Text Book Project “Eastern Europe-Global Perspectives”

As one of the main EEGA activities in the first funding phase, an editorial board has started working on the text book project »Eastern Europe-Global Perspectives« in November 2019. Combining expertise from all five EEGA research areas, the volume comprises findings and outcomes from more than three years of fruitful EEGA research activities. It stresses and demonstrates the importance of transregional perspectives on Eastern Europe, with regards to its global and regional entanglements and (self-)positioning in current and historical globalisation processes.

The textbook aims to provide MA and PhD students, in study programmes at EEGA’s partner institutions in Halle, Jena and Leipzig, as well as abroad, with an authoritative and simply written learning tool. Each chapter and case study can be used individually or as an overall guide for structure and content in seminars, lectures and other academic settings. Adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, the textbook comprises varied accounts of Eastern Europe’s interaction with and influence on the global sphere, as well as of reverse processes, with a focus on the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. The book’s didactic approach puts individual actors at the centre of the analysis, as they preconfigure, articulate, delimit, position and transcend what has become a globally connected Eastern Europe.

The chapters cover a variety of disciplines, with topics ranging from geopolitical visions of Eastern Europe and their impact on international relations over natural resources, environmental policies and climate change, as well as transnational and global aspects of Eastern European music history to Eastern European legal systems and their integration in international legal frameworks. Each chapter is supported by maps and illustrations as part of a visual language that guides readers through Eastern Europe and its global entanglements.

The editorial board consists of Dr. Katja Castryck-Naumann and Dr. Gilad Ben-Nun. Dr. Castryck-Naumann, specialist for transregional and transnational entanglements in Eastern Europe, among others, has been researcher at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO) since 2008. Dr. Ben-Nun, former EEGA research fellow and lecturer for Global and Migration Studies at the Global and European Studies Institute (GESI) at Leipzig University, is a historian of international law and an expert on the history of refugee law and forced migration.

The textbook is to be published in 2024.