Past Events

Kaija E. Schilde Jean Monnet Chair of European Security Associate Professor, Pardee School of Global Studies Director, Center for the Study of Europe Project on the Political Economy of Security Pardee School Initiative on Forced Migration and Human Trafficking The EU is a non-unitary security state of international significance and is threat responsive to challenges to its interests. It has become a security state through a combination of incremental institutional layering and shifts in international threat, primarily the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea and intervention in Eastern Ukraine, and the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. The security studies debate on European strategic autonomy has so far ignored and dismissed the infrastructural power of the EU. The EU’s infrastructural power comes from regulatory, monetary and market instruments, and a nascent but increasing direct procurement of military materiel. EU infrastructural power complicates EU-related state formation theory debates. Traditional security states extract resources from their society, directly tax their populations, and have formal authority to generate military capability. Historically, the EU has done none of these things. Scholars using the conventional lens of state security authority have concluded that the EU is not yet a security state, because it does not tax and spend to generate military capacity on its own (Kelemen & McNamara, 2022). However, this misdiagnoses the sources of infrastructural security power in the 21st century, and only compares the political development of the EU to the generation of military power in earlier centuries. Moreover, this position fails to consider the comparative: how do contemporary non-EU states generate military capacity? To what are we comparing EU state formation? I theorize a broader definition of security state to align with 21st Century generation of military power and evaluates the shifts in EU infrastructural power in light of changes. Prior Title: EU Defense Cooperation and the War in Ukraine

The revolutionary prospect of socialism inspired homosexual emancipation and the growth of toleration toward same-sex relations in the first quarter of the twentieth century in many countries, including the UK, US, Hungary, and USSR. However, the development of LGBTQ+ rights within socialism was never linear and even. The conference seeks to address those discrepancies and the reasoning behind them. It aims to discuss the LGBTQ+ experience and its political, social, and cultural implications under state socialism from a global perspective. What was the place of queerness under socialism? Was socialist ideology generally more responsive to queer people’s agenda and empathic towards them? How did legislation relate to same-sex activity change over time in socialist countries? How did the Cold War and geopolitical tensions between socialist and capitalist counties influence and inform sexual politics toward queer people and their perception? Why did some socialist countries, such as the Czech Republic, Hungary, and the GDR decriminalize homosexuality as early as the 1960s and the Polish People’s Republic never criminalize it? What strategies of networking and concealment did sexual and gender non-conformists adopt in the socialist countries where homosexuality was still illegal, such as Soviet Republics, China, and Cuba? What was the attitude towards gender and sexual dissidents among the left-leaning movements in capitalist countries? Why decriminalization of homosexuality and homosexual emancipation that followed it was subsequently cut off in some post-socialist countries such as Russia? The main goal of the symposium is to reflect on the broad spectrum of topics related to the conjunction of queer and socialist ideology from a global and comparative perspective. The symposium aims at the broader public, including students, scholars, and activists.

Presenter: Nicholas R. Micinski Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the University of Maine Moderator: Paweł Lewicki, Associate Director European Studies Center Migration has become an important area of cooperation within the European Union and has faced several recent refugee crises, including people seeking protection from Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Ukraine. This lecture will discuss the ways in which cooperation within the EU has evolved over the last 20 years, focused on the starkly different responses in 2015-17 and 2022. The lecture will build on the findings in Micinski's book, Delegating Responsibility: International Cooperation on Migration in the European Union (2022).

This in-person, one and a half-hour roundtable includes the following Pitt faculty members and concludes the conference. --John Markoff, Department of Sociology --Diego Holstein, Department of History --Michael Goodhart, Department of Political Science --Mohammed Bamyeh, Department of Sociology This roundtable will be moderated by Randall Halle, Department of German and the European Studies Center.

This one and half hour virtual panel on Histories of Democracy will be moderated by Mark Philp of the University of Warwick, UK The speakers and their topics are: --Eduardo Posada-Carbo, University of Oxford, UK "Simon Bolivar" --Guy Thomson, University of Warwick, UK, "Benito Juarez" --Stephen Sawyer, American University in Paris, France, "Napoleon II and the Third Republic" Joanna Inness, University of Oxford, UK, will be the Commentator. Lunch will be served for those watching the session in the Colloquium Room.

Richi (Moisé Curia) is on the road with a little girl (Anna Malfatti) in a camper van through southern Germany. They have a good time with each other, dress up, dance and laugh a lot. He is a seed salesman, she his little doll. An unusual couple, but happy? When the two stop off at a restaurant, the landlord (Heio von Stetten) becomes skeptical. Something is not right here! What's more, the girl speaks a very rare language: Ladin. Meanwhile, in Rome, police inspector Milia Demetz (Cosmina Stratan) is investigating cyberspace and is hot on the heels of a pedophile network. When she discovers a girl in one of the anonymous videos, she is soon certain: the lasciviously photographed child is Magdalena Senoner, who disappeared in Tyrol at the age of five. But who is behind the camera? When the landlord forwards the footage from his surveillance camera to the police, all the threads come together. Can Milia save little Magdalena? Harris Theater (Pittsburgh Cultural Trust) 809 Liberty Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15206 Get Tickets Here: https://trustarts.org/production/84748 PROMO CODE for discounted tickets: EUPITT (* Pitt Students, Staff and Faculty Only)

This one-hour, in-person lecture is part of the conference on Democracy in Europe, Democracy Beyond Europe. The speaker is Jessica Greenberg, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her talk will be moderated by Nancy Condee, Director of Russian East European & Eurasian Studies, University of Pittsburgh.