Along the Balkan Route: Refugees and Minorities in South Eastern Europe and the Middle East

/ Termine

Along the Balkan Route: Refugees and Minorities in South Eastern Europe and the Middle East

Veranstalter
Institute for Danube Swabian History and Regional Studies, Tuebingen; in cooperation with Institute for Eastern European History and Area Studies, University of Tuebingen (Carl Bethke), Department of Oriental and Islamic Studies, University of Tuebingen (Johann Buessow), Department of Political Science, University of Utah (Hakan Yavuz), Center for Islamic Studies, University of Frankfurt (Armina Omerika, Bekim Agai), Institute for History, Sarajevo (Husnija Kamberović), Department of Middle Eastern History, University of Haifa (Yuval Ben-Bassat)
Veranstaltungsort
University of Tuebingen, Große Aula
Ort
Tübingen
Land
Deutschland
Vom - Bis
20.10.2016 - 22.10.2016
Website
Von
Armina Omerika

In German public discussions since the autumn of 2015, the hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers who arrived to the country mainly from South Eastern Europe and the Middle East were perceived as a sudden reminder of the ongoing intertwinement between Central and South Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Evocative terms such as ‘refugees’ and ‘Balkan route’ quickly became the symbols of this development and ‘integration’ emerged as a key issue in the current debate on immigration and the so-called ‘refugee crisis’, stressing the ethno-religious and social backgrounds of the immigrants. Seen from a historical perspective, substantial parts of the discussions and arguments followed patterns about homogeneity and diversity similar to those developed in the multicultural societies of Central and South Eastern Europe and the Middle East during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This international conference seeks to historicize some core notions of the present debates on refugees and minorities. Through transnational and diachronic comparisons, it will try to shed light on the histories of multi-directional migration and integration processes between South Eastern Europe, Central Europe and the (post)Ottoman Middle East since the 19th Century. To this end, the five conference panels will compare cases of (forced) migration, integration, conflict management and minority politics along the so-called ‘Balkan route’, but they will also look at entangled histories, shared spaces, cultural transfer and mutual collective images.

No registration required. We are looking forward to a large attendance and lively discussions.

Programm

Thursday, 20 October

16.00
Welcome and keynote speech: Carl Bethke and Johann Büssow

16.45-19.15
Panel 1: Histories of migration and integration along the Balkan Route (Chair: Carl Bethke)

Bekim Agai: Crossing mental borders: Refugees and minorities and their challenges to national and regional histories
Mathias Beer: Flight and expulsion of Germans from South Eastern Europe. A facet of the Balkan Route at the end of World War II
Husnija Kamberović and Vera Katz: Bosnia: Immigrations and emigrations
Florian Bieber: Fleeing the Balkans: Yugoslav and Greek refugees in the Middle East, 1943-1946

Reception and dinner

Friday, 21 October

8.30 Coffee

9.00-11.30
Panel 2: Forced migration: Cases of flight and expulsion in comparison (Chair: Boris Nieswand)

Michael Schwartz: ‘Resettlements’ and forced migrations in Central Europe and the Balkans: Transfers of concepts and practices
Mehmet Arisan: Borderlands and violence during the Late Ottoman Period
M. Hakan Yavuz: Patterns of ethnic cleansing in the Late Ottoman Period (1821-1921)
Anisa Hasanhodžić and Rifet Rustemović: Memory work: Jewish refugees in Bosnia and Herzegovina

11.30-13.30 Lunch break

13.30-16.00
Panel 3: Encounter Studies: Transfer and entanglements (Chair: Johann Büssow)

Yuval Ben-Bassat: The Ottoman View on Jewish Immigration to the Empire since the 1880s
Constantin Iordachi: Encounters and Diversity in Times of Conflict: Life and experiences of Germans, Turks, Romanians, Bulgarians and others in Dobrudja
Thomas Schad: The Case of a Bosniak-Turkish Figuration between Migration (muhacirlik), Mutual (Be)longings, and Turkey's New Role in the Balkans
Armina Omerika: Knowledge Production on Islam in South Eastern Europe: Transfer and interaction during the 20th century

16.00-16.30 Coffee break

16.30-19.00
Panel 4: Conflict management and regulatory politics (Chair: Bekim Agai)

Sarah Büssow-Schmitz: ‘Conflict management’ in German consular records from Late Ottoman Palestine, 1868-1917
Tamara Scheer: The Habsburg Empire and Muslim refugees in South Eastern Europe (1878-1918)
Carl Bethke: The ‘Minority Question’ and the League of Nations

Dinner

Saturday, 21 October

9.00 Coffee

9.30-12.00
Panel 5: Collective images: Occidentalisms, Orientalisms, friendship (Chair: Armina Omerika)

Ruža Fotiadis: ‘Historical ties’, ‘traditional bonds’ and ‘common destinies’: The making of the Greek-Serbian friendship in the 1990s
Fruma Zachs: Occidentalism and the Woman Question as viewed by Nahda intellectuals, 1826-1912
Gaelle Fisher: Friendship, hostility or indifference? The relationship between Bukovina Germans and Bukovina Jews during the Cold War (1950-1980)
Maurus Reinkowski: The return of the Near East? The Arab World, Turkey and South Eastern Europe: Old and new interactions

12.00-13.30 Lunch break

13.30-16.00
Conclusion and final discussion

Jannis Panagiotidis: Migration and integration

Kontakt

Carl Bethke

Universität Tübingen, Osteuropäische Geschichte und Landeskunde
Mohlstraße 18, 72074 Tübingen

carl.bethke@uni-tuebingen.de