EAST-CENTRAL EUROPE AS A LABORATORY FOR NEW FORMS OF MOBILITY

The Conference is the result of the joint cooperation and exchange of researchers currently working on two Europeanprojects devoted to the study of international migration and border-making processes in Europe: GlocalEAST and REBOUND.‘
GlocalEAST’ is a consortium of academics from six partner universities (Comenius University in Bratislava; European UniversityViadrina in Frankfurt Oder; University of Belgrade; University of Bologna; Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas; University ofZagreb), who collaborate to the Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership project “Developing a new curriculum in Global Migration,Diaspora and Border Studies in East-Central Europe” (2020/2023), while ‘REBOUND’ (
REBOUND - Rethinking Borders in andby the European Union (unibo.it) is an Erasmus+ Jean Monnet Module made by a team of Professors based at the Universityof Bologna with the aim of discussing and problematizing the compounded changes in borders in the European Union (EU)since the refugee crisis of 2015 through multiple angles and perspectives.
On the occasion of this conference, we will address the complex and interrelated challenges of migration, diaspora and borders, looking at East-Central Europe as a laboratory for disentangling new forms of mobility. East-Central Europebecame a "transit area" in the so-called "refugee crisis" in the EU that peaked in 2015, but the region was also a site ofmigration to Western Europe from the socialist era to the post-Cold War period, lasting until today. More recently, the regionhas also become a place of immigration - for example, from Ukraine and other European states, but also from as far away asChina. The proclamation of independent states after the fall of the Iron Curtain, which in some cases led to war and/or frozen border conflicts (as in Georgia, Moldova, and Kosovo), as well as EU association processes and new global constellations in general, affected migration in different ways. Most importantly, Russia’s war of aggression against Ukrainehas triggered the upsurge of new relevant migration flows from both Ukraine and Russia to other regions of the world: these phenomena only followed the rising number of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in Ukraine after the start of the war in Donbas already in 2014.
During the Conference, the speakers will address the current, complex and interconnected challenges related to migration,diaspora and borders by offering an inter- and transnational perspective, while at the same time providing a profound knowledge of regional and local processes in East-Central Europe.