Deadline 15 April 2018
This year marks the 30th anniversary of the outbreak of the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, the first in a series of inter-ethnic and secessionist wars to arise in the final years of the Soviet Union, among others in
Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria, and Chechnya. Three decades onwards, most of these conflicts remain stubbornly unresolved: the Minsk Group has not been able to achieve a normalisation of relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan; the 2008 Russo-Georgian war has put both Abkhazia and South Ossetia firmly outside of Tbilisi’s control; and part of Moldova’s territory is still governed by the de-facto republic of Transniestria. Meanwhile, the North Caucasus has been imperfectly ‘pacified’, and new conflicts have emerged in Ukraine.
This joint
CREES/BASEES one-day workshop – scheduled for Thursday, 7 June 2018 at the University of Birmingham – will critically examine the causes and consequences of 30 years of unresolved ethnic conflict in the former Soviet Union from an interdisciplinary perspective, inviting contributions from scholars working across the social sciences and humanities, on the history, sociology, anthropology, and politics of the above.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
· Implications for/of theories of ethnic conflict and civil war
· Evolving nationalisms and national identities
· The geopolitical context of post-Soviet ethnic conflicts
· Gender and ethnic conflict
· Postcolonial perspectives
· The roles of history and historiography
· Secession, sovereignty and the status of de-facto states
· The environmental consequences of ethnic conflict
· IDPs, refugees and human security
· The (in)effectiveness of existing negotiating formats and peacebuilding initiatives
· Religion and ethnic conflict
· Impacts of territorial conflict on regime politics and interactions with democratization
· Diaspora mobilizations around post-Soviet conflicts: successes and failures
· Comparative perspectives on post-Soviet and other regions’ patterns of conflict and intractability
· …
Those interested in participating are invited to send a maximum 250-word
abstract to k.oskanian@bham.ac.uk before 15 April 2018.
