Decentering Empires: Local Communities and Cross-Cultural Interaction in the Black Sea Region (17th – Early 20th Centuries)

Workshop | Prague | 27-28 August 2026

Organized by the BridgeBSR Working Group – Nataliya Sureva, Julia Malitska, Svitlana Kaiuk, Valdislav Hrybovs’kyi and Volodymir Poltorak

The Black Sea region has historically served as a vibrant crossroads where empires, communities, and mobile groups have engaged in the negotiation of power, identity, and everyday coexistence.

BridgeBSR views the region not as a peripheral “borderland” between competing imperial powers, but as a dynamic space of cross-cultural exchange, shaped by local agency, pragmatic adaptations, and transboundary networks.

Building on New Imperial History and related approaches, the workshop shifts attention from state-centered narratives to the everyday practices of local actors—migrants, intermediaries, traders, religious minorities, frontier communities, and local elites—who actively influenced governance, economic cooperation, and cultural exchange. We are particularly interested in “middle ground” situations where rules and hierarchies were negotiated, leading to the emergence of hybrid forms of social order.

The MWNO is present at the workshop with its deputy director and head of the MWNO Tbilisi office, Dr. Moritz Florin; the editor of the DECENTERED ARCHIVE blog, Maike Lehmann; and a current fellow at the MWNO Tbilisi office, Azat Bilalutdinov.

The workshop is supported by the MWNO, The Canadian Institute for Ukrainian Studies, the University of St.Gallen and the Oriental Institute of the Czech Academy of Science.

Your cand find the workshop program here.

The CfP for the workshop can be consulted here.

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