Forging Wartime Biopolitics: Militarized Refugees’ Bodies and Environments in WWI Eastern Europe

Forging Wartime Biopolitics: Militarized Refugees’ Bodies and Environments in WWI Eastern Europe

Lead: Kerstin von Lingen
Project team: Liana Popa, Magdalena Hyllus
Project partners: Dr. Oksana Nagornaia (Humbolt Universität Brüssel), Dr. Kamil Ruszała
Funding: FWF (PIN5060524: WEAVE)
Duration: 1.1.2026 – 31.12.2028
Project homepage

The trilateral project between research groups at Vienna, Berlin and Krakow, funded as part of the European WEAVE programme, examines the impact of military actions on the environment and the living conditions of the population during the First World War, with a particular focus on war-related displacement in Eastern Europe. The research concentrates on Austrian Galicia, Congress Poland, and the Romanian regions of Wallachia and Bukovina as selected landscapes. These are understood to be natural, anthropogenic, and ethnically framed landscapes from the perspective of the military powers of Germany, Austria, and Russia. The study focuses on the image of individual and political bodies in the wake of collapsing empires, the influence of biopolitics, military medicine and its colonial practices, as well as gender-specific experiences of war and displacement within the refugee migration regime, whereby the environment is understood as an active part of warfare, aggravating the situation for refugees.

For the first time, the project links the history of mass displacement with medical and environmental history, addresses war-related destruction of habitats and its long-term consequences, and takes into account cross-border actors and influences. It opens up new fields for understanding migration crises both in the past and in the present by examining institutional responses and human resilience in a historical context and, by extension, for subsequent wars. The innovative potential lies in gaining comprehensive insights into the ‘conflict landscapes’ of Eastern Europe and their war-related destruction in the First World War through mass data analysis and GIS mapping. In this way, a novel, multidimensional understanding of the complex history of environment-related events on the Eastern Front during the First World War becomes visible. Examining the environmental history of the Eastern Front through the eyes of war refugees with attention paid to gender, the body, and visualization offers truly new scholarship on the First World War.