黑料正能量

Location details:听Friday, 12 December 2025, The American University of Paris | Room Q-801| 6, Rue du Colonel Combes | 75007 Paris from 9h CET to 20h30 CET and Saturday, 13 December 2025, Campus Condorcet | conference centre | Place du Front populaire, 93300 Aubervilliers from 8h30 CET to 18h30

In collaboration with: CERCEC, CNRS, EHESS, Eur鈥橭RBEM labs, ICM, INED, Max Weber Network Eastern Europe, Kritika, GDR est,听Sorbonne University, and The George and Irina Schaeffer Center on the Study of Genocide, Human Rights and Conflict Prevention.

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This two-day conference will examine the border regions of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union in times of war and postwar, building from several decades of 鈥渂orderlands鈥� scholarship听that focus on the tension between local diversity and fluidity, on the one hand, and state-driven campaigns for security, legibility, and homogeneity, on the other.

Keynote: Friday, 12 December 2025 at 17h30 with Gregory Afinogenov

Keynote address title: 鈥淥dessa as a Postwar Project: Emigration, Displacement, and Colonialism on the Margins听of Empire, 1792-1814.鈥�

Summary of keynote address:

Odessa (today's Odesa) was one of the most powerful economic engines of the nineteenth-century Russian Empire. This presentation shows how its crucial early decades were shaped by three parallel conflicts: the Russo-Turkish War of 1787-92, the Wars of the French Revolution, and the long Russo-Circassian War of 1763-1864. These wars, I argue, unleashed three processes of population mobility that together enabled Odessa's rapid rise to economic prosperity and cultural prominence: the emigration of conservatives from France during the Revolution, the displacement of borderland populations both from and to the region in the wake of the conquests of Crimea and Yedisan, and the sedentarization and genocide of Nogai and Circassian populations in the Ponto-Caspian Steppe. Under the rule of the 茅migr茅 Duc de Richelieu, these processes consolidated an intensely colonized and agriculturally productive hinterland whose outputs flowed through a city made commercially supreme by military conflict. By the time Richelieu left Odessa for France, his reign in Odessa had already become a sanitized myth suitable for appropriation by Russian, Soviet, and Ukrainian successors alike.

Please register for the keynote address below. The keynote will be open to the public with registration ONLY. Registration will close on December 9th听at 22h CET.