Location Note
1219 International Affairs Building
420 W 118th St, 12th Floor
This is a hybrid (in-person/virtual) event. Registration required for attendance. Please note that all attendees must follow Columbia’s COVID-19 Policies and Guidelines. Columbia University is committed to protecting the health and safety of its community. To that end, all visiting alumni and guests must meet the University requirement of full vaccination status in order to attend in-person events. Vaccination cards may be checked upon entry to all venues. All other attendees may participate virtually on Zoom or YouTube.
Please join the Harriman Institute for a book talk with Olga Onuch and Henry Hale, authors of The Zelensky Effect. Moderated by Elise Giuliano.
In the book Onuch and Hale make clear that this “effect” is not simply Zelensky’s doing alone. Providing a deeper historical perspective, which the book addresses in Chapters 2–4, the authors show how Zelensky himself is a product of a Ukrainian political culture steeped in the same sense of civic national belonging and duty that he advocates, advances, and now symbolizes. Herein lies Ukraine’s and Ukrainians’ success in the fight of their lives. It is also the formula behind what they call the Zelensky Effect. At the same time, Onuch and Hale trace Zelensky’s political rise, historical Presidential campaign and win to show that there were key constituencies in Ukraine which he and his party Servant of The People helped rally. In fact, employing statistical analyses, the book shows how Zelensky rallied specifically south-eastern and Russophone Ukrainians (many of whose homes are on the front lines of the war today) to supporting democracy, pro-EU, and NATO policy preferences, and more generally to a fierce attachment to the contemporary Ukrainian state above all other identities they many hold.
Thus, in the book, Onuch and Hale show that The Zelensky Effect is like two sides of the same coin. It is both about the rich contemporary history of democratic Ukraine that raises, nurtures and “makes” Zelensky and millions just like him. Creating a generation of citizens fiercely attached to the Ukrainian state and its democratic future. And it is also about the ability of Zelensky himself to double down on this civic sense of belonging and duty, mirror it in his actions, and motivate even more ordinary Ukrainians to rally in support of their state and democracy. Unlike other recent books on Ukraine, the war, or Zelensky, the book is unique in that it employs a rich array of original qualitative and quantitative data and analyses that we hope would please any contemporary politics expert, whilst providing both a history of independent Ukraine and a biography of Zelensky. By doing so, the book explains why Ukraine’s resistance has been so powerful, why so few expected it, and why Putin launched his war when he did (not least why his as well as western intelligence was so wrong).
