April 13th 2022, 6.15 pm CET (online, zoom)

Since the beginning of Russia›s invasion of Ukraine, the notion of  "war in the midst of Europe" has dominated media and academic discussions. From the widely disseminated claim that this is the first war in Europe since 1945, which erases the many armed conflicts taking place in the South and the East of Europe in the past few decades, to many Western news channels‹ repeated use of mislabelled maps of the countries bordering Ukraine, a widespread lack of knowledge of the geopolitical space and social reality immediately affected by the war has been increasingly apparent.

The roundtable takes the question of where Western discourses place a war that they can hardly locate on a map as a starting point in order to then deal with the larger questions of how many Europes there are and which one Ukraine is now at the center of, while war is waging "in the midst of Europe".

What does the war do to shift understandings of Europe and Europeanness, of who belongs and who doesn't? How does that reproduce existing cleavages and does it create others in the process?

Participants:
Olga Plakhotnik (University of Alberta, Canada)
Daria Krivonos (University of Helsinki, Finland)
József Böröcz (Rutgers University, USA)
Ovidiu Tichindeleanu (IDEA Publishing, Cluj/Chisinau, Romania/Moldova)
Steven Seegel (University of Texas, USA)

Moderator:
Manuela Boatcă, University of Freiburg, Germany