Arve Hansen is Senior Adviser in the Documentation and Accountability Hub and Project Manager for the Nansen Project.
He has a PhD in area studies from the University of Tromsø. He has researched urbanism, mass protest, the culture of opposition in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, and the Russo-Ukrainian war.
Arve has lived in the East Slavic region for ten years. He studied at two Belarusian universities in Minsk, worked for the Norwegian MFA in Kyiv and Murmansk, and did fieldwork in Ukraine over several years. He speaks Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Norwegian, and English.
The Helsinki Committee is a place where I can use my knowledge and experience to contribute to a region I am very fond of.
Arve Hansen
Arve is also an author and has published three books. He published ‘Ukraina: Historien. Menneskene. Krigen.’ in 2022 (in Norwegian). He wrote ‘Urban Protest: A Spatial Perspective on Kyiv, Minsk, and Moscow’ in 2021, and co-authored the book ’A war of songs: Popular Music and recent Russia-Ukraine relations’ in 2019.
Ukraine has been independent since 1991 and has since tried to balance the relationship between Russia and Europe. In fact, Ukraine, quite strikingly means “a country on the border”.
