Beschreibung
Where: GCSC (International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture), Otto Behaghel Str. 12, 35394 Giessen
When: January 31 - February 2, 2025
Organizers: Justus Liebig University Giessen / UNDIPUS joint project & Charles University in Prague / IMS Research Centre “Ukraine in a Changing Europe”
The end of February 2024 marked ten years since the beginning of the war in Ukraine—heralded by an (almost) non-violent annexation of Crimea in March 2014 and culminating in an all-out war launched by Russia in February 2022. During this period, the war, which brought about massive destruction of human lives, ecosystems, and infrastructure, as well as large-scale displacement, became part and parcel not only of the global agenda in journalism, politics, culture, and academic research, but also a crucial factor in cultural production and identity formation.
Our interdisciplinary conference “Re-Thinking Post-Socialist War(s): Comparative Dimensions of the War in Ukraine (2014-2024)” aims at conceptualizing the repercussions of this highly traumatic event that changed the lives of millions of people in Ukraine and also became a game-changing factor on a global scale. It is a collaborative effort between the Justus Liebig University Giessen and the Charles University in Prague. As the title suggests, rather than focusing on the war’s idiosyncrasy, we instead try to juxtapose it to other typologically comparable military conflicts in order to grasp their convergences and divergences. Premising on that, we also discuss the possible peacebuilding strategies and compare them to the relevant experiences observed in other countries and cultures.
The comparative stance underlying this endeavor is twofold. On the one hand, we approach the decade-long war in Ukraine as probably the most salient case of resolving post-socialist disputes with military means. Here, the conference zooms into the phenomenon of post-socialist wars,” understood as military conflicts in various areas belonging to the socialist camp before 1989-1991, from Yugoslav wars to armed tensions in the Caucasus, or, typologically, from warmongering and swiftly frozen conflicts to protracted genocidal wars. In particular, we focus on the ways in which the retreat of socialist practices and ideologemes opened space for overlapping layers of neoliberalism and nationalism, thus making affected polities less equal and more polarized.
On the other hand, we treat the war in Ukraine as an illuminating example of wars legitimized—or explained—within anti-/post-/decolonial or post-dependency frameworks (in post-socialist countries as well as in Africa or in the Middle East). From this perspective, the conference pinpoints the specific regimes of dealing with—or constructing—collective traumata, discourses of power, knowledge, and resilience, as well as identity and cultural politics resulting from the identitary (also nationalist) appropriations of post- and decolonial lines of thought—in Ukraine and elsewhere. By this means, the conference tries to reconnect the post-socialist wars (and the war in Ukraine as a “post-socialist” one) to the war-induced discursive, behavioral, economic, and ethical practices born out of post-dependency conflicts outside of the post-socialist space. Another goal is to figure out the specific features of post-Soviet narrations on (post-)coloniality and their role for the dynamics of war(s).
Our guiding questions are (i) what enabled armed conflicts (and the war in Ukraine in particular) as legitimate tools for achieving (geo)political goals; (ii) how warfare (co-)produced certain social and cultural practices that transformed implicated actors and polities or (iii) which social, cultural, and economic factors possibly prefigured the emergence and the perpetuation of warfare; (iv) finally, how the post-socialist and post-dependency wars were framed—in warring countries and in third states; by victims and by aggressors—and how those framings, in turn, reshaped identities of the involved sides?
The conference draws some 40 participants from political science, sociology, literary and cultural studies, international relations, linguistics, and history representing universities and research institutions in Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, India, Israel, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Serbia, Switzerland, Ukraine, and the USA. In addition to regular panels, the program of the conference also includes the keynote by Prof. Mark R. Beissinger (Princeton University, USA) on „Imperial Decline and Post-Socialist Wars: Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine in Comparative Perspective“.