How have memories of World War II and the post-war accountability mechanisms informed the sense-making attempts of Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine, and the international community’s response to it?
Welcome to a guest lecture by Professor Maria Mälksoo, University of Copenhagen.
Participants dressed as soldiers with the flags of the United Kingdom, the United States and the Soviet Union walk past a monument to Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin in Yalta on 4 February 2020. Foto: Sergei Malgavko/TASS
This lecture reflects on what has been lost and found in the mutual attempts to translate the memories of WWII and its aftermath between the traditional western and eastern European quarters in the context of the Russian aggression against Ukraine. Translating memories in international politics taps into the broader questions raised by the International Studies research agenda that has sought to conceptualise IR as interlingual relations, zooming in on imperial transitions and histories of domination. The lecture contextualises Russia’s war against the backdrop of its ontological security-seeking, for which Russia’s numerous memory laws have served as a symptom and a coping mechanism of sorts. The talk will introduce the forthcoming MEMOCRACY volume The Politics of Memory Laws: Russia, Ukraine and Beyond (eds Uladzislau Belavusau, Aleksandra Gliszczynska-Grabias, Maria Mälksoo, Angelika Nußberger, Hart Bloomsbury 2025) which examines these laws in detail.
Maria Mälksoo is Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen and an Associate Editor of the Review of International Studies. She is currently leading the European Research Council’s Consolidator Grant project RITUAL DETERRENCE and has recently concluded the Volkswagen Foundation-supported MEMOCRACY consortium project. She is the author of The Politics of Becoming European: A Study of Polish and Baltic Post-Cold War Security Imaginaries (Routledge, 2010), a co-author of Remembering Katyn (Polity, 2012), the editor of the JIRD Special Issue Uses of ‘the East’ in International Studies: provincializing IR from Central and Eastern Europe (2022), Handbook on the Politics of Memory (Edward Elgar, 2023), and a co-editor of The Politics of Memory Laws: Russia, Ukraine, and Beyond (Hart Bloomsbury, 2025).
The event is organized by the NORMEMO research project.
When: 13.03.25 kl 12.15–14.00
Where: B-1005, HSL Faculty
Location / Campus: Tromsø
Target group: Studenter, Besøkende, Ansatte
E-boastta: kari.myklebost@uit.no