Our research priorities

Based on UZH’s existing expertise on Eastern Europe and our established research collaborations, the CEES has defined five research priorities for the next few years:

Political conflicts can be understood as conflicts that result from a clash of interests and perceptions between individuals, social groups or state actors; they are either violent in nature or have great potential for the outbreak of violence. Generally speaking, this definition covers international and domestic conflicts as well as conflicts that are cross-border in nature, such as terrorism. In the post-Soviet region, temporarily suspended ethnic conflicts in the South Caucasus (Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh), Transnistria, the North Caucasus, parts of Central Asia, and more recently, Eastern Ukraine are considered to be particularly conflict-ridden zones. The CEES would like to investigate these conflicts in greater depth: what causes them, how they unfold, and what the potential solutions might be.

The University of Zurich is engaged in work on these issues. While developments in the North and South Caucasus are being investigated in the Division for Eastern European History, Central Asia has been a field of research at the Chair of Ethnology (Prof. Dr. Peter Finke) for many years. As a co-editor of Caucasus Analytical Digest, the CEES has good contacts in the region and can build on existing networks and expertise. The Caucasus region is also a focus of the CEES Fellowship Program.

The CEES is running various sub-projects dedicated to investigating how disinformation – the targeted production and placement of false or misleading information – works nationally and internationally, how it has developed historically, which narratives and rhetorical strategies it employs, which media it uses, which technical and economic strategies it applies, and which psychological traits it exploits. Our aim is to bring together researchers from different fields – history, political science, literature, theater, psychology, computer science, media studies and law – in order to examine current disinformation strategies and tactics in an interdisciplinary manner and in a global context. One focus is on Russia and the question of how disinformation strategies from the Cold War are being updated for use in current propaganda and disinformation in the digital realm.

Research on certain aspects of this topic is currently being carried out in various disciplines at the University of Zurich. For Eastern Europe, one research team is already working on “Media, Narratives and Procedures of Disinformation” as part of Prof. Dr. Sylvia Sasse’s ERC project Performance Art in Eastern Europe. The aim is to create a research network with experts from different disciplines in order to jointly launch an interdisciplinary research project. To this end, Professor Sasse (member of the CEES Advisory Board) is planning a conference at the University of Zurich in 2020, which is intended to connect the experts for the first time.

Since the end of the socialist system and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe has been marked by profound political, social and economic changes that are still ongoing. Current research on Eastern Europe cannot avoid tracing the nature of these changes when investigating the social foundations of political systems, ideological beliefs, the functioning of formal and informal institutions, political beliefs, and the peculiarities of governance and power structures. When considering authoritarian post-Soviet states, questions about the character, stability and changeability of political systems are of such importance because certain social and political dynamics have consequences that can also extend beyond borders, as recently demonstrated by the fall of the Majdan revolution in Ukraine.

At the University of Zurich, research on questions of power and society in Eastern Europe is chiefly concentrated in cultural research projects at the Department of Slavonic Studies. Research on the other aforementioned topics is carried out at various chairs of the Institute for Political Science at the University of Zurich, but there is currently no explicit focus on the post-Soviet space, which in our view is a major omission. Accordingly, the CEES has decided to develop a research focus in this area in order to apply its own expertise and thereby do justice to the importance of these issues.

Another area of our research focuses on the broad field of migration and population studies, which uses an interdisciplinary approach to address questions about the circulation of people, goods and knowledge. Developments regarding migration (e.g. labor migration, refugee movements), population decline (e.g. due to low birth rates, high mortality rates and emigration), and social mobility (e.g. lack of prospects for young people, problems of integration) are important issues with relevance for the economy and security policy. They harbor social conflict potential and pose great political challenges.

This research area currently receives particular attention at the Chair of Ethnology (Prof. Dr. Peter Finke) with a focus on Central Asia. There are completed, ongoing and planned research projects that deal with a variety of different topics such as the emergence and transformation of social cooperation, identity and ethnicity, migration movements, diasporas, and questions of integration. Other topics include local economic strategies and transformation processes following the breakdown of socialist systems. Migration issues were also one of the issues addressed at the Eurasia in Transition conference, which we co-hosted at UZH with ETH Zurich’s Centre for Security Studies from 10-12 November 20201.

The goal of this research area is to trace integrative and disintegrative forces in the post-Soviet and Eurasian regions. Markets and politics have been in flux since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Economic ties between the former Soviet republics have weakened or dissolved, and new ones have emerged. While large infrastructure projects (such as the energy and pipeline projects in the Caspian region) are creating new economic areas and political relationships – including China as an important player when looking more towards Asia – Russia in particular is striving to consolidate existing dependencies and to strengthen institutional links with its neighboring countries (especially as part of the Eurasian Economic Union). Analyzing these complex regional processes and geopolitical dynamics is central to understanding current and future economic and political developments in the Eurasian region.

One example of research on infrastructure projects is the UZH Department of Geography’s work on megaprojects in Russia (Sven Daniel Wolfe). Energy, energy history and economic issues with a focus on Russia and the Eurasian region are research areas at the Division for Eastern European History (Prof. Dr. Jeronim Perović), and there are plans to expand this research focus by building on existing partnerships. Together with the Center for Security Studies at ETH Zurich, we are planning an international conference entitled Eurasia in Transition for 2021.