25 November 2026
14:30 - 16:00 Europe/Oslo
THE BATTLE OF BENDER, 1992: Bender was one of the sites of greatest fighting during the whole Transnistria War, and the battle that occurred in the city was the bloodiest and largest single incident in the conflict.
Event
Behind Enemy Lines: Fighting Secession in the Soviet Borderlands
How do members of “parent-state” ethnic groups respond in the face of regional separatism? Focusing on Moldovans in Transnistria and Georgians in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Keith Harrington explores how local anti-separatist mobilisation during the secessionist conflicts in the early 1990s shaped violence and war.
Language: English
NUPI, Rosenkrantz' gate 22, OSLO
Seminar
In the early 1990s, several of the Soviet Union’s successor states were plunged into violence, as regions with strong minority populations sought to gain independent statehood. Those regions that strove for secession were not ethnically homogenous. In fact, many contained large numbers of “parent-state titulars”, members of the dominant ethnic group from the state they sought to secede from. This was particularly true for Transnistria, where Moldovans accounted for 40% of the population, as well as Abkhazia and South Ossetia, where Georgians accounted for 45% and 29% of the local population, respectively.
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In the seminar, Keith Harrington will discuss what happens when the region you reside in attempts to break away from your nation-state. In particular, he will explore questions of why some parent-state titulars mobilised against the separatists, while others did not, and what impact local anti-separatist mobilization had on the escalation of violence and the outbreak of war.
Keith Harrington is a Research Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at Dublin City University’s School of Law and Government. He received his PhD in History and Sociology from Maynooth University in 2023 with a dissertation on the origins of the Transnistrian War.
Moderator: Helge Blakkisrud, Senior Researcher, NUPI and Associate Professor, ILOS, University of Oslo
Discussant: Pål Kolstø, Professor Emeritus, ILOS, University of Oslo
The event will be streamed to NUPI's YouTube channel:
This seminar is sponsored by the RCN-funded project “Dynamics of de facto state patron-client relations” (project number 301277) and is co-organized with the Center for Slavic and Eastern European Studies at the University of Oslo.
Participants
Pål Kolstø
Professor, UiO
Keith Harrington
Postdoctoral Fellow, Dublin City University’s School of Law and Government
Related projects
Research project
2020 - 2026 (Ongoing)
Dynamics of de facto state patron-client relations (DeFacto)
Almost all de facto states that survive for some time have a powerful 'patron' that provides security guarantees and economic support. Too often this has resulted in the de f...
25 November 2026
14:30 - 16:00 Europe/Oslo
Language: English
NUPI, Rosenkrantz' gate 22, OSLO
Seminar