Thursday, March 7, 2024 4pm to 5pm
About this Event
1957 E St NW, Washington DC 20052
About the Event
This event will begin with opening remarks from Dr. Henry Hale, Director of GW's Petrach Program on Ukraine, followed by a lecture by the author, and a moderated Q&A with the audience. This event is hosted by the Petrach Program on Ukraine at the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (IERES) and the GW Political Science Department’s American Politics Workshop. The talk will be in-person and recorded.
About the Book
Political Technology is a ubiquitous Russian term, little known in the West. It is the operating code of Russian politics; and has metastasized to take over other areas – history, religion, foreign relations. It produces the propaganda that has helped produce the war against Ukraine. Properly defined, as the ‘supply-side engineering of the political system for partisan advantage’, the rest of the world has political technology too. Spin doctors and political consultants are now also political engineers. Russia has theatre politics, where everyone is playing a part. The USA has a different virtual reality of Political Action Committees, dark money, think-tanks dressing up private interest as public purpose, astroturfing and alternative reality media. Different national political technologies are increasingly globalized and intertwined. Russian propaganda points against Ukraine are now replayed in MAGA media; Hungarian political technologists advise the Republican Party under the banner principle ‘you only have to win one election’. This book explains all of these interactions and common patterns. See also the additional materials here.
About the Author
Andrew Wilson is a British historian and political scientist specializing in Eastern Europe, particularly Ukraine. He is Professor of Ukrainian Studies at University College London. His most recent books are The Ukrainians: The Story of How a People Became a Nation and Virtual Politics: Faking Democracy in the Post-Soviet World.
This event is part of IERES’s Petrach Program on Ukraine’s “New Books on Ukraine” Lecture series. In this series of talks, IERES’s Petrach Program on Ukraine offers the DC-area community in-person opportunities to engage leading scholarly Ukraine experts on their important new books.
Please register for the event here: https://forms.gle/kSgheRAjns73UbCbA