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Sasse is a nonresident senior fellow at Carnegie Europe. Her research focuses on Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, EU enlargement, and comparative democratization.
Gwendolyn Sasse is a nonresident senior fellow at Carnegie Europe. Her research focuses on Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, EU enlargement, and comparative democratization.
Sasse is the director of the newly founded Centre for East European Research and International Studies (Zentrum für Osteuropa- und internationale Studien, ZOiS) in Berlin.
She is also professor of comparative politics in the Department of Politics and International Relations and the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies at the University of Oxford, where she also works on ethnic conflict, minority issues, migration, and diaspora politics.
Prior to her 2007 arrival in Oxford, Sasse was a senior lecturer in the European Institute and the Department of Government at the London School of Economics.
Her most recent books include The Crimea Question: Identity, Transition, and Conflict (Harvard University Press, 2007), which won the Alexander Nove Prize awarded by the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies; Europeanization and Regionalization in the EU’s Enlargement to Central and Eastern Europe: the Myth of Conditionality (Palgrave, 2004; co-authored with James Hughes and Claire Gordon); and Ethnicity and Territory in the Former Soviet Union: Regions in Conflict (Frank Cass, 2001; co-edited with James Hughes). She has also published extensively in academic journals.
Sasse is a member of the Advisory Council of the European Centre for Minority Issues in Flensburg, Germany. She comments regularly on East European politics, in particular Ukraine, in U.S., British, and European media outlets.
In his first twelve months as Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy has notched up modest successes, but a series of missteps has eroded domestic and international trust.
Ukraine’s president is trying to reassert his control through a radical government reshuffle, but this risky strategy may well backfire.
Putin holds all the cards to maintain political leverage through a persistent low-intensity war in the Donbas.
Government and parliament are accepting President Zelenskiy’s proposals and orders too readily, thereby turning the Ukrainian political system into much more of a presidential system than it has ever been.
After Ukraine’s president wins a majority in the country’s parliament, the potential for real change exists, but it comes with the risk that the government could lose sight of socioeconomic and political priorities.
Ukraine’s recently elected President Volodymyr Zelenskiy remains largely unknown in European capitals. His true colors will come through only after Ukraine’s parliamentary election later this year.
The term “protest vote” does not really capture the full picture about the election result. It was a conscious vote against the incumbent and expressed hope for a new start in Ukrainian politics beyond identity cleavages.
It is high time for Europe and the United States to pay much closer attention to Ukrainian politics and the whole range of possible outcomes of the elections ahead.
The continuing war in Ukraine plays an important role in shaping politics and public perceptions in the run-up to this year’s elections. It turns out that identity issues are much more nuanced than the campaign rhetoric suggests.
Similar to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, Western powers have been confined to watching events from the sidelines without finding an effective response—so far.
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