EuroMaidanTahrir: Trajectories of Revolution and Violence in Eastern Europe and the Arab World

Nataliya Gumenyuk, Cilja Harders, Mayssun Succarie

In this transregional conversation, Mayssun Succarie, a scholar from Lebanon, and Nataliya Gumenyuk, a journalist from Ukraine, aimed to draw connections and contrasts between the recent “square revolutions” in the Arab world and the Ukraine, but also how they sparked geopolitical, social and cultural re-orientations in their regions. Both focus on the new revolutionary generation of actors, their representation and instrumentalization in society and media, but also their sense of agency and purpose. While Succarie tackles post-revolutionary discursive construction of the “revolutionary youth” as a de-politicized cultural category for the new neoliberal order, Gumenyuk draws attention to challenges that the “civil society” generation of actors face after the revolution in Ukraine. Both cut regional borders to draw connections in the public discussion, which was chaired by Professor Cilja Harders, a political scientist at the Free University in Berlin.

Introduction by Cilja Harders (Freie Universität Berlin)

 
Mayssun Succarie – The Politics of Youth and the Revolutions in Eastern Europe and the Arab World

 
Nataliya Gumenyuk – Geopolitical Misunderstandings of the Ideas, Causes and Persistance of the Arab Spring and the Euromaidan

 
Final Discussion

Mayssun Succarie received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2009, and a MA and BA from the American University of Beirut. Since then she has lectured in anthropology and development studies in universities around the Arab region (American University of Beirut; American University of Cairo) and the United States (Columbia & Brown Universities). Her research interests focus on youth, education, development and social movements in the Arab region, with a particular interest in studying the political, economic, cultural and social structures and processes that tie the region in complex and contradictory ways to the larger global political economy. Her first book, Youth Rising? The Politics of Youth in the Global Economy (co-authored with Stuart Tannock) was published earlier this year by Routledge’s Critical Youth Studies series. In 2015 she will start teaching at the Institute of Middle Eastern Studies at King’s College London.

Nataliya Gumenyuk is an independent Ukrainian journalist who specializes in foreign affairs and conflict reporting. During the last years, she has focused on post-Arab Spring developments in the Arab world and since the start of the revolution and later conflict in Ukraine she is reporting from the field on Maidan, Crimea and Donbas. She has recently published a book titled “Maidan Tahrir. In Search Of A Lost Revolution” (2015), in which she compares the two revolutionary developments and seeks transregional approaches to recent global political and social interconnections. She is a co-founder and recently elected head of Hromadske.TV (Public TV), a journalist-led initiative to create public broadcasting in Ukraine, and also is running Hromadske International newsrooms in English and Russian. Nataliya reported from nearly 50 countries. She holds a Master’s degree in Global Journalism Program from the Örebro University, Sweden.