March and April 2024 Fletcher Eurasia Club Lunch Seminars
By Natasha Wood, MALD 2024 Candidate, The Fletcher School
In March and April 2024, the Fletcher Eurasia Club hosted lunch seminars featuring prominent experts, including Sergei Erofeev, Stepan Goncharov, Anna Ohanyan, Rahat Sabyrbekov, and Ivan Kurilla. The conversations touched on great power politics in the South Caucasus, Russian memory politics, and the energy transition in Central Asia, among other topics.
On March 5, 2024, Sergei Erofeev from Rutgers University analyzed Vladimir Putin’s aggression, framing it as the tactics of a mafia state aimed at maintaining internal power and legitimacy rather than as a colonialist. Erofeev emphasized the intertwining of gangster language and traditionalist values within Putin’s regime, illustrating a societal acceptance of the mafia state. He delineated Putin’s power structure as concentric circles, with corruption pervading the bureaucracy and an indoctrinated population that reinforces the system. Erofeev also discussed the Russia-Ukraine conflict as a clash of civilizations, crediting the reactive nature of the West’s response to a lack of understanding of Putin’s regime, hindering efforts to delegitimize it effectively.
On April 2, 2024, Stepan Goncharov, director of Respo, a Central Asian research company, presented insights on public opinion research in Central Asia. Goncharov highlighted the region’s rapid economic growth and the challenges arising from its young and vocal populations striving to establish their identities. He discussed the complexities of Central Asian foreign policy and cultural orientations amid influences from Russia, China, Turkey, and the Arab world. Goncharov delved into public attitudes in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, shedding light on media preferences and sentiments toward key countries, with notable shifts in perceptions influenced by events like the Russia-Ukraine war. He also discussed changing attitudes toward other countries and the growing consumption of foreign media, particularly from Turkey.
On April 9, 2024, the club hosted Anna Ohanyan, Richard B. Finnegan Distinguished Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Stonehill College in Massachusetts. She discussed the geopolitics of the South Caucasus and how the backdrop of the Russian war in Ukraine is shaping regional great power politics. Ohanyan’s most recent book is “The Neighborhood Effect: The Imperial Roots of Regional Fracture in Eurasia” (2022).
On April 16, 2024, the club was also pleased to welcome Rahat Sabyrbekov, Visiting Scholar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. Sabyrbekov is an environmental economist specializing in decarbonization, climate change, and energy transition. Dr. Sabyrbekov discussed the energy transition in Central Asia and regional cooperation on climate.
Finally, on April 23, 2024 the Fletcher Russia and Eurasia Program hosted Ivan Kurilla to discuss the history of U.S.-Russian relations and Russian memory politics. Kurilla is the Mary L. Cornille Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities at Wellesley College. During his guest lecture in Professor Chris Miller’s course on the history of Russian foreign policy, Kurilla framed U.S.-Russian relations in constructivist terms and as an identity problem. He suggested that the question “Who and what are we?” can be answered in two ways: as descendants of somebody who constructed a nation and by comparing ourselves to others. Kurilla suggests that Putin has tried both strategies by relying on the past and drawing a contrast to the United States in his effort to construct Russian identity.
