2022 Pierre du Bois Visiting Professor: Oksana Myshlovska

In the 2022 academic year, the Pierre du Bois Foundation sup- ported the invitation of a Visiting Professor to teach at the Geneva Graduate Institute. The invitation was for a period of one semester, following the departure of Professor Michael Goebel, the first Pierre du Bois Chair “Europe and the World”, during the recruitment process for his successor. For the 2022 autumn semester, the Graduate Institute thus welcomed Oksana Myshlovska, a Lecturer at the University of Bern and expert on the politics of history and memory in Ukraine and Eastern Europe.

As a Visiting Professor at the Institute, Oksana Myshlovska offered a course on conflicts in the post-Soviet space, “From Perestroika to the Russian- Ukrainian War : Several Generations of Contention and Violent Conflict in the Post-Soviet Space”. Grounded in a constructivist approach to the study of international relations and conflicts, the course examined conflict escalation, protraction and transformation from a historical perspective, with the most recent escalation as of February 2022 as an episode in the contention in the space that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The course was well-received by students, an indication not only of its high pedagogical quality but also of its relevance to the study of current history ingeneral and to the recent episode in conflict escalation in particular.

In addition to this course, Professor Myshlovska gave a lecture at the International History and Politics Forum on “The War before the War : Examining the Failure of National Reconciliation in Ukraine during the Late Soviet and Early Independence Periods”.

With a PhD from the Graduate Institute, Oksana Myshlovska is cur- rently a Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer at the University of Bern. She has previously been a Guest Lecturer at the Graduate Institute as well as a Researcher at the University of St Gallen and at the Global Studies Institute in Geneva.

She is also a contributor to a SNSF project on the role of civil society in conflict transformation and recon- ciliation in Ukraine, Chechnya and Georgia. Amongst several other publications, she has recently co- edited a book entitled Regionalism Without Regions: Reconceptualizing Ukraine’s Heterogeneity, published in 2019. She continues her research and teaching on the role of socio- psychological factors in conflicts in the post-Soviet space.