The Great War and the environment of displacement

Dr. Kamil Ruszała (Kraków): The Great War and the environment of displacement: Refugee resilience in the militarized landscapes of Eastern Europe

The project places a central focus on refugees on Eastern Front/East Central Europe with particular focus on refugee camps as key sites of wartime experience, resilience, biopolitical negotiation, and as tool of state and imperial governance, categorisation, and citizenship formation. It examines refugee camps as spaces in which state power, humanitarian governance, militarized forms of governance, and social control intersected with individual and collective agency under conditions of of wartime emergency and prolonged instability. Particular attention is paid to questions of refugee resilience and to camp experiences as arenas in which the relationships between body, state, nationality, and citizenship were continuously negotiated. By foregrounding refugee perspectives and lived experiences both inside and outside the camps, the study seeks to recover underrepresented voices and to analyze how refugees navigated, adapted to, and at times resisted the regulatory frameworks imposed by states, military authorities, and humanitarian actors.

The existing debate on wartime forced migrations has largely focused on population management under occupation regimes or states of emergency, as well as on humanitarian aid mechanisms, paying much less attention to how individuals functioned in crisis situations. In particular, questions of endurance and resilience within the militarized landscapes of Central and Eastern Europe – including theatres of military operations, hinterlands of displacement, and refugee camps as structured environments of everyday life – remain underexplored from the perspective of individual experience. Addressing this gap, the study examines how individuals adapted to adversity during the First World War in Central and Eastern Europe by focusing on resilience, environment, and governance, with refugee camps as the central analytical lens, while also incorporating a comparative analysis of refugee experiences beyond the camps, including life in adapted shelters. Particular emphasis is placed on survival strategies developed under conditions of extreme violence and prolonged disruption, as well as on the effects of shifting political and physical borders – resulting from imperial collapse and state formation –on refugee regimes, repatriation policies, and emerging push-back measures.

Digital humanities methods will help to present the dynamics of war refugee migration based on statistical sources, utilizing digital tools to create visual representations of quantitative data on migration patterns, environmental impacts, and survival strategies (in the form of charts, graphs, interactive maps, heatmaps). Furthermore, they will also be used to illustrate the dynamics of wartime destruction, thereby depicting the environment of war refugees on the Eastern Front by digitally visualizing quantitative materials stored in the archives of Lviv and Kraków. Moreover, in research on resilience strategies, refugee networks will be mapped based on the tracking of migratory trajectories, highlighting the connections formed by war refugees in the creation of associations and communities during the wartime crisis, which investigates the formation and dynamics of refugee communities and networks (this can include family, ethnic, religious, gender-based networks, as well as interactions between refugees and local populations).