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Borderlands
The Borderlands Region
Themes and Significance
Schedule
Seminar Series
Notes
Questions, Results, Implications
Contacts
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Themes and Significance
Ethnic violence in the borderlands area is not a new area of study, to say the least. It has wrangled the minds and exhausted the wills of countless diplomats, politicians, and observers. Mountains of monographs, articles, reportage, memoirs, and novels have been produced on the topic. The issue has been analyzed from numerous angles and by many scholarly disciplines. This Project, however, is distinctive on a number of counts. “Borderlands”
- explores the large geographic area comparatively by taking into account the domains of all four empires
- includes the Ottoman Empire and Republican Turkey as vital parts of European history and contemporary politics
- includes the Holocaust as one manifestation of ethnic violence rather than as a singular event that can only be studied on its own terms
- is resolutely interdisciplinary in its approach, bringing together social scientists and humanists
- promotes applying diverse methodologies to the study of ethnic violence also by demarcating four thematic groups, each of which includes scholars representing different disciplines and perspectives
- covers both historical and contemporary manifestations of ethnic violence
- forges a trans-Atlantic dialogue by its links with several research institutes in Europe
“Borderlands” does not provide a singular answer concerning the causes of ethnic violence in the modern period. Its origins are too complex, the histories of the peoples and states in the region too diverse. Nor has every member of the Project proceeded from the same understanding. The Project has, however, operated on the following set of common premises that have guided individual research projects and have served as the basis for discussion among the participants:
Ethnic Violence in an Historical Context: Ethnic violence is not some timeless, ahistorical constant attached to the borderlands region, but it can be considered within the constraints of political history. Periods of relative peace and toleration in the region have alternated with years of intense violence. Certain localities and regions experienced repeated episodes of violence while others avoided the more extreme manifestations of ethnic conflict. Hence, attentiveness to historical specificities – of period, geography, religion, nation building, and so on – has been a vital element of the Project.
The Development of Ethnic and National Identities: Ethnic and national identities are not historical constants. As the vast weight of scholarly literature of the last generation has suggested, identities are “constructed” or “invented.” The development of national identities, for example, may be fostered by intellectuals or the state and entails a learning process that takes place in various realms of society, including the government, the military, educational institutions, and the public sphere. Hence, attentiveness to language and culture, and not just to the powerful modernizing processes of industrialization and state building, has been vital in our effort to understand the development of ethnic and national identities and the frequently violent conflicts that surround them.
Defining Identity with Multiple Constructs: People’s identities are multiple in character. In the modern period, national and even racial identities have been added to the variety of allegiances that people hold, sometimes supplanting but more often intermixing with older identities such as religion and locality. Attentiveness to the interplay of various identities – class, religious, gender, ethnic, national, and racial – has also been a vital part of the research projects and discussions of “Borderlands.”
The Role of the State: Especially in the modern period, ethnic violence has usually been instigated by states. In its most extreme manifestations, states have organized the deliberate killings of targeted populations. States have also mobilized populations to aid in the work of ethnic cleansing and genocide, but cannot be considered as completely abstract forces that operated on the societies they directed. Ethnic violence in the modern period has become so much more frequent, systematic, and deadly precisely because of its dual character, that is, fomented by states and enacted by significant segments of the population at large. A key aspect of the “Borderlands” Project has been its exploration of the interaction between state-directed and popular violence.
To investigate these issues more thoroughly, “Borderlands” established four thematic groups:
- Local Perspectives: This theme is devoted to research on heterogeneous communities in the “shatter-zone” of the four great multiethnic empires, i.e., in the borderlands where they touched or overlapped with each other. A variety of local studies currently underway were brought together under the general rubric of this theme, ranging from analyses of village communities and small towns to major cities, from investigations of short periods or single events to long-term developments. This theme engages social historians, sociologists, ethnographers, anthropologists, and cultural studies scholars. It concerns the most intimate and personal aspects of interethnic communities, but can also serve to reach more general conclusions about the social dynamics of interethnic relations as well as the link between the unleashing of violence on the local level and state-directed policy.
- State Involvement: This theme investigates the role of the state in defining categories of ethnicity and class, nation and race, and in implementing policies relevant to such definitions. It also examines the need to rethink and reconceptualize the very terms “race” and “ethnicity” and to reassess their validity and changing meanings within the particular historical contexts of the region. Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian/Soviet population policies are at the center of this theme. This perspective engages primarily political scientists and historians, as well as sociologists. It provides the crucial context for the shatter-zone of empires in transition from the old multi-ethnic empires to the nation state, racial state, socialist state, and other new political entities. Key topics include: the “representation of nations” as reflected in the emergence of national cartography intended to depict the “true” borders of the “nation,” a phenomenon that inevitably led to the appearance of and overlap between the borderlands of such newly mapped nations; the relationship between ethnic violence and the decay of regimes, including the older multinational empires and the more recent communist states; and the role of utopian ideologies of revolutionary or genocidal movements and states.
- Transnational Developments: This theme addresses crucial transnational developments relating to the transformation of economic, cultural, social, and demographic conditions of the past two centuries in the relevant geographical zones. It explores the extent to which such developments changed the ethnic and class make-up and relations of the populations concerned, and the cultural contexts in which people tried to make sense of the transitions they were experiencing. Some of the most crucial elements entail the changing compositions of rural and urban populations, the cultural meanings of new media, linguistic policies and their reception, the geographic dislocations introduced by industrialization, and the radical transformation of urban populations during the period under investigation. Not least, this theme has to do with the impact of migrations, expulsions, “ethnic cleansing,” and genocide, or what has been termed “population policies,” which both moved masses of people across borders and redrew borders in order to include or exclude certain populations. The analysis of such transnational developments engages sociologists and political scientists, linguists, literary scholars, social historians, and anthropologists.
- Ritual, Symbolism, and Identity: This theme investigates the effects on ethnic relations of religion, tradition, and the recasting of premodern modes of thinking and conduct under the impact of modernity. It is concerned with the ritualization of violence, the symbolic manifestations of identity, the role of language, and the function of faith. Combining a primary approach in ethnographic or cultural studies with the tools of social history and cultural history, this theme links the workings of symbolism and ritual in the relations within and between communities on the local level, and the national or even transnational level, where such symbols and rituals were “nationalized” and transformed into key components of modern ideological constructs. This examination of the manner in which images and representations were disseminated to large populations by political propagandists, religious leaders, and intellectuals, also provides us with a new understanding of the similarities and differences between interethnic relations and violence in Europe’s borderlands and other parts of the world that have experienced or are still suffering from eruptions of communal ethnic carnage.
The themes cannot easily be separated from each other. Many of the seminars, workshops, and conferences outlined below engaged more than one of the themes in a variety of manners. Nevertheless, the Project has maintained a balance between these four main themes in order to ensure that its analysis of interethnic relations and violence in Europe’s eastern borderlands encompassed a wide array of perspectives, methodologies, and disciplines.
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