Rotary Welcomes Local Experts to Discuss Russian Invasion of Ukraine

RCB President Brenda Hackney with Dr. Reuter, Dr. Law, Dr. Liber and Dr. Simoni.

The Rotary Club of Birmingham recently welcomed a panel of local experts providing perspectives on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Dr. Tina Kempin Reuter, UAB Institute for Human Rights Director and Associate Professor, moderated the panel with Dr. George Liber, retired UAB Professor of History, Dr. Randall Law, Birmingham-Southern College Professor of History, and Dr. Serena Simoni, Samford University International Relations Program Director and Associate Professor.

Dr. Tina Kempin Reuter is the Director of the Institute for Human Rights and Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration and the Department of Anthropology, specializing in human rights, peace studies, and international politics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). Her research focuses on human rights with a particular emphasis on the struggle of vulnerable and marginalized populations, including minorities, persons with disabilities, refugees and migrants, women, children, the LGBTQ community, and people dealing with the consequences of poverty. She studies how to use technology to improve access, inclusion, and participation of marginalized communities in society. In addition, she is an expert on ethnic conflict and peace making with a geographical focus on Europe and the Middle East.

Before joining UAB, Dr. Reuter was the Director of the Reiff Center for Human Rights and Conflict Resolution and Associate Professor of international and comparative politics at Christopher Newport University. She was formerly associated with the Solomon Asch Center for the Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict, University of Pennsylvania, the Institute of Public International Law at the University of Zurich, and the Center for Security Studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

Dr. Kempin Reuter holds a PhD in International Relations and International Law and an MA in Contemporary History, Economics, and International Law from the University of Zurich, Switzerland. She is the author of numerous publications in her field and has been awarded multiple prizes and grants to expand her research and teaching.

Dr. Randall Law is Professor of History at Birmingham-Southern College in Birmingham, Alabama. He is an internationally-recognized expert on the history of terrorism and the author of Terrorism: A History, a leading survey of the subject soon to be available in a revised third edition (Polity Press, 2023). He is also the editor of The Routledge History of Terrorism, a 32-chapter reference volume published in 2015. His current projects address the history of terrorism in the United States, and terrorism, political violence, and criminality in the city of Odessa in the Russian Empire in the early twentieth century. In 2009 he spent four months in Odessa as a Fulbright Research Scholar. Law is frequently interviewed by national and international reporters on matters related to terrorism and Russian politics and history.

Along with courses on the history of terrorism, Law teaches classes on modern Russian and European history at Birmingham-Southern, where he has won several teaching and research awards since he joined the faculty in 2003.

Law earned his B.A. in Russian from Amherst College; an M.A. in Russian and East European Studies from Yale University; and a Ph.D. in Russian and European history from Georgetown University. He grew up in Kansas City and now lives in Birmingham, Alabama, with his wife and two children. 

George O. Liber served as Professor of History at the University of Alabama at Birmingham until his retirement in 2021 (Ph.D., Columbia University, 1986; MA, Harvard University, BA, Indiana University). Liber is the author of: Soviet Nationality Policy, Urban Growth, and Identity Change in the Ukrainian SSR, 1923-1934 (Cambridge, England and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Alexander Dovzhenko: A Life in Soviet Film (London: British Film Institute, 2002); and Total Wars and the Making of Modern Ukraine, 1914-1954 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016). With Anna Mostovych, he compiled and edited: Nonconformity and Dissent in the Ukrainian SSR, 1955-1975: An Annotated Bibliography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1978).  He also served as a Short-Term Observer to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) for the 2010 and 2019 Presidential Elections in Ukraine, the 2011 Presidential Elections in Kazakhstan, the 2016 Presidential Elections in Moldova, and the 2012 parliamentary elections in Ukraine.

Dr. Serena Simoni is an Associate Professor and Director of the International Relations Program at Samford University. A native of Italy, Dr. Simoni’s teaching and research interests include International Relations, International Security, Global Political Economy, Europe and U.S. Relations, Foreign Policy, International Organizations, Conflict and Cooperation, Human Security, International Law, Gender, and Transnational Organized Crime. Dr. Simoni has previously taught at the California State University Long Beach and the University of Pennsylvania, and has been employed by the Italian Department of State as a consultant in Political Affairs. She is the author of Understanding Transatlantic Relations: Whither the West?, Routledge (2013). She had written an important case-study on Italy, ‘Transnational organized crime and globalization: godmothers of the Mafia and the undermining of the Italian state and society’, in Michel Gueldry, Gigi Gokcek and Lui Hebron, eds, Today’s imperatives, tomorrow’s conundrums? Understanding new security threats in a globalized world (Routledge, forthcoming 2019). She has published the article. “Queens of Narco-Trafficking: Breaking Gender Hierarchy in Colombia.” International Affairs (2018). She has just finished writing a paper on Women in drug cartels in Mexico.  She is currently working on her second book, Queenpins of Organized Crime: Gender Hierarchy in Context.

Dr. Simoni has also worked with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) as an international observer in Albania and as part of a nation-building mission to Bosnia-Herzegovina and Republika Srpska.