POSTPONED: Interdisciplinary conference "Re-Thinking Post-Socialist War (s): Comparative Dimensions of the War in Ukraine 2014-2024"

The conference has to be postponed. Additional information will follow.

Please find poster and flyer of the event here.

The end of February 2024 marks 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, not only became part and parcel of the global agenda in politics, journalism, and academic research, but also turned into a crucial factor in cultural production and identity formation.

We approach the decade-long war in Ukraine as arguably the most salient case of resolving post-socialist (and also postcolonial/postimperial) disputes with military means. Here, we introduce the concept 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. By putting the Ukrainian case in a broader comparative perspective, we aim to figure out:

(i) what enabled armed conflicts in the post-socialist space as legitimate tools for achieving (geo)political goals; (ii) how warfare (co-)produced certain social and cultural practices that transformed implicated actors and polities;
(iii) which social, cultural, and economic factors possibly prefigured the emergence and perpetuation of warfare; (iv) how the post-socialist 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 is a collaborative effort between the Justus Liebig University Giessen and the Charles University in Prague. It is part of the joint project “UNDIPUS—(Un)Disciplined: Pluralizing Ukrainian Studies—Understanding the War in Ukraine” (2022-26), funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (subproject “After Masculinity: Female Perspectives on the War in Eastern Ukraine”).