Past Events

Series: Lecture

Die Nobelpreisträgerin Olga Tokarczuk war in Wien. Mit Martin Pollack hat sie über die Bedeutung von Mythen und Parabeln gesprochen sowie über die Fähigkeit der Literatur, eine andere Dimension der Welt zu erschließen. Begleitet wurde das Gespräch von einer szenischen Lesung vorgetragen von Steffi Kautz und Markus Meyer, eingerichtet von Anna Badora.

Series: Seminars and Colloquia

The European Union stands at a critical juncture in terms of the Green agenda. In a complex geopolitical environment it aims among other to externalise its Green Deal - the most advanced political and technical proposal to chart a path torward a regional climate transition. Key in this overall geopolitical environment is the question: how far is China ready to go forward on its recently stated commitment to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2060 (President Xi Jinping’s statement at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2020). How can the EU's Green Agenda Go Global? How to best manage and mitigate the impact of China’s new role as a competitor also on the green transition? What does the European Union need to do to project its vision and values on these issues?

Series: Seminars and Colloquia

When the U.S. government announced its withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Afghan government folded, the president abandonend his people and the army surrendered to the Taliban. Many people, including the U.S. president looked askance at this development. Banerjee argues that such a development was hardly surprising. When the U.S. attacked Afghanistan, it was to create a client state that would protect U.S. interests, not those of Afghanistan or its neighbours. In fact, the nascent process of nation-building was halted. The US wanted to impose its values and most Afghans who went along with it did so out of self-interest. At best, the U.S. created a “creamy layer of collaborators” that in no way had deep rooted impact. When the U.S. left, there was nothing to hold the amorphous group together and they could not think of themselves as one nation. Many have fled, the others have surrendered to the Taliban, portraying clearly that it was never their war. Rather, it was another episode of the great game.

Nergis Canefe discussed the history of the Afghan refugee crisis that predates the withdrawal of the U.S. troops and the regional containment and redistribution of the dispossessed Afghan populations.

Series: Conferences and Workshops

"Sites of Statelessness: Laws, Cities, Seas" was a workshop on an edited volume (in the making) with the same title. It was being co-hosted with the Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group (MCRG) as part of the Europe-Asia Research Platform on Forced Migration.

The workshop brought together scholars to address the distinctive dynamics of the different sites of the production of statelessness. Different sites evoke different histories and repertoires. They also bring different possibilities of alignment of the problematic, which the volume aims to address. Each contributor to the volume was paired with a discussant, workshop participants joined both physically and online.

Series: Seminars and Colloquia

The second Europe’s Futures Fellows Colloquium explored the impact of growing ultraconservatism and pro-natalist policies in Central Europe on women's reproductive rights. Furthermore, it scoped different perceptions of what strategic action by the European Union should or should not encompass and mapped different national understandings of EU’s actions in North Macedonia, Serbia and Albania in order to find out how these aspiring members can best position themselves vis-à-vis the EU.

Series: Panels and Discussions

Im Sommer und Herbst 2020 erlebte Belarus die größten Massenproteste seiner Geschichte. Sie richteten sich gegen die manipulierten Präsidentschaftswahlen und das autokratische Regime von Aljaksandr Lukaschenka, der das Land seit 1994 regiert. Die Proteste erzeugten eine Aufbruchstimmung im ganzen Land und die Hoffnung auf politischen Wandel. Von der EU wird Lukaschenka seit den Wahlen nicht mehr als rechtmäßiger Staatspräsident anerkannt.

Series: Seminars and Colloquia

The first Europe’s Futures Fellows Colloquium investigated the nexus of issues around the European Union’s balancing act between a peace project it has been and a “strategically autonomous” superpower it seemingly wants to become.

Series: Other

The IWM is proud to host the second Emma Goldman Awards ceremony, awarded since 2020 by the FLAX Foundation. These awards are given to talented and engaged scholars working on feminist and inequality issues in Europe, to support their research and development.

After a welcome by Ivan Vejvoda, acting rector of the IWM, the programme starts with two speeches. Agata Lisiak, former junior Fellow at the IWM and professor at Bard College Berlin, will talk on “Recalcitrant: Emma Goldman, Rosa Luxemburg, and the politics of waywardness”.
She is followed by a keynote Speech by professor Akwugo Emejulu, one of the inaugural Emma Goldman awardees, on “The Lonely Activist”.
The award ceremony is twofold, starting with presenting the seven 2020 Emma Goldman Snowball awardees, who had no earlier chance for a celebration due to COVID restrictions, and the seven new 2021 Emma Goldman awardees.

Series: Seminars and Colloquia

Polish politics of memory has undergone significant change in the past several years, becoming more entrenched and preoccupied with projecting an image of Poland as the victim of successive historical catastrophes. At the same time, Polish politics relies increasingly more often on visions of happy “futures past” that are deeply rooted in Polish culture and builds social resentment by accusing subsequent social groups of squandering away chances for development. Therefore, it seems necessary to ask what are these versions of Polish alternate history embedded in Polish culture and in what way do they influence contemporary politics of memory?

Series: Panels and Discussions

Immediately following the hijacking of the Ryanair flight and abduction of Roman Protasevich and Sofia Sapega on 23 May, IWM hosted a discussion posing the question of что делать? (What is to be done?) from the perspective of European Union states: The Hijack. Europe, Belarus, and the Abduction of Roman Protasevich.
The following two discussions (the first in German, the second in English) shifted the focus from the European Union to the former Soviet space in an attempt to better understand what is happening inside Belarus itself. In what way is the currently showcased performative-confession-extracted-through-torture reminiscent of Stalinist times, and in what way is there something post-modern about it? What is the relationship between insecurities about masculinity and state terror? How does a “revolution with a woman’s face” open new possibilities for politics, for rebellion against tyranny?