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Research

The MWNO coordinates a number of projects covering early modern to contemporary history (16th to 21st century). Research mainly concerns the imperial and Soviet period, the history of non-Russian peoples living in Tsarist Russia, the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet states as well as the transnational and transregional contact zones of these peoples and states with other neighboring (imperial) states and their relationship with Germany.

The main areas of research, which are either focusing on particular time periods or certain issues across time, reflect core problems of national, transnational and global processes from the 16th to the 21st century. Research projects look at processes of consolidation of contacts, entanglements and internationalization on the one hand and othering, fragmentation and conflict on the other.

Besides a number of key themes (listed below), the MWNO focuses periodically on focal topics. While these may correspond with the general key themes, MWNO research capacities are pooled towards these focal topics for a certain amount of time. For 2025 through 2029, these are Knowledge Structures and Practices as well as Violence, War and Occupation from the late Soviet period to the present.


Key themes

  • Rule and War

War leads to violence, destruction and massive repression of the occupied societies. At the same time, war was one of the most formative and momentous ways in which different peoples, states and empires came into contact with Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. Rule and its effects on everyday life remains a key question – for the immediate context of conquest and occupation as much as for the long-term political and cultural developments in a multiethnic setting. MWNO research pays particular attention to the following fields of inquiry: 1. NS occupation in Eastern Europe, 2. Enforcement of imperial rule since the 18th c., 3. Everyday relationships and ciolence and their long-term effects.

  • Settler Colonialism, Forced Migration and Expulsions in the Tsarist Empire and the Soviet Union

Both the Tsarist and Soviet history was marked by processes of colonization, (forced) migration and expulsion. Settler colonialism led to displacement, (forced) migration went often hand in hand with repeopling a region. Colonists could turn into refugees and refugees could become colonists. Settler colonialism, forced migration and expulsion are, thus, explored as mutually constitutive phenomena. While suffering and destruction that could gain genocidal proportions are at the heart of this research the emerging connections and entanglements that could result from forced migration and colonization are likewise crucial to understand the histories of the regions covered by the MWNO. The South Caucasus and Central Asia form a first focus of research into these complex developments.

  • Maritime Contact and Conflict Zones

Like the Ottoman and the Habsburg Empires, Imperial Russia is considered a landed empire. However, its ambitions – as those of the Soviet Union – and its influence went far beyond the Eurasian land mass as such. This research theme turns the attention towards Russian and Soviet influence onto the Baltic rim, the Black Sea region and the North Pacific and the processes of dis/entanglement in these maritime contact and conflict zones from the early modern period until today.

  • Human sciences in the late Tsarist Empire and the Soviet Union

Sciences and how they studied the human condition – such as anthropology, ethnography and medicine – are at the heart of MWNO projects that explore the evolution of ethical, societal and biopolitical imaginations and concepts of humanity and their effects from the late 19th to the late 20th century

  • Environment and Economy in Soviet and post-Soviet spaces

This focus area marks the evolution of a previous working group on ‘Economy, Agriculture and Ecology in the Soviet Union and the late Tsarist Empire’. Newer projects on the maritime history of the Black and Baltic Sea regions pick up on the work of the working group on the North Pacific.

  • Law and Justice in the Tsarist Empire and the Soviet Union – Ideas and Practices

Conflict resolution under civil law, economic crime, law and religion as well as legal practice in multiethnic and multireligious contexts constitute the main areas of research in this focus area.

  • Language, Identity, Transfer (16th-20th century)

Research projects address the production of meaning by ways of texts and pictures. They look at the meaning, change and transfer of knowledge and political idioms while tracing the construction of social, religious and territorial order and imaginations (i.e. nation/empire, society-church-state, Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union and their peripheries vis-á-vis Europe). In terms of methodology, projects follow a constructivist perspective, broadly conceived: history of semantics, conceptual history, historical sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and historical myth and performance studies.