a resurgence of patrimonial rule not only in the developing world but also, more surprisingly, in the developed West. This resurgence carries potentially dire consequences for responding to a range of pressing problems. Understanding the sources of contemporary patrimonialism is hindered by assimilating the phenomenon into the familiar democracy/autocracy typology or by assuming that it is a function of failed modernization.

Over the last decade, responses to the crisis of democracy have been hampered by the fact that challenges to liberalism have often been subtle and ambiguous. All this changed on 24 February 2022. Two factors made Russia’s invasion a watershed moment in Europe’s battle for democracy: the stark moral clarity of Ukraine’s cause and the existential security threat presented by a newly aggressive Russia. As a result, the West has responded in a far more unified manner than anyone expected.

Has Russia's full-scale war in Ukraine forced an enduring correction back to traditional notions? Or are some changes predating the war destined to persist? Can geopolitics return if it never went away? What is the future of the fiscal-military state? Is the modern state fit for purpose anymore? What is technology actually doing to governance, if anything? How might security depend on new or reinvented institutions? Is China an even bigger game-changer than Russia for European security? Is there, could there be a pivot, to Asia, or is that nonsense? So many questions — how do we begin to sift them, and order them, to establish a workable framework with which to build notions of security that could last?