Conquest or Liberation?: Occupation in World War I Eastern Europe and Russia

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

Occupation was a central experience of the First World War; nearly 500,000 km2 inhabited by over 20 million people in Eastern Europe and Russia were occupied during the conflict. This roundtable brings together scholars who work on different occupations in the multinational borderlands of the region’s four empires – German and Habsburg occupations of Polish and Ukrainian lands, Russian occupations in Galicia and Anatolia, and Habsburg and Bulgarian occupations in Serbia and Macedonia. Topics to be discussed include: impact of invasion, destruction and mass flight on the occupied area’s demographics and human geography; decision-making structures and civilian-military relations of occupation regimes; tactics for establishing legitimacy, security and order; short- and long-term aims of occupation regimes; economic policy (food management, forced labor, resource exploitation); perpetration and experience of extreme violence and armed resistance; daily lived experience of occupied civilians. Panelists will identify general trends and local particularities and examine how the occupations evolved in response to local and international conditions and the changing circumstances of war. Further, occupation will be examined as a settling of accounts of prewar conflicts as well as a struggle over postwar geopolitical control; particularly, how occupation shaped various national and geo-political “questions.” This comparative and transnational analysis allows for the critical exploration of overarching frameworks – geographical, temporal, conceptual, and legal – as well as a consideration of the legacies of occupation in the long durée of the history of the region. Roundtable participants are contributors to a forthcoming volume on occupied Europe in the First World War.

Sub Unit

• History: 1900-1945

Chair

• Jovana Lazic, Stanford U

Roundtable Members

• Halit Dundar Akarca, Nazarbayev U (Kazakhstan)

• Oksana Dudko, U of Toronto (Canada)

• Peter Isaac Holquist, U of Pennsylvania

• Jesse Kauffman, Eastern Michigan U

• Jovana Lazic, Stanford U