Masha Cerovic

Wars intensify borders in multiple ways: along with administrative hardening, securitization, and militarization, wartime also enhances the importance of migration and refuge, the transfer of supplies and technologies, as well as processes of social re/bordering within societies, including the radical reconfiguration of gender orders. Wars are also about shifting, fading, and disappearing borders. Looking at borders in the context of mass violence, especially wars, benefits from recent interdisciplinary scholarship that treat them not as fixed spatial delimitations of territory, drawn and redrawn throughout history by states and governments, but as an everyday social reality constituted through contingent bordering processes. These processes involve a multitude of social actors, practices, narratives, and materialities. By foregrounding the lived experience of borders, we intend to place at the center the agency of those who engage with them—whether regularly or occasionally—and who, through embodied experience, participate in their everyday (re)creation. In this sense, borders are continuously enacted, appropriated, and contested through mundane encounters that both reproduce and potentially destabilize their meaning and effects. The conference will focus on the multiple borders in Europe that were drawn and redrawn, experienced and installed, moved and secured throughout the long 1940s—a period of violence and upheaval shaped by annexation, war, occupation, and postwar settlements. Thus, the opening moment of this period can be located in the Anschluss of 1938, followed by a cascade of annexations that turned borders into military frontiers after 1939; the establishment of different occupation zones; postwar border settlements formalized through agreements signed, and people moved. The last pieces of this new re/ bordering puzzle were put in place by the mid-1950s.

From the Yugoslav Wars, which marked the return of warfare to the European continent, through the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation in 2014, to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the entire border system that originated in the long 1940s is being challenged and changed. Taking these two periods—the historical and the more contemporary—as points of reference, we would like to look not only at state borders but at complex and composite border systems of different types and kinds. These include state borders recognized under international law and transgressed in the acts of annexation or declarations of war; borders between and within occupation zones (such as ghetto borders); borders delineating zones of control and borders dividing ideological systems (such as the “Iron Curtain”, which was both closed and permeable); state borders within ideological blocs, in particular within the Socialist Bloc; borders within supra-national entities. Furthermore, borders were more than lines delineating territories; they were both tools and markers of a radical and major societal change. We welcome researchers who engage with these periods across different European geographies— particularly Eastern, Central, and Southeastern Europe, but not exclusively—and offer a perspective on borders as social constructs.

We invite submissions focusing on the following topics: - Borders experiences and imagined - Materiality of borders and environment - Multiple types of borders and modes of bordering - Movement and bodily experiences - Social relations -Welfare - Temporalities - Urban / rural perspectives - Property issues - History and methodology of border studies applied to wartime contexts

We welcome submissions (max. 700 words) from scholars in the humanities and social sciences. Submissions from early-career researchers are explicitly encouraged. Applications should be sent to conferences@lvivcenter.org by April 20, 2026, with the subject line “Experiencing the Borders.” Notifications on acceptance will be sent by May 5, 2026. We expect to have draft papers or notes submitted to discussants by September 7, 2026. The conference language will be English. Organizers can provide assistance to the conference participants with limited English proficiency but strong proposals. The conference will take place on 16-18 September 2026 in Lviv (Ukraine). Online participation will be possible; however, preference will be given to in-person attendance. The organizers will cover travel and accommodation costs for all participants who are not funded by their home institutions. This conference is part of the activities of the “War and Society in Central and Eastern Europe (20th- 21st centuries)” Research Alliance (EURETES, EHESS-MESR), which brings together the Center for Russian, Caucasian, East-European and Central-Asian Studies at the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (CERCEC-EHESS) in Paris, Institute of International Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences at Charles University in Prague, and the Center of Urban History. The conference will be hosted in Lviv by the Center for Urban History in cooperation with the Research Centre Ukraine / Max Weber Foundation.

CfP - Experiencing Borders. The Long 1940's and their legacies in (Eastern) Europe
International conference, Lviv, Ukraine Sep. 16-18, 2026
@ehess.fr with Center for urban history in Lviv, Charles University, Lviv office of the @maxweberstiftung.de
Apply by April 20, 2026!

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Unconstitutional Assault Strips Universities of Core Faculties Starting 2026, most programs and faculties will be cut or reassigned, with Ilia State University effectively dismantled and GTU reduced to technical disciplines.

in another entirely illegal move, the nihilistic totalitarianism of the Georgian Dream continues its rampage, here against #Georgia's most successful research university.

Yes, it is a regime, and yes, this is illegal and totally illegitimate.

open.substack.com/pub/ganatleb...

The journal Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History is on Bluesky now. Follow here: @kritikajournal.bsky.social
#academicsky #skystorians

Outside of Global North scholars working in European archives nobody has easy access to archives. I was lucky as an Indian national to experience the extraordinary democratization and transparency of Brazilian archives after the dictatorship. It gave me a horizon of hope not a standard.

couverture du livre 1815 le temps du retour

couverture de l'épisode

Le livre : 1815, le temps du retour. Restituer l’art en Europe après l’Empire napoléonien, Paris, La découverte, 2026. La discussion : Une lecture comparée des enjeux de restitution des fins d’empire (1 :00) L’ampleur des spoliations révolutionnaires et napoléoniennes (7:40) Les timides débuts des restitutions en 1814 (16:30) Les vainqueurs haussent le ton en 1815 (25:40) Spoliations napoléoniennes, spoliations coloniales de l’époque (36:30) Les œuvres rendues ne le sont jamais à l’identique ou dans les mêmes lieux (42:15) Conseil de lecture et référence : Entretien avec Maria Pia Donato Matilde Cartolari, Ambassadors of Beauty. Italian Old Master Exhibitions and Fascist Cultural Diplomacy 1930-1940

Nouvel épisode en ligne: les restitutions artistiques de 1815, avec Bénédicte Savoy.
Un moment passionnant de fin d'empire, où le Louvre doit rendre des milliers d’œuvres issues des conquêtes françaises, préfigurant les débats actuels sur l'art africain notamment.
parolesdhistoire.fr/index.php/20...

Lale Can's Spiritual Subjects examines how Central Asian hajjis after the Romanov conquest navigated the tension between imposed political subjecthood and spiritual subjecthood as Muslim subjects of a European colonial power in the Ottoman empire.

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Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky's Empire of Refugees explores the emergence of an Ottoman refugee regime and the resettlement of Circassians from the Caucasus.

Happy that my review essay on Russian-Ottoman history in the Annales has been published in English - reviewing amazing books by @will-smiley.bsky.social @vhtroyansky.bsky.social and @lalehjoon.bsky.social

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

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What was conflict studies for? And what can its travails tell us about how wars have changed?

CoMMA: thousands of medieval manuscripts finally transcribed Transcribing thousands of medieval manuscripts by hand would be a monumental undertaking. Fortunately, researchers in computational humanities at the Inria Paris Centre have been able to automate the ...

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www.inria.fr/en/comma-med...

The banner shows a new publication by Svetlana Suveica (IOS): "Choosing the Soviet Union over Romania: The 1940 Jewish Exodus as Protest and Survival" published in "Nationalism From Below in the East European and Soviet Borderlands, Popular Responses to Nation-Building, 1900-1940".

📚 #OutNow
In the summer of 1940, many Romanian Jews fled to the USSR to escape persecution and protest antisemitism. In this book chapter, Svetlana Suveica (IOS) examines this largely overlooked migration & the fate of the refugees. Published by Bloomsbury Academic.
➡️ leibniz-ios.de/en/knowledge...

Every data centre is a U.S. military base - CCPA Understanding how the United States uses its tech companies to serve empire

For decades, Canadians eagerly rushed onto US tech platforms and services. But now the drawbacks of that dependence are on full display.

For @policyalternatives.ca, I explain the economic and political consequences of a US-dominated internet — and why digital sovereignty is imperative.

Universität Basel: PhD position: History of Interwar Czechoslovakia (case study Bohemian Lands) The Department of History at the University of Basel, Switzerland, invites applications for a invite applications for a fully funded, four-year (1 plus 3) PhD position in a history project led by Dr. ...

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This report in Nature on the costs of competing for & administering scientific grants is shocking: "In other words, European taxpayers will have spent more on the funding process than on the funding itself, and the scientific ecosystem has been drained." www.nature.com/articles/d41... 🧪

Moscou déclenche une spoliation massive des Ukrainiens dans les zones occupées Une loi signée par Vladimir Poutine, le 15 décembre, encourage l’expropriation à grande échelle des propriétaires de biens immobiliers dans les zones occupées par l’armée russe. Kiev dénonce un « remplacement de population ».

Moscou déclenche une spoliation massive des Ukrainiens dans les zones occupées

The way to actual tech sovereignty from the US? Extremely interesting talk by Cory Doctorow.

pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/3...

Cover - last issue of Annales

🚨 Le dernier numéro des #Annales est disponible sur @universitypress.cambridge.org

Au programme : #évergétisme #migrations #mercenaires #valeur #géographie

Avec plusieurs articles en #openaccess

Bonne lecture !

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

And neither Putin nor Trump can grasp why that will never happen.

He's basically telling Trump, over and over again, that if Ukrainians come to their senses and accept that they are truly Russians, they will be welcome back into the fold. And that his sincerest wish is for them to come to this realization as soon as possible, so that all is good again.

So Putin is clearly laying out that he wants to "reintegrate" Ukraine in Russia. Get a puppet government, buy it off with cheap gas, neutralize its military, get rid of the "fascists" aka supporters of Ukrainian independence, reclaim RU cultural and economic hegemony. Peace through conquest.

Moscow is thus heavily invested in trying to bar or stop the opening of archives outside Russia's borders that would challenge modern imperial myths (cf the huge pressure on KZ to stop opening gulag archives) while strategically using access / digitization to bolster the official Russian narrative.

Russia would have the funds, like Turkey, but does not have much interest in promoting this history that pre-dates much of its imperial expansion. The 19-20th c. are at the heart of its neo-imperial mythology, but it's way too "current" to allow the Turkish approach to archives of imperial glory.

There is also far fewer US and EU funds interested in digitizing (funding the digitization of) pre-19th c. archives / manuscripts in the Caucasus and Eastern Europe (don't know about CA), so even less is digitized for those earlier periods as well.

Thank you for the very interesting explanation! I'm still simply baffled by the whole thing. And also - the earliest document I've ever worked with in any archive dated back to the Crimean War.

a woman in a plaid shirt says oops ! ALT: a woman in a plaid shirt says oops !

il ne fallait pas dire ça.... je vous ai fait un mega thread de réponse :)

Ah et pendant que j'y suis: l'archive reste dans ces pays avant tout comprise comme relevant de l'Etat, et il y a très peu ou pas du tout d'archives privées, associatives etc. Memorial constituait une exception notable dans sa tentative de créer une archive indépendante des victimes du stalinisme.

Dans ces pays, la relation chercheur-Etat dont les archives sont l'interface est complexe, souvent empreinte de méfiance, alors que l'Etat cherche à contrôler et instrumentaliser une transparence de façade numérique. En tous cas, "l'ère numérique" y a des significations très différentes.

Impossible de savoir ce qui n'est pas en ligne. Même comme lieu physique, l'archive disparaît: vous pouvez travailler sur les archives turques sans jamais aller en Turquie. C'est très déroutant et requiert des stratégies à l'exact opposé de celles nécessaires dans les archives décrites ci-dessus.