Olympia Summer Academia

Alexander Kustov describes his impressions of visiting "ancient" Greece

Alexander Kustov (associate researcher at LCSR) took part in Olympia Summer Academia, a famous summer school devoted to the studies of ethnicity and civil wars. He described his impressions of visiting the motherland of the Olympic Games for the LCSR website.

Olympia Summer Academy involves a series of courses on political science and international relations organized by Yale University and other institutions at the International Olympic Academy in Greece. I participated in the school’s main seminar on political violence and conflict led by Yale professor Stathis Kalyvas, one of the leading experts in this field. Besides that, the course was taught by sociology professor Sinisa Malesevic (UCD), IR professor Alex Downes (George Washington), and economics professor Ana Maria Ibanez (Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, Colombia). The interdisciplinary program included the seminars on the latest developments in the research on ethnicity, nationalism, and civil wars, which was especially useful for my own project on the agent-based modeling of ethnic structure and civil conflict.In the end, I had a chance to publicly present my work to others and get some valuable feedback.

I should say that I was really astonished by the quality of not only the faculty, but also the participants. These people, who came from leading institutions around the world, as well as the peculiar settings of Ancient Greece and the remoteness from the hustle and bustle of the contemporary world, engendered a unique learning environment which is hard to forget.