Discussion

A panel hosted by Project 2022 as part of the Eastern Academic Alliance (supported by the European Union) and LSE Ideas.


The panel is concerned with the impact of recent wars and authoritarianism on Education, placing the impact of Russia’s war against Ukraine in broader international contexts. Education is a fundamental right that is secured in democratic societies with the help of systematic and institutional approaches to the formation of knowledge and the transmission of values. These involve a complex interplay of local, regional, national, and supranational actors, with children and young people taking central stage. Project 2022 maps how Education is threatened by multiple dimensions of insecurity, existential, institutional, and epistemic. Threats to national sovereignty in Ukraine lead to the destruction and dispersal of knowledge communities and economies. Threats of authoritarianism and repression affect knowledge communities in and in authoritarian regimes. Both state and non-state actors have been drawn into global conflicts, with cyberattacks threatening educators and public knowledge in multiple locations, as recently seen in the case of the British Library and other systems. But the exceptional pressure on the sector has also yielded responses of unprecedented variety, creativity, coordination, and resilience. There are grassroots as well as top-down initiatives at all levels, which are aimed to protect and enable communities of educators and students to save their knowledge as well as Ideas and as such, protect core democratic values. The aim of the Eastern Academic Alliance is to bring together experts who have been leading active interventions against these threats, and to distil ideas for possible action points. Unless they explicitly state otherwise, experts contribute in a personal capacity and under the Chatham House rule.

Welcome: Dina Gusejnova, Associate Professor in International History, LSE; Project 2022/Eastern Academic Alliance

Input from
Anna Chechel, Research Associate, Judge Business School, University of Cambridge; Ukrainian Association of Professors and Researchers of European Integration European Commission Representative

Discussants
Doris Lemmermeier, Commissioner of Integration for Brandenburg, Germany (2013-2024)
Andrea Petö, Professor of Gender Studies at Central European University, Vienna; Research Affiliate of the CEU Democracy Institute
Julia Strutz, Senior Researcher, Humboldt University; co-founder, Off University, Berlin
Jon Roozenbeek, Lecturer in Psychology and Security at King's College London, Department of War Studies

Moderator: Luke Cooper, Associate Professorial Research Fellow, Conflict and Civicness Research Group, LSE