Forced migration and refugee studies in the East. Is there a need for acknowledging the Global East as yet another epistemic concept? (in English)

Thinking about the world in a simple binary of the Global North and the Global South epistemologically disregards the experiences of the post-Soviet countries and generally the regions in the Global East (Müller 2020). Equally, some post-colonial thinking tends to struggle with the subaltern imperial position of Russia and other countries towards the West who are colonial powers in the region but subaltern to the North (Morozov 2013) or the dual subaltern position of countries such as Ukraine or Georgia vis a vis the North and Russia (Chernetsky 2003) or of subaltern powers such as Russia which may be inferior to the West but still superior to other countries in their vicinity. The epistemic concept of the Global East does thus not imply any homogeneity but rather facilitates studying its great diversity as well as the regional power relations of the coloniser and the colonised. However, the East “is outside the circuits and conduits of Western knowledge architecture” (Müller 2020). As a consequence, much migration, forced migration and refugee research too has been focussing on the Global South and power relations vis a vis the North; meanwhile, matters in the East have been understudied and what there is, is often policy driven and determined by the interests of international organisations favouring some and ignoring other issues. In the North little attention has been raised by displacement in Central Asia, post-colonial attitudes towards Central Asian Migrants in Russia (Kuznetsova and Round 2019), conflict in Tajikistan, refugees in Kazakhstan, Afghans in Uzbekistan, IDPs in Ukraine since 2014, the arrival of Belarusian and Russian dissidents in Ukraine prior 2022, not to forget the wars in Chechnya, Georgia and Moldova, and displacement due to the 2021 war between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Only the journeys of refugees through Belarus to the EU from 2021, just as of transit migrants through Ukraine in the 2000s, began to change this, but only because it affected the EU. But it is the Russian invasion of Ukraine that revealed how little is known about these countries and urgently puts the region back on the map of research needs.

The purpose of this workshop is thus threefold: (a) to sketch the state-of-the-art of forced migration research on the countries east of the EU, (b) to discuss the utility of the concept of the Global East not so much as a region but as an “epistemic concept” (Müller 2020) and (c) to consider how to facilitate and expand research collaboration and research.

We will have a hybrid two-day international workshop on 17-18 October 2022 at IMIS, Osnabrück, Germany.

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