Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on October 6, 2025 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute for a lecture by Julia Vassileva. Moderated by Jack Snyder.
This talk introduces a new framework for understanding how hybrid regimes engage with international norms, drawing on a comparative study of Georgia, Moldova, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Ukraine. Dominant accounts of diffusion assume linear adaptation shaped by socialization or cultural fit. Julia Vassileva's findings suggest otherwise. Based on 150 elite interviews and process tracing, she identifies three alternative mechanisms: strategic appropriation, geopolitical recalibration, and crisis commitment, which capture how political elites adopt norms instrumentally, selectively, or under wartime duress. This typology highlights the ways norm uptake is conditioned by regime hybridity, elite strategy, as well as shifting alignments within an increasingly multipolar system. By recentering power, alignment, and contingency, the talk challenges traditional assumptions in diffusion theory and offers a framework for explaining how global norms travel and are transformed in contested and transitional orders.
