The BEARR Trust Annual Lecture 2020

“Europe’s Eastern Partnership/Russia’s ‘Near Abroad’ – living with powerful neighbours”

The BEARR Trust’s Annual Lecture 2020 was given by Thomas de Waal, senior fellow with Carnegie Europe, on 7 July. 

The Eastern Partnership (EaP) is a joint initiative involving the EU, its Member States and six Eastern European Partners: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine.

In his talk Tom discussed how these countries live with the predicament of being a “double borderland” between Russia and the European Union and what kind of future lies ahead for them. 

Read the report here

BEARR’s Annual Lectures have in recent years been supported and hosted by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) at their London HQ. As the Bank’s premises are currently closed, this year’s event will take place on-line, but Marcus Warren of EBRD will introduce it and moderate the Q and A.

This was a fund-raising event for The BEARR Trust, to raise money for our Small Grants Scheme, which funds projects supporting vulnerable groups run by civil society organisations in the region where BEARR works.

About the speaker: 

Thomas de Waal is a senior fellow with Carnegie Europe, specialising in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus region. He is the author of numerous publications about the region. The second edition of his book The Caucasus: An Introduction (Oxford University Press) was published in 2018. He is also the author of Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide (Oxford University Press, 2015) and of the authoritative book on the Nagorno Karabakh conflict, Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War (NYU Press, second edition 2013).

From 2010 to 2015, de Waal worked for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC. Before that he worked extensively as a journalist in both print and for BBC radio. From 1993 to 1997, he worked in Moscow for the Moscow Times, the Times of London, and the Economist, specialising in Russian politics and the situation in Chechnya. He co-authored (with Carlotta Gall) the book Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus (NYU Press, 1997), for which the authors were awarded the James Cameron Prize for Distinguished Reporting.

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