Risk as Resource and Commodity: Critical Perspectives on the “Scholar at Risk” Ecosystem

Roundtable at the ceecon 26, the DGO-Congress of Central and East European Studies, at Freie Universität Berlin, 8–9 Oct 2026

Scholar at risk programmes could be described as an ecosystem involving a smaller group of vulnerable, usually displaced, scholars and students, and a larger group of ‘hosts’ situated in settled and established environments. This type of environment also includes dedicated branches of academic exchange programmes, as well as ad hoc measures connected to short-term funding, which helps place individual scholars at risk in institutions. At the centre of the system is a particular temporality: risk is experienced by a relatively smaller group of individuals, typically coming from abroad as a result of wars, repressions, or other disasters. The ‘established’ group of ‘hosts’ supposedly live on a different continuum of ‘normality’, their commitment to support of scholars at risk remaining a matter of individual preference, voluntary, and largely unrewarded by their own institutions However, with the continued assault since Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, as well as under the influence of Trump’s second administration and its attack on education and research, this ontology needs to be rethought. The panel proposes a new analysis of risk which maps critically how risk is more than a condition of the ecosystem. It is, in fact, a particular resource through which individuals affected by threats of war or authoritarianism can receive support, but also one through which scholar-at-risk support networks are themselves supported. Not only is the relationship between those ‘at risk’ and those ‘in safety’ not stable. We also suggest that it is in most actors’ interests to reverse the epistemic inequalities inherent in the relationship between ‘scholars at risk’ and hosts.

With: Andrea Pető, Dina Gusejnova, Nadiya Kiss, Tania Arcimovich, and Elena Trifan

Chair: Gabriele Freitag