We regret that the lecture scheduled for Dec. 4, 2025 has been canceled, due to speaker illness. We apologize for any inconvenience and will explore options for rescheduling this talk for a future semester.
About the Lecture: The presentation will explore selected legal and political questions concerning Austria’s constitutionally enshrined principle of “perpetual neutrality.” It examines both authoritative and scholarly Soviet and post-Soviet interpretations in this regard, particularly in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The presentation further aims to bridge the official Russian and Soviet interpretations in regard to Austria and those relating to the current “neutralization demand” vis-à-vis Ukraine, emphasizing that the concept of neutrality, as understood by Russia, is not necessarily congruent with the normative core of this principle.
This lecture is co-sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Global Legal Studies Center.
About the Speaker: Associate Professor Dr. Benedikt C. Harzl is the Deputy Director of the Centre for East European Law and Eurasian Studies of the Law Faculty of the University of Graz. He is General Editor of the journal Review of Central and East European Law and the book series Law in Eastern Europe (Brill Nijhoff). He graduated in Law at the University in Graz and completed the “East European Studies” MA program at the Free University of Berlin in 2010. After working at the Institute for European Studies in Minsk and the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin he was a researcher at the European Academy in Bolzano/Bozen (2007–2012) and worked as a university researcher at the REEES Centre between 2012 and 2016. He completed his PhD in law at the University of Frankfurt and was based at Johns Hopkins University between 2016 and 2017 as a Marshall Plan Foundation Fellow. His habilitation thesis examined matters pertaining to international law in the post-Soviet space. He is the author of Secessionist Entities: The South Caucasus Disputes between Self-Determination, Territorial Integrity, and the Quest for a European Engagement Policy (Brill Nijhoff, 2025), co-editor of Unrecognized Entities: Perspectives in International, European and Constitutional Law (Brill Nijhoff, 2022) as well as Diversity Management in Russia (Routledge, 2013).