ZfL INFO 37/2026: Affects & Effects: Comparing Post-Socialist Wars

Workshop funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR)

More than four years have passed since Russia began its large-scale aggression against Ukraine, and twelve years have passed since the war in the Donbas region interrupted the country’s peaceful post-Soviet transition. The ongoing war in Ukraine has now become a regular topic of academic discourse. However, the high hopes for rethinking, decentering, diversifying, and opening up various hitherto hermetic disciplinary fields that were prevalent in 2022–23 have not resulted in deep, far-reaching change. One reason for this is the “ban on comparisons,” which isolates the Ukrainian case from comparable cases in the post-socialist space and thus largely prevents the productive transgressions of disciplinary and area studies borders. Along with the mythological rather than concrete historical, economic, and cultural view of Ukraine’s heroic resistance, this hinders our understanding of the war’s structural premises, driving forces, and traumas, as well as our search for possible peace perspectives and the conflict’s bifurcation points.

This comparative stance lies at the core of the workshop, which draws some 20 international participants from literary and cultural studies, sociology, history, and political science. The workshop marks the official start of the nascent research network, WARP (War and Peace in Post-Socialist Space). WARP builds on the joint project (Un)Disciplined—Pluralizing Ukrainian Studies, Understanding the War in Ukraine, also funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space, and will be consolidated during a one-year transfer phase (2026–2027).

What theoretical and thematic links exist between the various disciplines and area studies that deal with different armed conflicts after socialism? In what ways are post-socialist wars influenced by post-socialist transformation? Are there any longue durée structures underlying the different types of post-socialist armed conflicts (e.g., secession and proxy wars vs. full-scale aggression) and their social, economic, and cultural effects, and how are these types comparable? How do culture and public discourse contribute to warmongering or, conversely, to reconciling conflicting parties in different post-socialist countries? How does the reception of “others’” wars influence one’s “own” internal cleavages and identity politics within the entangled post-socialist space? By addressing these and other related questions, the workshop aims to move beyond the solipsistic focus of area studies on their “own” wars. Instead, the goal is to create a broad, heterogeneous and differentiated panoramic picture that prioritizes interconnections and dynamic relationships over isolation and uniqueness claims, thus presenting post-socialist Eastern Europe as a polycentric yet coherent whole.

The workshop is organized by the WARP project in cooperation with the ZfL.

Program

program [PDF]

Friday, 8 May 2026

8.30
Registration

9.00
Opening Remarks

9.30
Panel 1: Post-Socialist Geopolitics

• Tatyana Malyarenko (Mechnikov University of Odesa): From Identity to Geopolitics: Two Generations of Post-Soviet Conflicts
• Alexandr Osipian (Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe, Leipzig): Buffer States and Movable Borderland: The Russia-Ukraine War in Comparative Perspective
• Alexander Dmitriev (Charles University, Prague): The Shift Toward “Repeating”: Exploiting the “Great Victory” in Russian Post-Soviet Historiography

11.45
Panel 2: Post-Socialist Wars’ Geopoetics

• Clemens Günther (Freie Universität Berlin): Defamiliarizing War: Perspectives on Tajikistan’s Civil War
• Ilya Kukulin (Princeton University): Who Speaks against State Violence? Literary Genres and Moral Agency in Russophone Literatures during and after the Chechen Wars
• Oleksandr Zabirko (University of Regensburg): Modelling Post-Socialist War: Scenario, Survival, and Comparison in Contemporary Video Games

16.00
Panel 3: Memory of/as Trauma

• Ewa Wróblewska-Trochimiuk (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw): Between Rambo and Homo Sacer: Visual Representations of War Veterans in Croatia, Serbia, and Ukraine
• Anna Ivanova (Justus Liebig University Giessen/International Graduate Center for the Study of Culture): Mobilizing for War or Enabling Peace? The Potential of Ukrainian Wartime Memory Politics

17.45
Panel 4: Conceptualizing Others’ Conflicts

• Manuel Ghilarducci (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) / Natallia Pazniak (Justus Liebig University Giessen/Graduate Center for the Study of Culture): Becoming Ukrainian? Accounts of Russia’s Full-Scale Aggression in Belarusian Poetry from Ukraine
• Alessandro Achilli (University of Cagliari): Understanding Belarus and the 2020 Belarusian Protests in Ukrainian Culture Before and After Russia's Full-Scale Invasion

Saturday, 9 May 2026

10.00
Panel 5: Continuity of Wars

• Danijela Lugarić Vukas (University of Zagreb): Affects without Closure: Documentary Literature and the Temporal Effects of the (Post-)Yugoslav Wars
• Kseniya Robbe (University of Groningen): The Slow Violence of (In)Dependence: Remembering the Abkhazian War and the 1990s in Contemporary Literature and Film
• Ivane Mchedeladze (University of Tbilisi): Memory and Postmemory of War in Georgian Literature of the Post-Soviet Time

13.15
Panel 6: Violence and the Post-Socialist Condition

• Alexander Chertenko (Justus Liebig University Giessen): Pregnant with War: Constructing Post-Soviet Space in Political Comics Before and After 2014
• Roman Dubasevych (University of Greifswald): “For some reasons, all boys look for trouble”: Post-Socialist Masculinity and the Transmission of War in Luxembourg, Luxembourg (2022) by Antonio Lukich

15.00
Panel 7: Solidarity and Disparity

• Anna Osypchuk (Kyiv-Mohyla Academy): Social Cohesion and Demand for Justice in Post-Socialist (Post-)Conflict Societies: Notes from Ukraine
• Vera Skvirskaja (University of Copenhagen): Affects and Effects: Collaboration with the Enemy in (Post-)Soviet Perspective
• Oksana Myshlovska (University of Bern): Vilification and the Limits of Negotiated Peace: Linguistic Delegitimization and the Proscription Regimes during the Early Period of the Donbas War

17.15
Final Discussion: Quo vadis?
Moderators: Alexander Chertenko (Justus Liebig University Giessen) / Matthias Schwartz (ZfL)