Pristupačnost
Advanced Research Seminar with Keith Harrington will take place on 28 October at 15:30 (Lecture Room 502). The title of the guest lecture is: "Minorities in Their Own State: Experiences of Moldovans in Transnistria and Georgians in Abkhazia and South Ossetia during the Collapse of the Soviet Union".
Abstract:
The collapse of the Soviet Union led to the emergence of several de facto states, entities that lack international recognition yet possess characteristics of statehood. Today, three remain: Transnistria, which seceded from Moldova in 1992, and South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which broke away from Georgia in the early 1990s. Although the circumstances that led to the creation of these de facto states differed, they shared an important common feature: prior to and during their wars of secession, each region was home to a substantial number of parent-state titulars, the dominant ethnic groups from the states they seceded from.
According to the 1989 Soviet census, Moldovans accounted for 40 per cent of Transnistria’s population, while Georgians constituted 45 percent of Abkhazia’s and 29 percent of South Ossetia’s. While existing scholarship has examined the experiences of these communities before and after wars of secession, how they responded to the emergence of separatist movements and how they navigated the subsequent wars remains underexplored.
This project fills this gap by examining how Moldovans in Transnistria, and Georgians in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, responded to separatist mobilisation and the wars that followed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It compares patterns of response both between regions and within them, demonstrating significant regional variation. The project outlines a theoretical model to explain these differences, arguing that resistance was strongest in areas where parent-state titulars formed a local majority, possessed a robust ethnic identity, and where local elites supported the parent state’s territorial integrity.
About the guest speaker:
Dr Keith Harrington is a Research Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at Dublin City University’s School of Law and Government. He received his PhD in History and Sociology from Maynooth University in 2023, and his dissertation on the origins of the Transnistrian War was awarded the Keith Hitchins Dissertation Prize by the Society of Romanian Studies. His research focuses on the rise of nationalism, the emergence of separatist movements, and the formation of de facto states during the collapse of the Soviet Union. His work has appeared in several journals, including Journal of Romanian Studies and Comparative Southeast European Studies.
