Decolonizing Eastern Europe

Shifting the focus of decolonial discourse from West to East, this panel looks at Eastern Europe’s pitfalls in the post-Soviet/socialist context. The panelists will discuss the Russian Empire and the USSR with regard to Ukraine and non-Russian communities still living within the Russian Federation, and how the Russian-centric view of Eastern Europe contributed to an underestimation of the destructive potential of Russian imperialism. Different meanings, similarities, and intertwinings of decolonization processes in the Ukrainian, Baltic, and Georgian contexts will be brought into focus, as well as the ways in which colonial violence affects the bodies of those under attack, and therefore, why decolonial work is embodied and experienced within bodies. In English