Postwar and Violence
Research Center Postwar and Violence
Käthe Kollwitz, Die Freiwilligen (The Volunteers), 1921–1922. Woodcut from the series Krieg (War). Public domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Leader: Ota Konrád
The center is a hub for research on the aftermath of war and on violence in modern societies. It holds regular research meetings, organizes workshops and international conferences, and serves as a platform for developing new grant applications and joint projects with partners abroad. One of its key aims is to bring together researchers at different career stages, offering early-career scholars, from doctoral candidates to early postdocs, a space to present their work, gain international experience and develop their own projects. In 2024, the Center co-founded the War and Society: Central and Eastern Europe research alliance with CERCEC (EHESS, Paris) and the Center for Urban History in Lviv.
The Center approaches the postwar not as a mere transition from war to peace but as a distinct period in its own right, one that has profoundly shaped modern societies from the nineteenth century to the present. Rather than a clean “zero hour,” the postwar is a fluid and often prolonged condition that may begin during the fighting and outlast it by decades. The Center’s interest in violence extends beyond its postwar forms: it studies violence as a social phenomenon, including its transformations, the changing ways it has been perceived, and how those around it and the societies it affects have responded to it. The main territorial focus is Europe, particularly its central and eastern parts, with deliberate comparisons to other regions. Grounded in broadly conceived modern and contemporary history, the Center is consciously open to insights from sociology, anthropology, political science, international relations and other social sciences. Its work also speaks to the present, as Europe once again lives with war.
Members
Reserach centre activities
The centre organises international conferences, workshops and research seminars with guest speakers, often together with partners such as CERCEC (EHESS, Paris), CEFRES and the War and Society research alliance. Regular centre meetings provide space for discussing members’ work in progress and new new research project proposals.
Gallery
Projects
- Bridging the East-West Divide: Exploring Common Grounds between Western and Eastern European Histories of Political Violence
- Exploring Personal History: War, Violence, Occupation, and Post-Conflict Reconstruction in 20th and 21st Century Europe
- Negotiating ‘Serbhood’: Layers of memories among the Serbs in the post-Yugoslav and postwar space
- Understanding and Experiencing Sexual Violence in the Late Habsburg Monarchy
- The Practice of Psychology on the Socialist Periphery: Work Psychology in Czechoslovakia and Cuba during the Cold War
- The Legacy of the Kosovo War in Collective Memory: Serbian Victimhood Discourses in Digital Spaces
- The Making of a Cultural Leader in Buchenwald Concentration Camp
- Domestic Violence in Postwar Reconstruction. The Czech Lands, 1945-53 (completed)
- Bosnian Fluxes: Everyday entanglements of war, postsocialism and (neo)liberalization in Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina (completed)
- Violence in Central Europe During and in the Aftermath of the World War I. Austrian and Czech Lands in Comparison (completed)
Selected publications
- Konrád, O. (2026). Between ritualisation and reflection: The Holocaust, postcolonial challenges, and history education in Germany. Comparative Education, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/03050068.2026.2691615
- Konrád, O. (2026). When is it violence? Social recognition of domestic violence in Czech society under state socialism, 1948–1989. Journal of Family History, 51(2), 132–151. https://doi.org/10.1177/03631990251380128
- Konrád, O. (2026). Victory, homogeneity, and international order: Czechoslovakia’s violent paths to national democracy in 1918, 1945, and 1989. In M. Schulze Wessel (Ed.), Political crisis in Central Europe in the interwar period and today: Temporality, semantics, and logic of crises in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania (pp. 173–204). Berghahn Books. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781836956310
- Žíla, O. (2026). ‘Partial returns:’ Displacement, mobility, and translocal connections in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina. Journal of Refugee Studies, 39(1), 201–216. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/feaf073
- Žíla, O. (2023). ‘Exodus’: The Serb flight from Sarajevo, its legacy, and its role in the political memory of Republika Srpska. Nations and Nationalism, 29(3), 1007–1023. https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.12958
- Kučera, R. (2022). At the end of the end of history: Czech historiography and the Ukrainian-Russian War. Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung, 71(4), 651–657.
- Konrád, O., & Kučera, R. (2022). Paths out of the apocalypse: Physical violence in the fall and renewal of Central Europe, 1914–1922. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192896780.001.0001
- Konrád, O., Barth, B., & Mrňka, J. (Eds.). (2022). Collective identities and post-war violence in Europe, 1944–48: Reshaping the nation. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78386-0
- Žíla, O. (2022). Managing mass migration after the war: The case of Sarajevo’s unification in 1996. Political Geography, 96, Article 102595. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2022.102595
- Böhler, J., Konrád, O., & Kučera, R. (Eds.). (2021). In the shadow of the Great War: Physical violence in East-Central Europe, 1917–1923. Berghahn Books. https://doi.org/10.3167/9781789209396
- Žíla, O. (2021). The flight of Serbs from Sarajevo: Not the Dayton Agreement’s first failure, but its first logical consequence. Nationalities Papers, 49(5), 967–985. https://doi.org/10.1017/nps.2020.52
- Žíla, O. (2019). After coming home: Forms and meanings of return in Dayton’s Bosnia and Herzegovina. Glasnik Etnografskog instituta SANU, 67(3), 523–543. https://doi.org/10.2298/GEI1903523Z
- Konrád, O. (2018). Two post-war paths: Popular violence in the Bohemian lands and in Austria in the aftermath of World War I. Nationalities Papers, 46(5), 759–775. https://doi.org/10.1080/00905992.2017.1354362
- Šmidrkal, V. (2018). The First World War in the Czech and Slovak cinema. In H. Leidinger (Ed.), Habsburg’s last war: The filmic memory (1918 to the present) (pp. 69–92). University of New Orleans Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt22zmb1c.7
- Šmidrkal, V. (2018). The International Federation of Resistance Fighters: Communist anti-fascism, Germany and Europe. In Á. Alcalde & X. M. Núñez Seixas (Eds.), War veterans and the world after 1945: Cold War politics, decolonization, memory (pp. 17–32). Routledge.
- Šmidrkal, V. (2017). They shall—or shall not—pass? Communist state borders in the Czech culture of remembrance after 1989. East European Politics and Societies, 31(2), 251–268. https://doi.org/10.1177/0888325416679693
News
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The research team for the project ‘Exploring Personal History: War, Violence, Occupation, and Post-Conflict Reconstruction in 20th and 21st Century Europe’ set off for Paris
On 26 September 2025, the research team of the project Exploring Personal History: War, Violence, Occupation, and Post-Conflict Reconstruction in 20th and 21st Century Europe, carried out wit
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The War and Society Research Alliance discussed the changes to national borders in the 1940s at the conference ‘Experiencing the Borders: The Long 1940s and Their Legacies in (Eastern) Europe’
During periods of armed conflict, national borders shift in many different ways; in addition to increased administrative control, securitisation and militarisation, periods of war also heighten the si
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The Postwar and Violence Research Centre organised a workshop entitled ‘Silence and Silencing in Historical and Social Sciences Research’
As part of the Barrande project, the Postwar and Violence research centre organised a workshop in early October entitled Silence and Silencing in Historical and Social Research, the aim of which was to explore the concept of silencing and its application across disciplines. In addition to members of the organising centre, colleagues from the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) also took part, either online or in person. -
Natalia Aleksiun from the University of Florida attended a research seminar and gave a presentation on Jewish survivors and their rescuers
On Monday 10 November, historian Natalia Aleksiun from the University of Florida gave a lecture entitled Jewish Survivors and Their Rescuers in the First Postwar Decade at an IMS research seminar. In her lecture, she presented current trends in research into the post-war history of the Holocaust and focused on the complex relationships between Jewish survivors and their rescuers after 1945. -
The Postwar and Violence Research Centre at the University of St Andrews
Ota Konrád, Ondřej Žíla and Tomáš Košek from the Postwar and Violence Research Centre took part in a workshop and an international conference held at the University of St Andrews in Scotland
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Three doctoral students from the Modern History programme presented their research at a workshop in Paris
This year again, first-year PhD students in Modern History at IMS — Giovanni Ghetti, Alina Galster, and Tomáš Košek — had the opportunity to present their research at a doctoral workshop organized by CERCEC / EHESS in Paris.
