Project description
Humanitarian crises and the collapse of the Soviet Union
How did humanitarian crises contribute to the collapse of the Soviet Union? How did crises influence the post-Soviet world? The answers may help explain aspects of the Soviet disintegration. The ERC-funded LabHum project aims to investigate humanitarianism across the Soviet Union, focusing on the role humanitarian action played in state collapse and reconstitution. A research team will explore humanitarian interventions in Armenia, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine. They will rethink the Soviet collapse, emphasise health and welfare rather than focus solely on high-level politics. The project will create a framework for producing transnational histories of the Soviet disintegration, focusing on linguistic, cultural, and environmental diversity while addressing challenges of archival access.
Objective
Laboratories of Humanitarianism is a ground-breaking history of the Soviet collapse that explores the transformative impact of humanitarian crisis on the country’s disintegration and the reconfiguration of the post-Soviet world. To explore this impact, the project takes a panoramic approach and explores humanitarianism at multiple scales using case studies from across the vast territory of the Soviet Union. At the heart of the project is one fundamental question: What is the role of humanitarian action in contexts of state collapse and reconstitution? To answer this question, the project brings together a multilingual and dynamic research team to explore the impact of humanitarian intervention in Armenia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Russia. Laboratories of Humanitarianism provides a radical rethinking of the Soviet collapse—arguably the formative geopolitical moment for understanding modern Eurasia. It moves beyond the realm of high politics to place the chronically under-researched themes of health and welfare at the centre of the analysis and provides an innovative methodological framework for writing new, transnational histories of the Soviet disintegration that foreground the country’s linguistic, cultural, and environmental diversity and that respond to contemporary challenges associated with archival access. In focusing on the Soviet and post-Soviet world, this project will upend assumptions within the modern history of international humanitarianism, where the timelines, perspectives, frameworks, and ‘watershed moments’ of North America and Western Europe have tended to be taken as normative. The USSR and its successor states provide a unique vantage point for exploring the relationship between donor and recipient of aid, as well as role of the ‘Second World’ in the development of global humanitarian regimes and practices in the late twentieth century.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2025-STG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
M13 9PL Manchester
United Kingdom
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