Event Recordings

Recently, the German initiative #OutInChurch draw the public attention to the conflicts LGBTIQ*-people experience within their religious communities. After a brief introduction on the religious and human rights situation in Ukraine strategies to reconcile or ignore competing identies are discussed.

Five years have passed since the ceremonial opening of ZOiS in March 2017. To mark this anniversary, at our 2022 Annual Conference we wanted to provide insights into the wide range of social science research undertaken at ZOiS.

Like other countries, Russia has in recent years seen the emergence of a culture centred on the management of subjective emotions, which relies on a psychological language. Since the start of the war against Ukraine, the language and norms of feeling have changed once again.

We discuss with the poets Pavel Bannikov, Aleksandr Kabanov, and Semion Khanin how Russia’s war against Ukraine affects Russophone literatures, how one writes poetry in Russian after months of bloodshed and war crimes. What is the future of russophone literarure given that many people now refuse to use Russian?

Russia’s invasion of its neighbour Ukraine came as a shock to many people in Germany, even though a Russian-backed war had been smouldering in the east of the country for years. What are the defining characteristics of this country that the Russian leadership calls a ‘brother nation’ and on which it is at the same time inflicting a brutal war?

The protests in Belarus after the 2020 presidential elections were marked by solidarity and concern for fellow citizens. Have the ideas of the protests against the authoritarian regimes in Belarus and Russia changed? How does this manifest itself in new forms of protest and how does it influence societies?

The “wild 90s” have become a trope in Russian public and political discourse to discredit democracy. We discussed insights from the various projects that the Yeltsin Centre has developed to try and shape the memory of that era, embed these in the wider political and public context and its shift over time, and illuminated how the wider Russian society relates to that era.

8 December marks the thirtieth anniversary of the end of the Soviet Union. The break-up into independent states continues to shape the region and the power structure of geopolitics to this day. Gwendolyn Sasse explained in the context of a digital journey why we urgently need to concern ourselves more with "the East".

2020 and 2021 have been turbulent and transformative years for the societies in the South Caucasus and for EU-South Caucasus relations. The purpose of this roundtable is to discuss whether the recent “resilience turn” in EU foreign policy is the right response to the aggravated challenges, and how we could understand the practical application of this new policy concept.

From the mid-1980s, the highly integrated Soviet economic space started to dissolve. We discussed the dynamics of post-Soviet economic (dis-)integration and its consequences for Russia's significance as a regional power vis-à-vis other external players like China and the EU.