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Claudia Eggart

Researcher at the Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS) 

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Tel. +49 30 2005949-40

claudia.eggart@zois-berlin.de

What is your project and why did you choose it?

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In my project, I am interested in infrastructures, bureaucracy, and geopolitics at the border triangle between Ukraine, Moldova and Romania. More particularly, I study the way in which Russia’s full-scale invasion first destroyed and then reorganisation local and cross-regional transportation. As a social anthropologist, I focus on the lived experiences of logistics workers, especially lorry drivers, and the perspectives of local, national, and EU decision-makers. I realised that to understand the present-day condition of cross-border regulations and its inherent paradoxes, it is important to take a long-term perspective on the history of infrastructural development and geopolitical shifts in the region. Together with my colleague, Sandra Parvu, I have therefore embarked on a project that studies the fluvial and the overland transportation corridors at the lower Danube, between Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania in light of the region’s contested borders and infrastructure history. While the region is often labeled as ‘liminal’ or ‘in-between’, our research aims to draw attention to the multitude of actors and factors involved in the (re)shaping of this borderland.

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What brought your interest to the region?

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I have a background in Slavonic Studies and after my Bachelor I lived and worked in a provincial Russian town to improve my language skills. This was my first encounter with post-Soviet markets, which I came to understand as critical places from where to learn about the lived experience of post-Soviet transformation. In my two Masters (Free University, Berlin, 2018 and Central European University, 2019), I then studied market entrepreneur’s biographical trajectories in Russia, and trade-related cross-border mobilities in Kyrgyzstan. In my Ph.D in social anthropologist at the University of Manchester (finished 2024), I compared the development of the two largest existing container-built retail hubs, the 7Km Market in Odesa and the Dordoi Bazaar in Bishkek, from the collapse of the Soviet Union until the recent post-imperial backlash.  

 

How has Russia's war against Ukraine affected your project?

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For the LimSpaces project, I had planned to expand my existing market-based research to other retail hubs in Ukraine and Moldova. Russia’s full-scale invasion, however, made such a study impossible. Engaging in humanitarian aid during the first few months of war in 2022 sensitised me for the complex customs regulations and infrastructural connectivities between Ukraine, Moldova and the European Union. Based on my experience with organising aid trucks from Berlin to Odesa, and the challenging cross-border bureaucracy it involved, I developed the project that I then pursued for LimSpaces.

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Claudia Eggart is a social anthropologist with a Ph.D from the University of Manchester. Her recently defended dissertation studied “Lived Geopolitics. Re-scaling Market Infrastructures from Soviet Collapse to Backlash Imperialism”.  At ZOiS, her research focuses on customs and border logistics at the intersection of three Danube ports in Ukraine, Moldova and Romania. In particular, she investigates how the geopolitical tensions in the region affect the lived experiences of logistics workers. Her work was published in journals like Euro-Asian Studies Journal, Third World Quarterly, and Geopolitics.

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Project(s)
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Photo : Yvonne Troll

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