Public lecture
11.11.2015
Dr Kaupo Känd, Head of Analytical Reporting and Outreach Department, EU Monitoring Mission to Georgia, will give a public lecture entitled
The Eurasian Union project – challenges and/or opportunities for the EU?
on 24 November 2015 from 12.15-15.45 at the UT Faculty of Social Sciences and Education, Lossi 36, room 214.
Over the last fifteen years, President Putin has been trying to establish a new parallel world — the Eurasian Union — which is a geopolitical alternative to the West and could be seen as a simulacrum of the European Union. Although the Eurasian Union has been in the making for over a decade, the significance of the project has been largely overlooked by politicians, analysts, experts, and academics in the West. Only after the Crimea events have many prominent Western think-tanks started to focus on the Eurasian Union project and its implications. The lecture discusses the state and relevance of the Eurasian Union project with particular emphasis on challenges and opportunities for the EU.
Dr Kaupo Känd is an Estonian diplomat who is currently working as the Head of Analytical Reporting and Outreach Department in EU Monitoring Mission to Georgia. In the past, he has worked as a Senior Adviser to the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities, as a Political Adviser to the EUSR for the South Caucasus, and as a Political Adviser to the ESDP mission EUJUST Themis to Georgia. Before that he was a CFSP/CSDP diplomat at the Estonian Representation to the EU and Analyst/Speechwriter in the Policy Planning Department of the MFA. As a Chevening/OSF scholar he holds a PhD in Philosophy and an MA in Continental Philosophy from the University of Warwick (UK), and has studied Philosophy at the Central European University and at Moscow State University.
The lecture is organized by the UT Centre for EU-Russia Studies (CEURUS).