CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — The EU Center at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign will host political scientist and author Ivan Krastev for a lecture on how the Russian invasion of Ukraine is reshaping the political imagination of Europe by replacing the Cold War narrative of the past decades while increasing geopolitical tensions and threatening the sovereignty of European nation-states.
The lecture, titled “Russia’s War in Ukraine: Reimagining the East-West Divide in Europe,” will be held Tuesday, Oct. 4, at 7:30 p.m. in room 300 of the Levis Center, 919 W. Illinois St., Urbana.
The event is free and open to the public, and also will be livestreamed at https://ensemble.illinois.edu/Watch/Krastev.
Krastev is the chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria, and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He is a founding board member of the European Council on Foreign Relations; a member of the board of trustees of The International Crisis Group; and a member of the board of directors of GLOBSEC, a nonpartisan think tank based in Bratislava, Slovakia.
From 2015-21, Krastev was a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and is currently a Financial Times contributing editor. He’s the author of the 2020 book “Is it Tomorrow, Yet? How the Pandemic Changes Europe” and the 2020 winner of the Jean Améry Prize for European Essay Writing.
Krastev has held fellowships at St. Antony’s College, Oxford; the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars; the Collegium Budapest; the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study; the Institute of Federalism at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland; and the Remarque Institute at New York University.
The lecture is sponsored by the Office of the Provost and the EU Center.