23.02.2024 Consular Corp Forum "Russia's War on Ukraine: The Challenge to the International Order"

On Friday, Feb. 23, 2024 at 3:30 p.m., the Consular Corp Forum "Russia's war against Ukraine: the Challenge to International Order" was held in Venice by the Consular Corp of Venice and Veneto in collaboration with Ca' Foscari University of Venice (Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage, Department of Comparative Linguistic and Cultural Studies, Department of Economics, PISE) and the Europe Direct Office of the City of Venice. 

The Forum was held at the Ca' Sagredo Hotel, Campo Santa Sofia 4198/99, Venice. Admission was free and free of charge to the citizenry while places were available.

The meeting, dedicated to students and citizenship, was moderated by Professor Emma Brannulund, Ca' Foscari University Venice and featured a keynote address by Professor Roy Allison Full Professor, Oxford University, in International Relations , Foreign and Security Policy.

After nearly eighty years, war has reappeared on the Old Continent. Vladimir Putin's dastardly aggression against Ukraine on February 24, 2022, broke decades of peace and returned Europe to what it had always been for centuries until the conclusion of World War II: 'the place of war.' How could such havoc happen in 'civilized Europe' of all places? In the place that had been a pillar of that liberal order that transformed the international system by huddling around it a family of brotherly democracies and weaving a dense web of institutions and treaties guaranteeing cooperation and peace? If peace, then, has been broken precisely where the conditions for maintaining it were the best possible, what hope remains to prevent force from once again becoming the sole 'rule of the world'? The answer to this question comes through the realization that the possibility of ruling out war as a prospect derives precisely from the credibility and survival of that liberal order that Putin's war has put under attack: for Russia's invasion of Ukraine is not only a declaration of deadly hostility toward that country, but is also an explicit aggression against the democratic West and the principles and rules on which it is based. Rethinking the war, and its place in contemporary European political culture, after Ukraine is the only way not to be faced again with a broken design with no strategy to be able to rebuild it on a more solid and more universal basis. Because if there is one thing that the proud resistance of the Ukrainian people has taught us, it is that we must never give up, that the defense of one's freedom has a cost but is the prerequisite for pursuing every dream, every hope, every purpose, that the things worth living for are the same things worth dying for.

Some pictures from the event:

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