A warm thank you to all contributors at the Symposium – presenters at campus and in online panels. And thank you for all good and inspiring discussions! Symposium program and abstracts
Registration required for zoom and webinar links. [check for program updates]
10.00 Opening of the Symposium
— Dr. Liudmyla Pidkuimukha (Justus Liebig University Giessen) Weaponizing Language: How Russia Commits Linguicide on the Occupied Territories of Ukraine
—Svetlana L’nyavsky (Lund University): I am a Russian Ukrainian, but I will not learn Ukrainian just for you! Language ideological debates, linguistic vigilantism, and Internally Displaced People at the time of war
— Solomija Buk, Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, Department of General Linguistics: Ukrainian for Foreigners in Russian-Ukrainian War: Changes and Challenges
— Juldyz Smagulova and Kara Fleming (College of Humanities and Education, at KIMEP University, Almaty, Kazakhstan): Shame and struggles for power: New speakers of Kazakh in Kazakhstan—
— Edward Lemon (Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University) and Oleg Antonov (visiting researcher at GPS and RUCARR, Malmö University; visiting researcher at Södertörn University): Academic Diplomacy: The Educational Aspects of Russian Soft Power in Tajikistan
— Victoria Clement Central Asian Insights): Avoiding a Reckoning: Memory Days and History in Turkmenistan
— PhD candidate Dina Kucherbayeva and Prof. Juldyz Smagulova: Language Revitalization: Challenges for Kazakh in Higher Education
— Emre Pshigusa (U.S. State Department, English Language Fellow): The Circassian language and identity created a feeling of illegality in us” Language Ideologies, Policies, and Circassian Language Rights in Turkey
— Lars Funch Hansen (Circassian Studies) The marginalisation of Circassian language through local history teaching, with cases from Krasnodar Krai including the Black Sea coast
— Valeriya Minakova (Penn State): “It all starts in the family”: Placing discourses on the role of families in Circassian language preservation into a historical-political context
Merab Chukhua (Tbilisi State University and the Circassian Culture Center, Tbilisi): One case of reflecting a historical fact in language
— Otari Gulbani (Central European University MA): Russian Imperial Orientalism in Svaneti: A Discursive Analysis
— Sam Tarpley (Tulane University, Grad stud): Contemporary Deconstruction: Post-Soviet Monuments and the American South
10.15 Welcome (Niagara, 5th floor, C section (Nordenskiöldsgatan 1)
Giorgi Alibegashvili (State Language Department of Georgia) & Maka Tetradze. (State Language Department of Georgia & Tbilisi State University):: Street Georgian – as a Reflection of functioning of the State language in Georgia
Tinatin Bolkvadze (Tbilisi State University & State Language Department): How to assess the functioning of the Russian language in Georgia (online)
Nadiya Kiss (JLU Giessen): Languages at war: Language shift, contested language diversity and ambivalent enmity in Ukraine
Andrey Makarychev (University of Tartu): “Estonian Russophones: A Biopolitical Story”
Mariam Manjgaladze (Caucasus University): Issues of the Official Language Ecology in Contemporary Georgia
Lidia Zhigunova (Tulane University, USA): Russia’s War on Indigenous Languages: The Case of Circassian in the North Caucasus
Moderator: Professor Barbara Thörnquist-Plewa, Central and Eastern European Studies, Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University
Dr Maia Barkaia, Georgian Institute of Public Affairs, Visiting RUCARR researcher: A Valley of Misconstrued: Georgia’s North-Eastern Borderland Entanglements
The post-Soviet wars and socio-economic crisis of the 1990s in Georgia and the North Caucasus shaped the lives of Pankisi residents, transforming the borderland region into the epicenter of tension. While Pankisi residents have kept a distinct Kist identity in Georgia, they have also maintained their ties with their Northern neighbours, and political developments in Chechnya and Ingushetia have often had a significant impact on their lives. The transition of North-Eastern Georgian borders from open to closed after the collapse of the Soviet Union unfolded in a specific way in Pankisi Gorge. This shift in border regimes coincided with the Russo-Chechen war. These events played a pivotal role in shaping their ethnic and religious identities and became an integral part of the collective memory of Pankisi Kists. It is against the backdrop of the Russo-Chechen wars and Georgia’s western-oriented geopolitical aspirations that I seek to understand the „valley of misconstrued“ by examining the formation of borderland identity at this politically and socially pivotal juncture.
When: October 24, 15.16-17.00
Where: Seminar room, 9th floor (campus seminar)
Dr. Elizaveta Kopacheva will present her thesis “The resource model of political participation 2.0: Protesting in semi-authoritarian regimes – A privilege of the privileged”, that she recently defended at Linnaeus University. Read the abstract here. Welcome!
When? Tuesday 13th of June, 15:15-17:00
Where: Zoom-link: https://mau-se.zoom.us/j/69779449463
Striving towards democracy? Political participation in post-Soviet countries by Viktor Tuzov, Ph.D Candidate in Media and Communication, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR
The formation of political systems in the post-Soviet region remains a relevant topic even thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Due to the social, economic and cultural factors, the political regimes continue to move from the general communist in the past towards different political futures dominated by authoritarian or democratic frames. Our study aims to analyze the patterns of political participation and political culture, focusing on the binary categorization of political regimes across post-Soviet countries and the impact of media trust. It focuses on eight post-soviet countries equally divided into authoritarian and hybrid political regimes using WVS/EVS 2017-2020 survey. The results highlight the importance of media in the formation of political participation habits across countries with unconsolidated democracy. The people with higher media trust tend to participate in non-institutional political actions less frequently but have a higher willingness to vote during the national elections. The freedom index has also been integrated into the research as a moderator due to the importance of freedom for the media to mobilize society. The moderation analysis has revealed the distinctive patterns of political participation in countries with lower and higher levels of freedom.
Prof. Oleksandr Potii, Brigadier General the Deputy Chairman of the State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection of Ukraine since September 2020, will give a prsentation at the RUCARR seminar:
When: May 16, 15.16-17.00
Where: Zoom – https://mau-se.zoom.us/j/68914039402
Prof. Potii is an expert on information protection standards, on the development of personnel potential in the field of cyberdefense, and on the protection of critical information infrastructure, information security and cryptography. From 2019 to 2020, Deputy Chief Designer of Systems and Means of Cryptographic Information Protection at the Private Joint Stock Company “Institute of Information Technology”. From 2014 to 2019, Professor of Security Information Systems and Technologies, Faculty of Computer Science, the Kharkiv National University. Earlier served in the Air Force of Ukraine for 25 years.
Welcome to the RUCARR seminar on May 11, 10.00-11.30 with Ass.Prof. Edward Lemon, Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University and Dr Oleg Antonov, researcher at Södertörn University and RUCARR, Malmö University.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 led many analysts to predict that its role in Central Asia would decline. While there have been moments of pushback against Russia from the region’s governments, political, economic and security ties remain strong and resilient to change. At the same time, China is capitalizing on Russia’s distraction to make further inroads in Central Asia, becoming less deferential to Moscow, accelerating a trend that existed before February 2022. The speakers will discuss how the region is being affected by the war in Ukraine and what this tells us about the influence of Russia and China.
Dr. Edward Lemon is a Research Assistant Professor at the Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University. He previously held positions at the Wilson Center and Columbia University. His research focuses on Russia and China’s influence, authoritarianism and security in Central Asia
Dr. Oleg Antonov is a Researcher at the Department of Global Political Studies, the Faculty of Culture and Society, with Russia, Ukraine and the Caucasus Regional Research (RUCARR), Malmö University (supported by the Crafoord Foundation) ant at the same time a Researcher at the Department of Political Science, Södertörn University. His research focuses on authoritarian governance in Central Asia, in particular Russia and China’s influence in the region. He has previously held positions at Uppsala University, University of Amsterdam, University of Gothenburg, University of Heidelberg and University of Fribourg.
Very welcome to join our next RUCARR seminar on April 11 with Evgeny Romanovskiy, Charles University.
WHEN: April 11, 15.15-17.00
WHERE: Sign-up here for zoom link
The Caucasus has always been a mystical region for researchers not only from abroad, but also for Russians, where “traditional methods did not work.” Nevertheless, in this study, the author will lift the veil of the secrets of the formation and development of state policy in nation- and identity building in two republics of the North Caucasus: Chechnya and Dagestan. While Chechnya is a traditional mono-ethnic and mono-religious republic within Russia that has given rise to a “special” kind of nationalism, Dagestan is a «Babel tower of languages and cultures” that represents a different type of nationalism, or lack of it. While using modern social theories, the author of this study [in both cases] will try to prove that the Caucasus went through a difficult, but the same way of forming national identities as other regions of the Earth. This seminar will help to better understand the Caucasus, as well as the processes that took place and are taking place there and that have shaped the image of this region as we know it.
Welcome to next RUCARR seminar on March 21 with Dr Katrine Godfredsen, senior lecturer in Caucasus Studies at Malmö Unversity.
When: March 21, 15.15-17.00
Where: Sign-up here for zoom link (new link)
Zoom Meeting https://mau-se.zoom.us/j/67632369897 Meeting ID: 676 3236 9897
In this presentation I will outline some preliminary findings from recent ethnographic fieldwork in Georgia conducted as part of the research project “Occupied Intimacies: Borderization in Palestine, Georgia and Western Sahara”. The project as a whole is about contemporary military occupations and their effects on the everyday lives of people under their rule. It compares three cases of on-going and disputed military occupations: the Russian occupation of the Georgian territory of South Ossetia, the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories and the Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara.
The Georgian case study explores local effects of Russian border-making practices, or “borderization”, between the occupied territory of South Ossetia and Tbilisi controlled territory. Through the installation of physical barriers and symbolic gestures, such as signposts, fences and patrolling border guards, a previously invisible and elastic administrative boundary line (ABL) is gradually being turned into a de-facto international border. Moreover, these activities are accompanied by instances of what is locally described as “creeping occupation” – the step-by-step moving of fences and barbed wire further into Georgian controlled land and seizing of more Georgian territory.
Borderization has grave effects on the lives and livelihoods of borderland village communities. Some families have already experienced being cut off, or displaced, from their native farmlands, gardens and orchards, and others live with the fear and risk that this might happen at any time. This ongoing uncertainty presents local families with a number of economic and social problems and dilemmas, but it also fosters innovative strategies of accommodation, negotiation and contestation. In this presentation, I will examine how, and to which effect, borderization as a tool of dominance and subordination affects and reconfigures local village communities and livelihoods.
Welcome to join tomorrow’s conference Restoritative Justice in Action, where Dr. Mariia Tyshchenko, Honorary Doctor of Malmö University and affiliated RUCARR researcher will speak about her research and results of the School of Peace in Ukraine. The conference will discuss potential post-war restoritative strategies that might be employed in Ukraine going forward.
Where: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88596115140 Meeting ID: 885 9611 5140
When: 4.30 pm Swedish time
Organiser: Kenneth Laundra, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Sociology Program Director, Sociology Millikin University visited camp of School of peace last year.
Background reading: Laundra, Kenneth. Restorative justice in Ukraine: understanding practices and challenges. The International Journal of Restorative Justice 2022 vol. 5(2) pp. 263-280. doi: 10.5553/TIJRJ.000125
