CFA: Borders, Sovereignties, and Environments in Eastern Europe (16th–20th Centuries)

 CALL FOR PAPERS • "Borders, Sovereignties, and Environments in Eastern Europe (16th–20th Centuries)” • Titles and abstracts submission deadline: June 25, 2026

Call for papers for a special issue of Cahiers d’histoire russe, est-européenne, caucasienne et centrasiatique to be released in 2028

Coeditor: Jawad DAHEUR (CNRS-EHESS, CERCEC)

Long conceptualised within the stable framework of nation-states, interactions between societies and their environments take on a renewed significance when examined in spaces marked by unstable territorial frameworks,  multiple authorities and changing political regimes. Eastern Europe—understood here in a broad yet concrete sense, stretching from the eastern Baltic region and Polish periphery to the Black Sea, and including  present-day Baltic states, Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova—offers a particularly rich field of study in this respect. Over the long term, it has been characterised by highly mobile borders, overlapping and competing claims to sovereignty, and diverse forms of governing territories and populations.

Since the sixteenth century, this region has been shaped by the interaction of political formations, each with its own distinct logic. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, an elective and composite monarchy, coexisted with the expansion of the Grand Duchy of Moscow, which eventually became an empire, while the northern shores of the Black Sea remained under Ottoman influence through flexible provincial structure and vassal entities such as the Crimean Khanate. These configurations were further complicated by the integration of certain territories into more western political entities, such as the Habsburg Monarchy in Galicia from the late eighteenth century, or the longstanding German presence on the Baltic shores.

These dynamics gave rise to differentiated and often competing forms of governance. Borders functioned as multifaceted arrangements—military, fiscal, legal and social—that structured access to resources, regulated mobility and created territorial hierarchies. The borderlands of the Pontic steppe, shaped by Crimean Tatar incursions and Cossack mobility, exemplify this enduring porosity, while other areas were subject to attempts at stricter territorial control through military or administrative means. River basins—the Dnieper, Dniester, Dvina and Neman—structured spaces of circulation that extended beyond political boundaries. External borders were complemented by numerous internal ones: differentiated legal statuses, specific fiscal regimes, internal customs boundaries and systems of mobility control. The Pale of Settlement imposed on the Jewish population of the Russian Empire from the late eighteenth century onwards, the privileges granted to Cossack communities, and special legal regimes applied to colonists in the southern steppes all illustrate a complex spatialisation of statuses and mobility.

Such configurations make Eastern Europe a particularly fertile ground for a mixed  approach drawing at once on the history of sovereignties and on environmental history. They invite us to move beyond national frameworks by highlighting the mismatch between political borders and ecological, social and cultural dynamics. Environments—forests, wetlands, agricultural land and steppe regions—developed according to their varied biophysical logic cutting across institutional discontinuities. At the same time, successive shifts in sovereignty brought about sometimes rapid transformations in legal frameworks, property modes and modes of resource exploitation. The partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the late eighteenth century, Russian expansion towards the Black Sea, and the political and territorial changes  of the twentieth century all exemplify these processes. The key issue, therefore, is not simply to measure the impact of political power on environment, but to analyse the gaps, frictions and adjustments between state projects and ecological dynamics.

The history of this region can be understood as a series of reconfigurations in which relationships between territory, resources and authority are constantly reshaped. The nineteenth century saw an intensification of state intervention in the environment: colonisation of the steppe, agricultural expansion, agrarian reforms, forest regulation and hydraulic engineering. The development of urban and port centres such as Odessa, Riga, Königsberg and Warsaw reflects the growing integration of these spaces into regional and international economic circuits. These processes transcended political borders without rendering them irrelevant, while each change in sovereignty redefined legal frameworks and modes of natural resource exploitation without fully homogenising these practices.

The twentieth century marked a major turning point. The collapse of empires and their subsequent integration into the Soviet sphere profoundly transformed the relationship between power and environment. Centralised planning—collectivisation, industrialisation and large-scale infrastructure projects—reflected an ambition to master natural environment, even as these efforts ran into material constraints. Post-Soviet developments  have prolonged these tensions, combining the redrawing of borders, territorial conflicts and transformations in environmental governance within contexts shaped both by the legacies of the twentieth century and by uneven integration into broader international frameworks.

Thematic Axes

Proposals must address environmental history, borders and sovereignties in Eastern Europe across a time span from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. They should embed environmental analysis within explicit reflection on political, legal and territorial discontinuities, demonstrating how these have shaped relationships between societies and environments. Particular attention will be given to contributions that highlight the plurality of governing frameworks, focus on spaces situated across political borders, or examine territories that have undergone changes in sovereignty. Preference will also be given to contributions based on diverse sources drawing on archives from several states or written in different regional languages—particularly German, Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, Hungarian, Romanian or Ottoman Turkish—in order to better capture circulation, disjuncture and reconfiguration in spaces shaped by plural sovereignties.

Contributions may address one or more of the following themes, without this list being exhaustive, and may also develop alternative lines of inquiry at the authors’ initiative.

1. Shifting Borders and Environmental Dynamics

This axis welcomes studies of environmental dynamics that traverse, bypass or redefine borders. Contributions may focus on river basins, wetlands or steppe regions, analysing how political discontinuities—territorial redrawing, shifting borders or overlapping jurisdictions—shape (or fail to shape) environmental processes, including natural disasters (climatic hazards, erosion, floods, forest fires) and their management. Particular attention may be paid to the differentiated effects of changing sovereignties, to mismatches between political and ecological temporalities, and to forms of continuity or rupture produced by territorial reconfigurations.

2. Sovereignty and Governance of the Environment

This thematic axis explores concrete ways in which competing powers—empires or nation-states, para-state entities —seek to appropriate, regulate and transform environments through colonisation policies, forest regulation, water management, resource taxation or economic planning, land reforms, ‘modernisation’ development programmes. Contributions may examine the instruments of governance (legal, fiscal, technical and scientific) deployed in contexts of overlapping or successive sovereignties. Particular attention will be paid to frictions between governing projects and local practices, especially in borderlands or newly integrated territories.

3. Internal Borders, Legal Hierarchies and Access to Resources

This thematic axis focuses on forms of internal fragmentation of sovereignty (differentiated statuses, exceptional legal regimes, administrative or fiscal boundaries) and their interactions with the environment. Contributions may analyse how these mechanisms structure access to resources, dynamics of exploitation and mobility, accounting for diverse actors—peasant communities, local elites, military or paramilitary groups, populations subject to specific legal statuses, colonists and migrants, state officials—as well as their practices and modes of engagement with the environment. Attention may also be paid to processes of adaptation, circumvention or resistance, and to the socio-environmental inequalities these arrangements produce.

4. Cross-Border Circulation and Socio-Environmental Reconfiguration

This axis addresses the circulation of resources, people, knowledge and techniques across politically fragmented spaces. Contributions may analyse how borders can restructure flows rather than simply blocking them, and how such circulation is shaped by environmental dynamics that constrain, direct or transform them. Topics may include exchange networks, infrastructure (ports, waterways, rail and road systems), and chains of interdependence linking various environments at many levels. Particular attention may be paid to reconfigurations associated with moments of changing sovereignty, and to the reciprocal adjustments between infrastructure, circulation and their environment.

By bringing together the history of borders, history of sovereignties and environmental history, this issue aims to contribute to a renewed understanding of Eastern Europe as a space of recurrent but unevenly paced recompositions, where environments and forms of power are embedded in relations of interdependence and mutual transformation over the long term. Contributions should explicitly demonstrate how the analysis of borders—understood as lines, zones or territorial arrangements—and sovereignties—in their plurality and reconfigurations—provides a key entry point for understanding these dynamics.

Titles and abstracts submission deadline: June 25, 2026

Short project abstracts (500 words maximum) should be sent to chreecc[at]ehess.fr

Please include name, institutional affiliation and e-mail address in all correspondence.

Authors of selected proposals will be notified by July 15, 2026.

Languages: French, English

Manuscripts submission deadline: March 1, 2027

Maximum article length: up to approximately 70,000 characters (space characters and notes included)

Evaluation: In accordance with the policies of Cahiers d’histoire russe, est-européenne, caucasienne et centrasiatique, the accepted articles will be submitted for double-blind peer review by two external referees.

Publication date: 1st half of 2028

Coeditor: Jawad Daheur

For additional information, please contact:

Coeditor jawad.daheur[at]ehess.fr

And/or the redaction: chreecc[at]ehess.fr