First ERDAM Workshop: Zooming In, Zooming Out: Contextualising Emerging Russian Diasporas and Anti-War Activism in Larger Europe

ERDAM Workshop
Zooming in, zooming out: Contextualising emerging Russian diasporas and anti-war activism in larger Europe

Tbilisi, 18-19 April 2024 at Ilia State University

This workshop is organised by the ERDAM research network (Emerging Russian Diasporas and Anti-War Movements, DSF) which brings together established and young career researchers from different disciplines studying current Russian migration and the political and anti-war activism of Russians abroad.

After two years of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, we want to get a better understanding of: 1) what is going on with war-related Russian migration in larger Europe; 2) migrants of previous waves and their interactions with new migrants; 3) processes of building new diasporic communities. The ERDAM Research Network focuses on relatively recent migrants, however, those who belong to ‘older’ post-Soviet Russian speaking communities or those who arrived in host countries years before 2022, are of interest in the context of interactions with the ‘newcomers’ and anti-war and civic mobilisation, both as actors and as counter-actors. In recent years, anti-war engagement and the role of diasporic migrant communities in conflict and peace processes have become a serious matter of debate in academia as well as among policymakers. As non-state actors, diasporic communities can create intermediary zones outside of nation states and influence international relations. Moreover, in a digitalised world, diasporic communities can become a new force shaping interactions between countries in both a negative and a positive ways.

We want to look at these phenomena using various optics. The first stream of the workshop (Zooming In) will be dedicated to answering the questions: Where are we empirically and what is our research progress? What do we observe in our respective fields and which tendencies became more prominent? Around which issues ‘new’ and ‘old’ migrants mobilise and demobilise in the context of anti-war and civic movements?

During the second stream (Zooming Out), we aim to develop broader perspectives and transcend the peculiarities of our cases on several levels: conceptual, temporal, and comparative.

- Conceptual developments: Which concepts and theoretical frameworks can be used fruitfully to grasp what is going on and to open up new research questions? We welcome contributions discussing and applying concepts from social movements studies, diaspora studies, peace and conflict studies and related disciplines: opportunity structures, political remittances, critical junctions, de-colonial lens.
- Historical legacies: How do historical legacies influence Russian diasporic constellations and how do host societies deal with different groups of migrants? Could the recent Russian migration be contextualised fruitfully by addressing previous waves of migration and Russian colonialism?
- Comparative perspectives: What can we learn by comparison to other conflict-generated diasporas and their engagement, also to other diasporas from authoritarian states (such as Iran, Turkey or Azerbaijan)?

Please submit titles and abstracts (max. 300 words) and a short bio note by March 15th 2024 to the ERDAM coordinators:
Domas Lavrukaitis: domas.lavrukaitis@zois-berlin.de
Tatiana Golova: tatiana.golova@zois-berlin.de
Tsypylma Darieva: tsypylma.darieva@zois-berlin.de