Workshop: Black Sea Studies - The War in Ukraine and Security in the Black Sea Region with Dr. Huseyin Oylupinar

Abstract
The Workshop in Black Sea Studies aims to expand knowledge regarding the war in Ukraine, researchers will discuss the regional impact the war around the Black Sea with an emphasis on the global repercussions. Focusing on the Black Sea region is timely and essential as the region become one of the confrontation scenes with the Russian blockade placed on the Ukrainian access to international waters, blocking trade causing food crisis, and also Russian use of the region to conduct military attacks on military and civilian targets from the Black Sea.

Speaker bio
Huseyin Oylupinar completed his master's degree in European Studies at the University of Economics, defending her master's thesis titled "Ukraine on the Border of Two Worlds: Foreign Policy in Transition". While pursuing his PhD in International Relations at the Middle East Technical University, he was encouraged to pursue an interdisciplinary PhD at the University of Alberta (Canada). His doctoral studies in Canada allowed him to go to Ukraine every year from 2008 to do his field research. Meanwhile, he improved his Ukrainian, which he started to learn as a Harvard Summer School Student. During his stay in Ukraine, Hüseyin was a visiting researcher at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Hüseyin defended his thesis titled “Terra Cossacorum: Kozak Revival and Kozak Collective Identity in Independent Ukraine” in 2014. He received a research grant at New Europe College (Bucharest) in 2013 and later at Harvard Ukraine Research Institute in 2015 to do a research on the relations of Crimean Russians and Crimean Tatars in Crimea. In this research, Hüseyin examined the Crimean Russian Cossacks as a factor in defending Russia's interests in the peninsula. Hüseyin founded and coordinated the Turkish-Ukrainian-Crimean Tatar Studies program at Harvard University. He is affiliated with the Foreign Policy Institute in Ankara as the Academic Advisor for Central and Eastern European Affairs. He is also an affiliated researcher at the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Uppsala University, Sweden.