The workshop aims to bring together a group of scholars to reflect and exchange their works and approaches on the topic of popular responses to nationalizing and state-building projects with a special focus on two historical regions – Bessarabia and Transnistria –, which at different times during the 20th century belonged to different polities (Russian Empire, Romania, USSR). The two regions currently constitute the Republic of Moldova. In 1991, an unrecognized Dniester Moldovan Republic has been formed in Transnistria. Moldova represents a fertile ground for comparative and longitudinal case studies which would examine the responses of the population to the successive and/or concomitant strategies and interventions of the states aiming to shape distinct national communities. As in the case of other Eastern European nation-states, few in-depth analyses of popular responses to various nation-building projects were undertaken in Moldova. Top-down studies, some of them remarkable due to the effort and complexity of the analysis, are still dominant. This workshop aims to compensate for this imbalance by approaching the “Moldovan case” from a “bottom-up” perspective, based on the perceptions, discourses and practices of “ordinary” people as a response to the nation- and state-building projects, implemented simultaneously and successively by the political and intellectual elites and state structures. The internal comparison will reconnect Bessarabia and Transnistria with the wider geographical and political areas within which the two regions have existed over the past two centuries. Taking into account the successive, and often conflicting, regimes established in Bessarabia and Transnistria will highlight social and political differences, especially in terms of national identification options of the local population, perpetuated over time between the two regions which today constitute the Republic of Moldova.

The workshop’s outcomes will be of interest both for the scholarly community and for the civil society interested in Moldova and the CEE region and will result in the publication of a collective volume or a special issue in a peer-reviewed academic journal.

Expected participants: Regional and international scholars in history and social sciences, specializing in Moldova and the CEE region.