The Politics of Networks: Europe, Ukraine and Strategies of Digital Development
Aro Velmet
University of Southern California25.6.2025, 18:30
Conference Room of the Center for Urban History
We invite you to the lecture by researcher Aro Velmet on the challenges and peculiarities of Ukraine's digitalization.
Since 2014, international development organizations ranging from Sweden's SIPA and America's USAID to various arms of the European Commission have contributed millions of euros to the development of Ukraine's digital public infrastructure. Development funding has been central to the construction of the decentralized data exchange system Trembita, the information processing system Vulyk, the smartphone platform Diia, and many others.
Many of these infrastructures have been developed and built by Estonian consultants and engineers, who have argued that their decentralized and distributed model of networking makes it ideal for digitizing state function, particularly in regions that face large-scale cybersecurity threats.
This talk unpacks the history of decentralized public networks, international development, and geopolitics, and analyzes what is at stake for different actors in this process of supporting Ukraine's efforts at digitization.
Aro Velmet
Associate Professor at the University of Southern California and Visiting Researcher at the University of Tartu. A historian of modern Europe, colonialism, science, technology, and medicine. He is the author of Pasteur’s Empire (OUP, 2020) and a number of articles on French colonial and late Soviet history.
Credits
Cover Image: Illustration by the Diia portal.