A5: Ethnic Minorities in Border Regions – Potential for Conflict or Cooperation? (Workshop)

Ekaterina Mikhailova is a Political Geographer working at the crossroads of Post-Soviet Area Studies, Border Studies and Governance.

Ekaterina studied Public Administration at Lomonosov Moscow State University and holds a doctorate in Human Geography from the Institute of Geography, Russian Academy of Sciences. Before joining IOS, Ekaterina worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Eastern Finland (Finland, 2018-2019), University of Geneva and Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (both in Switzerland, 2020-2022).

As a Postdoctoral Researcher at the IOS Regensburg, Ekaterina examines comparatively how post-Soviet borders in selected countries – Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan and Ukraine, Belarus and Russia – have been oscillating between conflict and cooperation in practice, border-related narratives and imaginaries produced by elites and borderlanders.

In addition to her research project, Ekaterina coordinates the KonKoop junior research group and plays a central role in creating a database of knowledge-production centres for Peace and Conflict Studies in Eastern Europe.

Sabine von Löwis is senior researcher at ZOiS since 2017 and head of the research cluster Conflict Dynamics and Border Regions.

She studied Economic and Social Geography at the Technical University of Dresden (TU Dresden) and gained a doctorate in political science at HafenCity University in Hamburg. She has held positions at various university and non-university research institutes, working on projects on the stability and change of spatial structures in urban and rural areas. From 2011 to 2017, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch, where she was involved in the joint research project Phantomgrenzen in Ostmitteleuropa (Phantom borders in East Central Europe) funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). Having studied the persistence and dissolution of spatial structures in Western Ukraine within this project framework, she now focuses her research on the post-Soviet space.

Curriculum Vitae (last updated: 23/02/21)

Beate Eschment is an expert on Central Asia and has been a researcher at ZOiS since 2016.

She gained her PhD in Russian history at the University of Hannover in 1992. Since then, her research has focused on contemporary developments in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. She has worked at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) in Ebenhausen, the Central Asia Seminar at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the Institute for Oriental Studies at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, and the Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen. From 2008 to 2019, she was the editor of the Zentralasien-Analysen. She has taught at various German and Central Asian universities, including the German-Kazakh University and the Al-Farabi University in Almaty, Kazakhstan, and the Bishkek Humanities University in Kyrgyzstan.

CV Beate Eschment