February 2024 Fletcher Eurasia Club Lunch Seminars
By Natasha Wood, MALD 2024 Candidate, The Fletcher School
Throughout February 2024, the Fletcher Eurasia Club hosted a series of scholars and practitioners for interactive lunch conversations sponsored by the Fletcher Russia and Eurasia Program. The seminars focused on political activism in Ukraine, security and economic developments in the Western Balkans, and anti-war resistance in Russia.
Emily Channell-Justice on Self-Organization and Political Activism
Emily Channell-Justice is the Director of the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. She visited Fletcher on February 6, 2024 to discuss her new book, “Without the State: Self-Organization and Political Activism in Ukraine” (2022), which focuses on the 2013-2014 Euromaidan protests. Her research gave students insight into how Ukrainian activism and political engagement have worked in the past two years.
Citing survey data from the Mobilise Project, Channell-Justice said that the most common way Ukrainians reported being involved in the response to the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine was through donating funds and volunteering in the community. Perhaps more notably, the survey also included space for participants to write about how they were resisting the invasion. Respondents listed actions ranging from building barricades and camouflage nets to helping people evacuate, cooking for the armed forces, and donating blood. For example, one respondent said they’d given troops a chicken for their stew.
“Everybody is investing however they can to fight for the same thing,” Channell-Justice said. She also drew connections between civil resistance today and the Euromaidan protests. “The second thing that I think is interesting is the breadth with which people define what it means to be engaged. That very broad idea of what it means to be engaged as a citizen in society, I argue, comes from this moment of the Euromaidan protests and this concept of self-organization.”
Channell-Justice has seen Ukrainians self-organize by volunteering in the armed forces and territorial defenses, conducting their own cyberattacks, and helping civilians evacuate from danger zones. The common view is that “if something needs to be done and the person has the ability to do it, then that person should simply do it,” she noted.
Valbona Zeneli on Security Challenges in the Western Balkans
On February 8, 2024, Valbona Zeneli joined the Fletcher Eurasia Club to discuss security challenges in the western Balkans, as well as great power competition in the region. Zeneli is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and an expert on transatlantic relations, EU enlargement, and the Western Balkans.
Zeneli cited economic security as one of the primary security-related challenges facing the region. She noted that the 2023 GDP per capita figure of $7650 in the Balkans was 14% of the EU average. Limited economic prospects for young people have created massive emigration and brain drain. Other structural challenges, like governance and the rule of law, have also contributed to weak regional economic security.
“If we take all six of the Western Balkan countries, we are talking about 16 or 17 million inhabitants, maybe even less, depending on different data and censuses. It’s not a big enough market in order to be competitive,” Zeneli pointed out.
Zeneli said that there have been reforms, but they’ve been very slow. The “carrot” of EU membership has been a longstanding driver of regional reform, but public faith in the EU accession process varies widely across the Balkans. Zeneli cited polling data showing that when asked the question “When do you expect EU membership?” over 40% of Serbians answered ‘“never.” This was the highest rate of ‘never’ responses in the Balkans. Across the whole region, under 30% of respondents do not expect EU membership to ever materialize.
Zeneli explained that the decision to put a moratorium on enlargement under the Juncker presidency of the European Commission showcases regional reform fatigue. “This was the biggest political and diplomatic mistake of the EU when it comes to the Balkans. All the countries [of the Balkans] knew that none of them were going to become members of the EU in five years. It only sent the wrong message that you’re not welcome. And it created the unintended consequence of reform fatigue,” she said. “Regional leadership,” she suggested, “could easily say, ‘the EU doesn’t want to accept us, so why reform?’”
Still, Zeneli noted that the full-scale invasion of Ukraine has reinvigorated the EU enlargement conversation. The imperative of deterring further Russian aggression in Europe has sped up some enlargement talks, with the first intergovernmental conferences on accession negotiations taking place in July 2022 for North Macedonia and Albania.
Finally, Zeneli touched on the influence of Russia in the region. “In each of those cases where we have seen backsliding, I personally think there is a lot of external influence in the region, mainly from Russia, that has acted as an opportunistic spoiler. The problems [in the Balkans] are regional issues.” However, Zeneli noted, “It’s very easy and not costly for [external] powers to spoil the issues that already exist and create tensions, be those ethnic tensions within a country or tensions between countries.”
Yury Terekhov on Anti-War Resistance in Russia
Finally, Yury Terekhov, visiting scholar with the Fletcher Russia and Eurasia Program, led a conversation on February 27, 2024 about grassroots anti-war resistance efforts in Russia. In 2022, Terekhov launched an initiative to promote the white-blue-white flag of the Russian anti-war protest movement. He has worked with Russian opposition figures Gary Kasparov, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and the late Alexey Navalny.
In his role as an international political analyst at the Wilson Center, part of Terekhov’s research focuses on understanding and categorizing resistance movements that have grown since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. These new groups, he suggested, could be the foundation of a new Russian civil society. Terekhov has worked with data on over 300 organizations built around antiwar activity.
Terekhov’s research has found that, so far, diaspora protest organizations are the most common type of grassroots resistance – his research suggests some 108 of these groups operating in 44 countries. Other common types of resistance groups are activist-to-activist projects (65), support initiatives for Ukrainians by Russians (26 found), new independent media outlets (30), and peaceful resistance political organizations (37).
Terekhov said that a primary challenge to this project was collecting reliable data from organizations that operate in dangerous security environments. He also mentioned that a deep-seated mistrust of leaders characterizes many anti-war resistance groups. On the one hand, this presents opportunities for new, horizontal governance styles within organizations. On the other hand, Terekhov suggested that the movement struggles to produce unified leadership or a singular set of objectives.
Despite the challenges, Terekhov drew inspiration from the Belarus opposition movement. As he views it, the Belarusian opposition movement doesn’t rely exclusively on the leadership of Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya but manages to be robust and decentralized. Under the big tent of many different types of groups, priorities, personalities, and organizational styles, Terekhov emphasized the importance of building a robust movement that is internationally respected.
