On January 17, 2024, during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland Timothy Snyder, Yaroslav Hrytsak, and Serhii Plokhii held a public discussion about the history of Ukraine and the future of the world. In particular, they discussed the goals of the “Ukrainian History: Global Initiative” project.
“The notion is to do something that is both very old-fashioned and extremely modern. It is very old-fashioned to think you can do a huge project about the history of a country, but this is also very contemporary in that we will be using the latest technological models, especially to try to understand the distant past. So, we will be bringing together over the course of three years about 100 people to work on about 70 themes. And by the end of it we will have rearranged the history of the world. We will have demonstrated a new model of national history,” said Timothy Snyder, Professor of History at Yale University, Chair of the International Academic Advisory Council, and Member of the Board of Trustees of “Ukrainian History: Global Initiative.”
“Ukraine stands under the center of the global conflict, and there is no doubt that results of this conflict have a huge impact on global history,” noted Yaroslav Hrytsak, Professor at the Ukrainian Catholic University and Co-Chair of the International Academic Advisory Council of the project.
This thesis was developed by Serhii Plokhii, Director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University, who is a Co-Chair of the International Academic Advisory Board as well. According to him, Ukraine has had a prominent place in a plethora of crucial processes in the history of the 20th century.
“If you think about Indonesia and what is happening there after the Japanese occupation, what is happening in Ukraine after the German occupation; if you think that India gets into the United Nations on the same ticket as Ukraine, this is an opportunity not only to integrate global history into the Ukrainian context. It is an opportunity that we cannot miss and the opportunity that did not exist before – to really rethink and add to the global history of the 20th century, but certainly of the earlier periods as well,” he emphasized.
The discussion was moderated by Nataliya Gumenyuk, Co-Founder of the Public Interest Journalism Lab and a Member of the Board of Trustees of “Ukrainian History: Global Initiative.” The event took place within “Deciding Your Tomorrow” project, organized by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation and PinchukArtCentre in cooperation with the Office of the President of Ukraine.
Photographs provided by the VictorPinchukFoundation©2024. Photographed by Nicolas Lobet / Valentyna Rostovikova
