MEMPOP at the conference “Experiencing the Borders: The Long 1940s and Their Legacies in (Eastern) Europe” in Lviv

From 16 to 18 September 2026, the Center for Urban History in Lviv hosted the international conference Experiencing the Borders: The Long 1940s and Their Legacies in (Eastern) Europe. The conference looked at how borders were drawn, crossed, enforced and lived with during the period of annexation, war, occupation and postwar settlement that ran from 1938 into the mid-1950s. It also asked how the border system set up then has been reworked since 1991, including through Russia’s war against Ukraine. Across eight panels, speakers discussed forced migration and property redistribution, minorities, welfare in new borderlands, and how borders are remembered and re-narrated.

MEMPOP’s post-doctoral researcher Diána Vonnák spoke at the opening round table, Experiencing the Borders: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, alongside Gruia Bădescu, Catherine Gousseff and Anna Wylegała, moderated by Masha Cerovic. Drawing on her fieldwork in Ukraine, she discussed how a border change keeps producing effects for decades, and how since 2014 such effects have reshaped cities, to some extent regardless of their distance from the frontline. She also presented MEMPOP’s question of how histories of deportation and displacement in the former Habsburg borderlands are taken up by populist politics, and how family archives and local commemoration take part in this from below.

The conference was organised by the Center for Urban History, CERCEC-EHESS (Paris), the Institute of International Studies at Charles University (Prague), and the Research Centre Ukraine / Max Weber Foundation (Lviv). It was part of the EURETES research alliance “War and Society: Central and Eastern Europe in the 20th–21st Centuries”. The Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, through MEMPOP, was a partner of the event. The program also included a keynote lecture by Sabine Dullin on Soviet bordering in the 1940s and a closing round table on borders today, with Joanna Konieczna-Sałamatin, Marek Radziwon, Hannelore Valier and Tetyana Zhurzhenko, moderated by Natalie Nougayrède.

More about the conference: lvivcenter.org