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Max Weber Netzwerk – Osteuropa / Max Weber Network – Eastern Europe

The Max Weber Network Eastern Europe (MWNO) conducts research on key problems of Eastern European history from the 16th to the 21st century and coordinates extensive digitization projects at the intersection of Eastern European and German history. It supports researchers who engage with the (post)imperial, (trans)national and local dimensions of Eastern European and German history along with processes of trans- and interimperial (dis)entanglements in multiethnic Eurasia.

The MWNO has a decentered setup with branches in Helsinki, Vilnius and Tbilisi with other locations to be added. It cooperates with local partner institutions as well as with the German Historical Institute Warsaw, the newly founded Research Center Ukraine and the Orient Institute Istanbul. This structure ties in all resources of the Max Weber Foundation in the region to provide research and networking opportunities to scholars specialized in the history of Eastern Europe in an international context by the way of research projects, different funding formats, events and publications.

Through the development of the MWNO, the Max Weber Foundation (MWS) responds to the challenges brought on, first and foremost, by Russia`s invasion of Ukraine and the political repressions and comprehensive threat to academic freedom within Russia and Belarus. As an academic network of smaller branch offices situated along transimperial contact zones that supports decentered archival research, the MWNO`s mission is to encourage a shift in perspective onto the histories of the larger region, to reflect on historiographical practices in a transnational perspective and to further innovative research and cooperation.

The branch office in Tbilisi/Georgia was set up by MWNO deputy director Andreas Hilger in September 2023. After his sudden death in 2024, he was succeeded by Moritz Florin before the office was officially inaugurated in June 2025. The Tbilisi branch office supports research mainly on the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Black Sea region in cooperation with universities and archives in the area. The cooperation with the Orient Institute Istanbul constitutes the first instance of a comprehensive approach to the larger Caucasus/Black Sea region in the context of the MWS.

The Max Weber Forum Helsinki hat commenced work in Finland in fall 2024. With the Slavonic Library – set up in 1828 as one of two central state libraries collecting all printed matter published in the Tsarist Empire –, the internationally renowned Aleksanteri Institute with its research on Russia, Eastern Europe and Eurasia and the Finnish National Archives, Helsinki provides excellent conditions for research on Russia outside of Russa as well as the transimperial and transnational history of entanglement of the Baltic Sea region. To date, the MWNO and its MWS sister institutes cooperate with the Bibliotheca Slavica and the Aleksanteri-Institute by co-organizing different academic events.

The branch office in Vilnius/Lithuania is co-developed by the MWNO and the DHI Warsaw in cooperation with the Research Centre Ukraine. Originally established by the DHI Warsaw, the Vilnius branch office became a base for members of the MWNO from 2022. It supports historians from Germany and Eastern Europe in their research, i.a. on the different imperial constellations that shaped the region since the early modern era, German occupation, the Soviet period and the post-1989/1991 transformations.

The Max Weber Network Eastern Europe is part of the larger infrastructure of the Max Weber Foundation that includes ten other German research institutes abroad (in Rome, Paris, London, Washington, Warsaw, Tokyo, Beirut, Istanbul, Delhi) with similar research goals in their respective countries and has its headquarters in Bonn. It is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

The organization and work of the MWNO are coordinated by its Academic Board.