On September 22, a meeting of the Expert Council of the Black Sea Peacebuilding Network (BSPN) has taken place in the office of the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress (EAJC). The meeting was titled “Identities and Conflicts.” The seminar was organized by the Center of Near East Studies in cooperation with the EAJC and the Congress of National Communities of Ukraine.

The two main speakers at the meeting were the important scholars Natalia Belitzer and Nikolai Ryabchuk. Natalia Belitzer, of the Pylyp Orlik Democracy Institute made a report titled “Regional Identities: 'Natural' and Attempts to Artificially Construct Them.” She gave the most attention to the regionalization and functioning of regional identities in the context of modern Europe, as well as examined several examples. The writer and analyst Nikolai Ryabchuk made a report titled “'Yanychars' and 'Svidomits: On Two Versions of the Ukrainian National Identity and Their Confrontational Potential.” He described the ethnopolitical processes taking place in Ukraine as the formation of two political nationalities, which rely on different ideological reference points and different models of identity.

The reports provoked a lively discussion, some of the participants of which included EAJC General Council Chairman Josef Zisels and EAJC General Council Member Vyacheslav Likhachev.