• Soviet & Post-Soviet Wars: An Oral History Project

    http://journals.openedition.org/pipss/5856

    For some years now, the Journal of Power Institutions in Post-Soviet Societies has introduced in its issues the publication of interviews with veterans, war reporters, or other witnesses of the Soviet and post-Soviet wars. Indeed, it seemed important to us to gather the testimony of witnesses who are still alive in order to shed light on past or current conflicts. Today, PIPSS wishes to intensify the practice of collecting oral testimonies which was initiated in 2011. To mark its 15th anniversary, Pipss is launching an oral history project on Soviet and post-Soviet wars which aims to collect and make available interviews of participants in armed conflicts conducted by researchers during their fieldwork, regardless of the focus of their research.

    The Project’s Objectives

    This project aims to enhance the value of the corpus collected by researchers in order to open up and create exchanges between disciplines and approaches. These past years, researchers from all disciplines (humanities and social sciences) have increasingly produced and still continue to produce oral sources that are used only to a limited extent in the context of articles. These interviews cover a wide range of themes, focuses and angles. Different approaches are used: open, semi-open or closed questionnaire, with or without interview grids, life course etc. War is sometimes dealt with centrally; sometimes conflict is only approached as a stage in a life course, in a trajectory. Whatever their approaches, they are all of great value to understand wars.

    #histoire #histoire_orale #urrs #ex-urss #études_post-soviétiques

  • Uncertain Borders in the Post-Soviet Space
    http://journals.openedition.org/pipss/4405

    numéro époustouflant sur les frontières et leur évolution dans l’espace post-soviétique. Juste le problème, ça manque de cartes.

    Ukraine’s border is sacred and untouchable," reads a sign in a border garrison in the Chernivtsy region of western Ukraine. Sacred and untouchable? The news coming out of Ukraine seems to indicate the opposite. Though protected by a specific international agreement1, the Ukrainian border was brutally redrawn with the annexation of Crimea by Russia in March 2014. Immediately after, the armed conflict that erupted in Donbass deprived Kyiv of its control on almost four hundred kilometres of borders in eastern Ukraine.

    The Ukrainian situation is not unique in the region. Post-Soviet borders offer a particularly rich and complex picture, rooted in Russian and Austro-Hungarian imperial history, as well as in the consequences of the two world Wars and of Soviet Union’s foreign policy. With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, local wars on the periphery led to the formation of unrecognized states and disputed borders. More recently, with the EU’s eastward enlargement, these problematic boundaries have become the external borders of the European Union.

    #frontières #urss #ex-urss #espace_post-soviétique