Elen Budinova

Doctoral Researcher

Project

Donbas beyond Political Myths: Revisiting the Entangled History of a European Border Region until its Time Collapse 2014 into Separatist Violence and the Outbreak of Russia’s War against Ukraine

Contact
budinova@europa-uni.de
+49 335 5534 2437

(photo by Heide Fest)

Vita

Elen Budinova completed with highest honours International Relations (MA, Specialisation: Global Challenges, Humboldt Uni., Free Uni. of Berlin and Uni. Potsdam) and Political Science (BA, Profile: Modern Political Theory, Otto Suhr Institute). Key sites of her work-experiences involve “Prisma Ukraïna – Research Network Eastern Europe” (Forum Transregional Studies, Berlin), the German Corporation for International Cooperation – Portfolio Management: Belarus and Ukraine (Kyїv), the Chair “Entangled History of Ukraine” (European University Viadrina) and the Bulgarian Office of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (Sofia). Interested in epistemically just methodology embracive of discourse-criticism, conceptual revisions, contextualization and careful comparisons, she focuses on: territorial and resource disputes; warfare-forms; peace models, core international crimes; imperial legacies; post-socialist transformations; political dis/integration processes; rivalries among regime types; hegemony-, statehood-, irredentism- and nationalism-theories; informal institutions; memory cultures, large group identity constructs, sociospatial differentiations, legitimacy-building tools and contestation of power hierarchies in (post-)colonial settings. Distinguished with the Humboldt Prize, her MA thesis on process-tracing of post-Soviet separatism in Crimea underlined de-escalatory effects of regional autonomy, the domestic lack of socio-economic, identity- and/or security-driven secession potential, and Russia’s annexation as unprovoked external aggression. Supervised by Andriĭ Portnov and Andrew Wilson, she pursues a PhD in International Cultural Studies (Europa-Uni.Viadrina) and works in EUTIM mainly on the focal theme Comparative Histories of Science in the 20th Century.