“Eastern Europe” and War: A New Kidnapping?

“Eastern Europe” and War: A New Kidnapping?

Guests: Aliaksei Kazharski, Andrey Makarychev

Chair: Zuzanna Bogumił

Date & Time: Tuesday, June 9, 2026, at 9:30 am CET

Online Registration: Register on Zoom

More about the Global Easts initiative: Global Easts Website

About the Seminar

What have been the effects of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 on Central and Eastern Europe (CEE)? How have countries in the region positioned themselves vis-à-vis the war, and how are they (re)defining their regional identities and geopolitical belonging?
These are the questions explored by the contributors to this volume, whose chapters examine how these transformations are being understood, debated, and contested across the region. During the seminar, the editors, Aliaksei Kazharski and Andrey Makarychev, will reflect on how local post-2022 discourses and perspectives capture the region in all its complexity and diversity.

Speaker Bios

Aliaksei Kazharski received his Ph.D. from Comenius University in Bratislava in 2015. He has worked at Charles University in Prague and has been a guest researcher at the universities of Oslo, Tartu, Vienna, Malmö, and Uppsala, the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna (IWM), and the Polish Academy of Sciences. He has published two monographs: Eurasian Integration and the Russian World: Regionalism as an Identitary Enterprise (CEUPress 2019) and Central Europe Thirty Years after the Fall of Communism: A Return to the Margin? (Lexington Books 2022), which won the International Studies Association, Global International Relations Section 2022–2023 Book Award.

Andrey Makarychev is a Professor of Regional Political Studies at the University of Tartu's Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies. He is the author of Popular Biopolitics and Populism at Europe’s Eastern Margins (Brill, 2022), and has co-authored five monographs: Celebrating Borderlands in a Wider Europe: Nations and Identities in Ukraine, Georgia and Estonia (Nomos, 2016), Lotman's Cultural Semiotics and the Political (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), Critical Biopolitics of the Post-Soviet: From Populations to Nations (Lexington Books, 2020), Practical Biopolitics of COVID-19: Comparing Russian and Indonesian Experiences (Lexington Books, 2023), and Biopower in Putin’s Russia: From Taking Care to Taking Lives (CEU Press, 2024).