The Research Centre Ukraine is looking forward to submissions for the conference “Experiencing the Borders: The Long 1940s and Their Legacies in (Eastern) Europe”.
16-18 September 2026 in Lviv, Ukraine.
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.
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. Since 1991, this internationally established border system has been radically transforming, and increasingly violently so. It is no coincidence that this new era has witnessed the spectacular development of border studies in the social sciences. 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.
We invite submissions focusing on the following topics:
- Borders experienced 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
Applications should be sent to conferences(at)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.
Co-organisers:
Center for Urban History, Lviv
Center for Russian, Caucasian, East-European and Central-Asian studies, School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (CERCEC-EHESS - Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales), Paris
Institute of International Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague
Research Centre Ukraine / Max Weber Foundation, Lviv