Events / Program: Guests of the Institute

	Title	Date	Type Sort descending	Speakers	Register
	The Contamination of History. World War II and How Everything Started to Make Sense	Tue, 19.03.2024	Lecture	Holly Case Ivan Vejvoda		The Contamination of History. World War II and How Everything Started to Make Sense Tue, 19.03.2024 Speakers: Holly Case Ivan Vejvoda Series: Lecture In this Monthly Lecture, Holly Case elaborated on the ideas of those who made super sense out of the events of World War II in particular, and how their ideas have come to inform the contemporary perception that the world is irredeemably contaminated. Read more
The Contamination of History. World War II and How Everything Started to Make Sense Tue, 19.03.2024 Speakers: Holly Case Ivan Vejvoda Series: Lecture In this Monthly Lecture, Holly Case elaborated on the ideas of those who made super sense out of the events of World War II in particular, and how their ideas have come to inform the contemporary perception that the world is irredeemably contaminated. Read more
	History of the Shoah and Politics of History in Post-Communist Lithuania	Tue, 08.06.2021	Lecture	Christoph Dieckmann Marci Shore Viktoras Bachmetjevas		History of the Shoah and Politics of History in Post-Communist Lithuania Tue, 08.06.2021 Speakers: Christoph Dieckmann Marci Shore Viktoras Bachmetjevas Series: Lecture History has become a deeply contentious topic in the post-communist space, particularly with regard to World War II, Communism, and Nationalism. Memories are not static, and our increasing historical knowledge is embedded within a dynamic contemporary context. This means that both history and the politics of history are developing and changing. Christoph Dieckmann, one of the leading historians of the German occupation in Lithuania, shared his experiences and impressions of the politics of history in Eastern Europe from the perspective of a German historian. Read more
History of the Shoah and Politics of History in Post-Communist Lithuania Tue, 08.06.2021 Speakers: Christoph Dieckmann Marci Shore Viktoras Bachmetjevas Series: Lecture History has become a deeply contentious topic in the post-communist space, particularly with regard to World War II, Communism, and Nationalism. Memories are not static, and our increasing historical knowledge is embedded within a dynamic contemporary context. This means that both history and the politics of history are developing and changing. Christoph Dieckmann, one of the leading historians of the German occupation in Lithuania, shared his experiences and impressions of the politics of history in Eastern Europe from the perspective of a German historian. Read more
	Balaton. Novellen	Mon, 03.05.2021	Lecture	Ludger Hagedorn Noémi Kiss	Facebook-Stream	Balaton. Novellen Mon, 03.05.2021 Speakers: Ludger Hagedorn Noémi Kiss Series: Lecture Ungarn in den 1980er-Jahren: Der Balaton, oder Plattensee, ist ein beliebtes Urlaubsziel. Hier liegen Menschen von beiden Seiten des „Eisernen Vorhangs“ einträchtig nebeneinander am Strand, durch den Mauerbau getrennte Familien machen gemeinsam Ferien. Read more
Balaton. Novellen Mon, 03.05.2021 Speakers: Ludger Hagedorn Noémi Kiss Series: Lecture Ungarn in den 1980er-Jahren: Der Balaton, oder Plattensee, ist ein beliebtes Urlaubsziel. Hier liegen Menschen von beiden Seiten des „Eisernen Vorhangs“ einträchtig nebeneinander am Strand, durch den Mauerbau getrennte Familien machen gemeinsam Ferien. Read more
	Democracy - A Fragile Way of Life	Tue, 15.06.2021	Lecture	Shalini Randeria Till van Rahden		Democracy - A Fragile Way of Life Tue, 15.06.2021 Speakers: Shalini Randeria Till van Rahden Series: Lecture After the Cold War ended, liberal democracy was taken for granted. Now it is in crisis: citizens distrust parliamentary politics, the people’s parties are losing members and votes, and social media are crowding out public debates. Challenging the sense of despair that informs recent studies on how democracy dies, Till van Rahden argued that it might prove more useful to explore what keeps it alive. A fruitful point of departure is the insight that democracy is not only a matter of elections and political parties, constitutions and parliaments, but is grounded in democratic experiences. The attention is less on how democratic government works, but on what equality, freedom, and justice feel like. A focus on democratic forms and aesthetics allows us to revisit the cultural and social foundations of democracy. No matter how stable a democracy may seem, it will wither and perish without ways of life that allow for and encourage democratic experiences. Read more
Democracy - A Fragile Way of Life Tue, 15.06.2021 Speakers: Shalini Randeria Till van Rahden Series: Lecture After the Cold War ended, liberal democracy was taken for granted. Now it is in crisis: citizens distrust parliamentary politics, the people’s parties are losing members and votes, and social media are crowding out public debates. Challenging the sense of despair that informs recent studies on how democracy dies, Till van Rahden argued that it might prove more useful to explore what keeps it alive. A fruitful point of departure is the insight that democracy is not only a matter of elections and political parties, constitutions and parliaments, but is grounded in democratic experiences. The attention is less on how democratic government works, but on what equality, freedom, and justice feel like. A focus on democratic forms and aesthetics allows us to revisit the cultural and social foundations of democracy. No matter how stable a democracy may seem, it will wither and perish without ways of life that allow for and encourage democratic experiences. Read more
	War, Work and Want: How OPEC Caused Mass Migration and Revolution	Tue, 11.04.2023	Lecture	Ivan Vejvoda Randall Hansen		War, Work and Want: How OPEC Caused Mass Migration and Revolution Tue, 11.04.2023 Speakers: Ivan Vejvoda Randall Hansen Series: Lecture In the early 1970s, there was every reason to believe that large-scale immigration to Europe and America would end. In fact, global migration has tripled. This lecture asked why. Read more

	The Limits of Migration Control	Tue, 22.03.2022	Lecture	Dariusz Stola Ivan Vejvoda Ranabir Samaddar		The Limits of Migration Control Tue, 22.03.2022 Speakers: Dariusz Stola Ivan Vejvoda Ranabir Samaddar Series: Lecture Thanks to a historically unprecedented system of police control, transnational mobility from European communist states is probably the best documented social phenomenon of its kind and a unique experiment in the limits of the state control of mobility. This lecture presented some of the conclusions of Stola’s research project on migrations from communist Poland. These migrations underwent a marked evolution, from the movement of millions of people in the 1940s; to almost nil under the non-exit policy of the early 1950s; to the reemergence and gradual expansion of transnational mobility, especially within the Soviet bloc, between 1956 and 1980; to mass population flows in the late 1980s. Each trip outside the bloc, and indeed each trip abroad for most of the duration of communist rule, required applying for a permit from the Security Service. This procedure resulted in an archival collection of passport files that fills some 60 kilometers of shelf space. Despite the constraints, more than two million people eventually left Poland for good, and temporary movements occurred on a mass scale, pioneering forms of mobility that continued well after 1989. This lecture shed light on the key factors and currents of migration in communist Poland, as well as the evolution of the migration regime, from early imitation of the Soviet model to its eventual implosion. Read more
The Limits of Migration Control Tue, 22.03.2022 Speakers: Dariusz Stola Ivan Vejvoda Ranabir Samaddar Series: Lecture Thanks to a historically unprecedented system of police control, transnational mobility from European communist states is probably the best documented social phenomenon of its kind and a unique experiment in the limits of the state control of mobility. This lecture presented some of the conclusions of Stola’s research project on migrations from communist Poland. These migrations underwent a marked evolution, from the movement of millions of people in the 1940s; to almost nil under the non-exit policy of the early 1950s; to the reemergence and gradual expansion of transnational mobility, especially within the Soviet bloc, between 1956 and 1980; to mass population flows in the late 1980s. Each trip outside the bloc, and indeed each trip abroad for most of the duration of communist rule, required applying for a permit from the Security Service. This procedure resulted in an archival collection of passport files that fills some 60 kilometers of shelf space. Despite the constraints, more than two million people eventually left Poland for good, and temporary movements occurred on a mass scale, pioneering forms of mobility that continued well after 1989. This lecture shed light on the key factors and currents of migration in communist Poland, as well as the evolution of the migration regime, from early imitation of the Soviet model to its eventual implosion. Read more
	Beyond the Leader: Looking at Grassroots Reasons for the Rise of Illiberalism	Tue, 14.05.2024	Lecture	Ludger Hagedorn Marlene Laruelle	I want to attend	Beyond the Leader: Looking at Grassroots Reasons for the Rise of Illiberalism Tue, 14.05.2024 Speakers: Ludger Hagedorn Marlene Laruelle Series: Lecture As Europe and the United States prepare themselves to see a rise of far-right and illiberal parties gaining a large share of the votes at the June and November 2024 elections, Marlene Laruelle explores the grassroots reasons for this rise of illiberalism. Read more
Beyond the Leader: Looking at Grassroots Reasons for the Rise of Illiberalism Tue, 14.05.2024 Speakers: Ludger Hagedorn Marlene Laruelle Series: Lecture As Europe and the United States prepare themselves to see a rise of far-right and illiberal parties gaining a large share of the votes at the June and November 2024 elections, Marlene Laruelle explores the grassroots reasons for this rise of illiberalism. Read more
	The Future of Work: Is Artificial Intelligence a New Road to Serfdom?	Tue, 15.03.2022	Lecture	Robert Skidelsky		The Future of Work: Is Artificial Intelligence a New Road to Serfdom? Tue, 15.03.2022 Speakers: Robert Skidelsky Series: Lecture In contemporary discussions about the future of artificial intelligence we often lose our heads. While economists offer bleak predictions of mass job losses and a deepening of already widespread precarity, Silicon Valley utopians insist that new technologies are bringing us ever closer together and will one day deliver us from work, disease and poverty. But when human life is reduced to a set of rational processes waiting to be optimized, we risk losing sight of the irreducible quality of human experience. The talk shed new light on the dream of machinery and the entailed dichotomy of liberation versus control. With his characteristic attention to the subtleties of the human condition, Robert Skidelsky offered a challenging account of what it means to pursue the good life in the age of the machines. Read more
The Future of Work: Is Artificial Intelligence a New Road to Serfdom? Tue, 15.03.2022 Speakers: Robert Skidelsky Series: Lecture In contemporary discussions about the future of artificial intelligence we often lose our heads. While economists offer bleak predictions of mass job losses and a deepening of already widespread precarity, Silicon Valley utopians insist that new technologies are bringing us ever closer together and will one day deliver us from work, disease and poverty. But when human life is reduced to a set of rational processes waiting to be optimized, we risk losing sight of the irreducible quality of human experience. The talk shed new light on the dream of machinery and the entailed dichotomy of liberation versus control. With his characteristic attention to the subtleties of the human condition, Robert Skidelsky offered a challenging account of what it means to pursue the good life in the age of the machines. Read more
	Alien Logic	Tue, 11.05.2021	Lecture	Ayşe Çağlar Martin Burckhardt Timothy Snyder		Alien Logic Tue, 11.05.2021 Speakers: Ayşe Çağlar Martin Burckhardt Timothy Snyder Series: Lecture Bronislaw Malinowski has shown with his ethnological studies that a supposedly primitive society can be of astonishing complexity, as well as why the structure of this order remains obscure to its members. Obviously, modern societies also suffer from system blindness – why else is digitization said to have chiliastic, diabolic, magical powers? In a continuation to his cultural-theoretical investigations on the genealogy and philosophy of the machine, Martin Burckhardt explores the question of how the self-enchantment of rationality can occur, and to what extent the operating system of the attention economy can be read as an outsourced unconscious. This, in turn, leads back to the point of departure: what perspective must a contemporary social anthropologist take in order to read the present? Read more
Alien Logic Tue, 11.05.2021 Speakers: Ayşe Çağlar Martin Burckhardt Timothy Snyder Series: Lecture Bronislaw Malinowski has shown with his ethnological studies that a supposedly primitive society can be of astonishing complexity, as well as why the structure of this order remains obscure to its members. Obviously, modern societies also suffer from system blindness – why else is digitization said to have chiliastic, diabolic, magical powers? In a continuation to his cultural-theoretical investigations on the genealogy and philosophy of the machine, Martin Burckhardt explores the question of how the self-enchantment of rationality can occur, and to what extent the operating system of the attention economy can be read as an outsourced unconscious. This, in turn, leads back to the point of departure: what perspective must a contemporary social anthropologist take in order to read the present? Read more
	The Death and Rebirth of Democratic Internationalism: Controversies and Possibilities	Mon, 22.11.2021	Lecture	Claus Offe Ludger Hagedorn Micheline Ishay		The Death and Rebirth of Democratic Internationalism: Controversies and Possibilities Mon, 22.11.2021 Speakers: Claus Offe Ludger Hagedorn Micheline Ishay Series: Lecture The current nationalist wave has dampened hopes of managing an array of global challenges: economic, social, environmental, and public health emergencies, along with planning for the long-term impacts of technological innovations in fields like artificial intelligence and bioengineering. This lecture addressed how a new internationalism could reinvigorate policies promoting global governance based on universal human rights. It addressed three questions: what can we learn from past internationalist movements toward a liberal global order? How did the neoliberal order, established after the Cold War, lead to today’s chronic crises? What are possibilities for a future and robust internationalism encompassing three levels: civil society, the state, and global governance? Read more
The Death and Rebirth of Democratic Internationalism: Controversies and Possibilities Mon, 22.11.2021 Speakers: Claus Offe Ludger Hagedorn Micheline Ishay Series: Lecture The current nationalist wave has dampened hopes of managing an array of global challenges: economic, social, environmental, and public health emergencies, along with planning for the long-term impacts of technological innovations in fields like artificial intelligence and bioengineering. This lecture addressed how a new internationalism could reinvigorate policies promoting global governance based on universal human rights. It addressed three questions: what can we learn from past internationalist movements toward a liberal global order? How did the neoliberal order, established after the Cold War, lead to today’s chronic crises? What are possibilities for a future and robust internationalism encompassing three levels: civil society, the state, and global governance? Read more