University gathers politics experts for public event on Ukraine war

Politics experts from the University of Stirling are hosting a public event this week to discuss Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The roundtable event will take place in the University’s Logie Lecture Theatre at 5pm on Friday, 11 March and will feature a panel of five experts from the History, Heritage and Politics division.

The panel will include Sir George Reid, the first presiding officer of the Scottish Parliament and former Director of Public Affairs of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent; senior politics lecturer Dr Sossie Kasbarian; politics lecturer Dr Clemens Hoffmann; and European History lecturer, Dr Thomas Marsden. They will be joined by special guest, Professor Peter Jackson, Chair in Global Security in the Department of History at the University of Glasgow and Chairman of the Scottish Council for Global Affairs.

Panellists will provide their expertise on various aspects of the conflict and also take questions from the audience.

Professor Neville Wylie, Deputy Principal (Internationalisation) and Professor of International History at the University of Stirling, will chair the event. He said: “Russia’s attack on Ukraine poses Europe with its biggest security challenge since the end of the Cold War and threatens to transform the nature of global international relations.

“The roundtable, hosted by the University of Stirling, will allow the public to hear from experts in the field, and join the conversation about the crisis, its origins and potential consequences.”

It is hoped that this event, which is free to attend, will be the first in a series of discussions held by the University about the current crisis.

Those wishing to attend are asked to register via the event page on Eventbrite: UoS Roundtable on the Russian Re-invasion of Ukraine

About the panel

Sir George Reid, the first presiding officer of the Scottish Parliament (2003–2007), teaches a module on Humanitarian Studies on the Politics MSc International Conflict and Cooperation at the University of Stirling. A history graduate of the University of St Andrews, he has been visiting Russia and Ukraine since 1959. He has had a long career as the Director of Public Affairs of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent, and he was the chief Red Cross delegate of Armenia in the USSR in 1988–89 following the devastating earthquake in 1988.

Professor Peter Jackson is Chair in Global Security in the Department of History at the University of Glasgow, and Chairman of the Scottish Council for Global Affairs. He has edited 'Intelligence and National Security', the world's leading journal on intelligence and security issues, he has led an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded Research Network entitled 'The Practice of International History in the Twenty-First Century', and he currently leads a Royal Society of Edinburgh Research Network on ‘Visions of Global Order: Peace, Law and Security after the First World War’.

Dr Thomas Marsden is a Lecturer in European History at the University of Stirling, where he has taught since 2019, following his DPhil at Oxford and a postdoctoral fellowship at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. His research, carried out in archives in Russia (Kazan, Perm, Moscow, and St Petersburg), Ukraine (Lviv, Chernivtsi) and Austria (Vienna), focuses on the nineteenth-century Russian empire.

Dr Sossie Kasbarian, a graduate of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, is a Senior Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the University of Stirling. She is co-editor of 'Diaspora—A Journal of Transnational Studies'. Her research interests and publications broadly span diaspora studies; contemporary Middle East politics and society; nationalism and ethnicity; transnational political activism; refugee, displacement and migration studies. She is currently working on a monograph entitled 'The Middle East—Armenian remnants, resilience and reconfigurations'.

Dr Clemens Hoffmann is a Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Stirling. His DPhil in International Relations at the University of Sussex was followed by research and teaching at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, before he arrived at Stirling in 2016. He is a specialist in the historical sociology of international relations, and he is the Director of the Politics MSc in International Conflict and Cooperation.

Professor Neville Wylie (chair) is Deputy Principal for Internationalisation at the University of Stirling and professor of International History. His research explores issues relating to humanitarianism, prisoners of war and the Red Cross movement.