13/03/2026
(Dis)Comfort Zones: Resilience and its Limits
(10–22 August 2026)
This year’s Greifswalder Ukrainicum explores the multifaceted, often contradictory nature of resilience, its limits, and its complex relationship to peacebuilding. It also seeks to connect Ukrainian suffering and responses to it with Europe’s intensive engagement with the traumatic events of the “extreme” twentieth century (Eric Hobsbawm), mapping possible bridges between different concepts of conflict resolution. Alongside (geo)political and large-scale economic perspectives, the program places particular emphasis on grassroots strategies of resilience, survival, and coping with trauma in society and culture. In doing so, it aims to uncover how these strategies transcend or even subvert official narratives, compensating for shortcomings and oversimplifications at the state level while shaping everyday practices beyond prescriptive models. Special attention will be paid to the potential of scholarship and art to unsettle society’s discursive comfort through critical interrogation, so as to avoid the fate of a new “uncomfortable place” (endroit inconvénient), so astutely documented by Jonathan Littell in his eponymous book on Babyn Yar and the war-torn Ukraine (2023).
Through interdisciplinary lectures, discussions, and cultural events, participants will engage with:
• academic and societal conceptualizations of resilience
• grassroots strategies of survival and coping with trauma
• the relationship between resilience, violence, and the risk of romanticizing suffering
• Europe’s historical experiences with war and their influence on current political culture
• the role of scholarship and art in challenging societal “comfort zones” and avoiding the “discomfort” of military confrontation and war
Join us in reflecting on how resilience is constructed, narrated, and lived — and how it shapes visions of conflict resolution and peaceful futures.
More details and registration information coming soon. Stay tuned!
