Biopolitics of displacement in the militarized landscapes of Eastern Europe

Dr. Oksana Nagornaja (Berlin): Biopolitics of displacement in the militarized landscapes of Eastern Europe: German, Russian, and Austrian military medicine in the Great War

The Great War in Eastern Europe created an environment in which the human body was exposed not only to extreme social, technological, and military violence but also to the forces of nature. This environment posed an existential challenge for civilians. Uprooted from their familiar social structures, they were compelled to reorganize their Lebenswelt under conditions in which maintaining any culturally grounded habitus became impossible. At the same time refugees played a central role in the “grey zone” of the war” actively shaping processes of militarization and demilitarization in Eastern Europe.

The mobile warfare rendered the boundaries between military and civilian medicine more fluid than ever before and brought the civilian population directly into the remit of military physicians. This applied not only to one’s “own” civilians but also to inhabitants of enemy states, who likewise had to be medically treated, classified, and integrated into systems of military control. Unlike the military command or combatants at the front, military physicians and Red Cross nurses were in direct contact with the civilian population. They rapidly medicalized Eastern Europe’s migration regimes, the imagery of refugees, and the gender orders of wartime society. Military medics were not merely involved in constructing spatial orders and population taxonomies; they became a central pillar of control regimes, of the dissemination of professional vocabularies, and of the illusion of technocratic dominance over the territories seized from three collapsing multinational empires—Tsarist, German, and Habsburg.

Foucault’s concepts of biopolitics and medicalization offer a productive lens through which to examine the entanglements of war, environment, human bodies, and medicine on the Eastern Front. Military biopolitical discourses were deeply politicized, with medical professionals acting either as executors or as creators of taxonomies that translated state prerogatives into classificatory systems—or, conversely, generated new classificatory systems that the state then adopted. Refugees were categorized and frequently perceived as threatening or “diseased” bodies that needed to be controlled, disciplined, and often discriminated against.

This case study engages with a broad set of current research questions: Which colonial discourses and practices of medical geography informed the environmental dimensions of the occupation policies pursued by all belligerents on the Eastern Front? What medical taxonomies of the collective bodies of civilians and their environments emerged during the war, and how did these shape the biopolitics of the Eastern Front as a whole? What significance did the gendered experiences of victims, nurses, and humanitarian functionaries acquire within these processes? A gendered perspective opens an alternative view of the militarized environment of the First World War and underscores that the experiences of women were no less formative than those of male soldiers.

My project seeks to investigate the complex interactions between colonial medical practices and the environment of the Eastern Front by combining GIS-based spatial analysis with methods from the digital humanities.