Human Rights in Global Orthodoxy

As detailed in reviews, interviews, and notes on here over the past five years especially, discussions of human rights are front and centre in much of Orthodoxy today. A book set for November release continues and advances that discussion: Giuseppe Giordan and Siniša Zrinščak, eds., Global Eastern Orthodoxy: Politics, Religion, and Human Rights (Springer, 2019), 276pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

This volume highlights three intertwined aspects of the global context of Orthodox Christianity: religion, politics, and human rights. The chapters in Part I address the challenges of modern human rights discourse to Orthodox Christianity and examine conditions for active presence of Orthodox churches in the public sphere of plural societies. It suggests theoretical and empirical considerations about the relationship between politics and Orthodoxy by exploring topics such as globalization, participatory democracy, and the linkage of religious and political discourses in Russia, Greece, Belarus, Romania, and Cyprus. Part II looks at the issues of diaspora and identity in global Orthodoxy, presenting cases from Switzerland, America, Italy, and Germany. In doing so, the book ties in with the growing interest resulting from the novelty of socio-political, economic, and cultural changes which have forced religious groups and organizations to revise and redesign their own institutional structures, practices, and agendas.

War, Memory, and Myth-Making in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus

For many years now the questions of memory and the healing of its traumas have preoccupied me, especially in Catholic-Orthodox relations, but also more generally across cultures. In our forthcoming book on remembering the Ps-Sobor of Lviv of 1946, I briefly discuss some of the challenges posed by competing memories and competing historiographies of the post-World War II world in Ukraine and Russia. A recent and substantial collection carries this discussion further and broadens it out to include a third country: War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, eds. Julie Fedor et al (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), ‎506pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

This edited collection contributes to the current vivid multidisciplinary debate on East European memory politics and the post-communist instrumentalization and re-mythologization of World War II memories. The book focuses on the three Slavic countries of post-Soviet Eastern Europe – Russia, Ukraine and Belarus – the epicentre of Soviet war suffering, and the heartland of the Soviet war myth. The collection gives insight into the persistence of the Soviet commemorative culture and the myth of the Great Patriotic War in the post-Soviet space. It also demonstrates that for geopolitical, cultural, and historical reasons the political uses of World War II differ significantly across Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, with important ramifications for future developments in the region and beyond.

New Studies of Ukrainian Realities

The University of Toronto Press catalogue was waiting for me in my mailbox after the break. It tells us of several books forthcoming in 2016 that will be of interest to Ukrainian and Russian Christians especially, inter alia, and to those trying to understand the history of the current Russian war against Ukraine, and Ukraine's own recent history.

It also drew my attention to a wide-ranging study released last summer: Margarita Balmaceda,  Politics of Energy Dependency: Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania between Domestic Oligarchs and Russian Pressure (U of T Press, 2015),464pp.

The publisher tells us this about the book:

Energy has been an important element in Moscow’s quest to exert power and influence in its surrounding areas both before and after the collapse of the USSR. With their political independence in 1991, Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania also became, virtually overnight, separate energy-poor entities heavily dependent on Russia. This increasingly costly dependency – and elites’ scrambling over associated profits – came to crucially affect not only relations with Russia, but the very nature of post-independence state building.

The Politics of Energy Dependency explores why these states were unable to move towards energy diversification. Through extensive field research using previously untapped local-language sources, Margarita M. Balmaceda reveals a complex picture of local elites dealing with the complications of energy dependency and, in the process, affecting the energy security of Europe as a whole.

A must-read for anyone interested in Eastern Europe, Russia, and the politics of natural resources, this book reveals the insights gained by looking at post-Soviet development and international relations issues not only from a Moscow-centered perspective, but from that of individual actors in other states.

Set for release in March is George Liber's study, Total Wars and the Making of Modern Ukraine, 1914-1954 (U of T Press, 2016), 416pp.

About this book we are told:

Between 1914 and 1954, the Ukrainian-speaking territories in East Central Europe suffered almost 15 million “excess deaths” as well as numerous large-scale evacuations and forced population transfers. These losses were the devastating consequences of the two world wars, revolutions, famines, genocidal campaigns, and purges that wracked Europe in the first half of the twentieth century and spread new ideas, created new political and economic systems, and crafted new identities.

In Total Wars and the Making of Modern Ukraine, 1914–1954, George O. Liber argues that the continuous violence of the world wars and interwar years transformed the Ukrainian-speaking population of East Central Europe into self-conscious Ukrainians. Wars, mass killings, and forced modernization drives made and re-made Ukraine’s boundaries, institutionalized its national identities, and pruned its population according to various state-sponsored political, racial, and social ideologies. In short, the two world wars, the Holodomor, and the Holocaust played critical roles in forming today’s Ukraine.

A landmark study of the terrifying scope and paradoxical consequences of mass violence in Europe’s bloodlands, Liber’s book will transform our understanding of the entangled histories of Ukraine, the USSR, Germany, and East Central Europe in the twentieth century.

Also set for release this year is a collection sure to be of interest to Canada's very considerable Ukrainian community: Lisa Grekul and Lindy Ledohowski, Unbound: Ukrainian Canadians Writing Home (U of T Press, 2016), 160pp.

About this book we are told:

What does it mean to be Ukrainian in contemporary Canada? The Ukrainian Canadian writers in Unbound challenge the conventions of genre – memoir, fiction, poetry, biography, essay – and the boundaries that separate ethnic and authorial identities and fictional and non-fictional narratives. These intersections become the sites of new, thought-provoking and poignant creative writing by some of Canada’s best-known Ukrainian Canadian authors.

To complement the creative writing, editors Lisa Grekul and Lindy Ledohowski offer an overview of the history of Ukrainian settlement in Canada and an extensive bibliography of Ukrainian Canadian literature in English. Unbound is the first such exploration of Ukrainian Canadian literature and a book that should be on the shelves of Canadian literature fans and those interested in the study of ethnic, postcolonial, and diasporic literature.