This "expert meeting" aims to deepen our understanding of individual armed actors—soldiers, conscripts, and volunteers—through their personal testimonies and life stories. It will address the unique challenges of studying these individuals, whose fragmented and subjective narratives often make it difficult to reconstruct comprehensive biographies.
War and conflict involve actors with intricate motivations and backgrounds, particularly those who have committed violence or participated in armed activities. This event will consider how researchers can analyze these complex biographies to understand motivations, influences, and moral conflicts, especially when dealing with perpetrators of wartime violence.

The event will begin with a presentation by Alyona Bidenko, researcher at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam, Germany, titled "Marching Offbeat: Insights from Interviews with Russian Deserters During the Full-Scale Invasion".

The Objectives are:

1. Addressing Gaps in Personal Data: Individual testimonies are often incomplete, with essential aspects of a person’s background—such as youth, family, and education—missing or obscured. This event will explore strategies for “rounding out” these biographies, helping researchers to assemble more cohesive life stories from scattered information.

2. Types of Sources: Researchers rely on diverse sources to reconstruct individual narratives. This session will discuss the use of letters, diaries, memoirs, oral history interviews, investigation reports, and trial records to create fuller and more accurate accounts of personal experiences in war, examining the strengths and limitations of each type.

3. Navigating Complex Biographies and Motivations: Many individuals present contrasting personas, such as being a violent actor at the front while appearing as a loving family member at home. This event will examine biases in interpreting these complex biographies, considering the duality of roles and motivations.

4. Challenges of Scattered and Limited Archives: Testimonies and records of individuals in mass armies are often limited, especially for regular soldiers or volunteers who may not have left formal records. The discussion will consider strategies to locate and analyze fragmented data from diverse archival sources.

5. Digital and Social Media: The meeting will also explore how social media influences the way individuals represent their experiences and how this affects research on armed actors. It will address issues of privacy, accessibility, and the subjective “staging” of self-image, especially in the context of both contemporary and historical testimonies.

Key Questions:
- How can researchers develop methods to “round out” biographies using fragmented information from diverse sources?
- How do different types of sources—from letters and diaries to social media posts, YouTube videos, and photographs—shape our understanding of personal narratives?
- What unique challenges emerge when analyzing personal narratives of regular versus volunteer soldiers?
- To what extent do social media and digital platforms introduce new dimensions to studying testimonies and individual experiences in war?

This event offers a platform for exchanging ideas, discussing methodologies, and addressing ethical considerations in the study of individuals' lives during warfare. Its goal is to deepen our understanding of the human experience within the context of war and conflict.
Bridging historical perspectives from WWI, the Spanish Civil War, WWII, the Vietnam War, and the Balkan Wars, the event also explores how digital technologies—such as social media posts and videos—enable new insights into accounts and testimonies from contemporary conflicts.