{"id":11877,"date":"2026-04-29T10:29:45","date_gmt":"2026-04-29T08:29:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/uni-freiburg.de\/ucf\/?page_id=11877"},"modified":"2026-04-30T06:30:34","modified_gmt":"2026-04-30T04:30:34","slug":"the-nation-as-colony-diaspora-and-development-in-the-armenian-republic","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/uni-freiburg.de\/ucf\/college\/ets\/the-nation-as-colony-diaspora-and-development-in-the-armenian-republic\/","title":{"rendered":"Guest Lecture"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Nation as Colony:
Diaspora and Development in the Armenian Republic<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Invited speaker: Dr. Veronika Zablotsky<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Veronika<\/figure>
\n

This lecture presents the outlines of The Nation as Colony,\u00a0<\/em>a book project that revisits\u00a0how\u00a0the\u00a0ambivalent positioning of Armenians as intermediaries between \u201cEast\u201d and \u201cWest\u201d shaped histories of displacement and resettlement in\u00a0the borderlands of West Asia. Moving across trans-imperial geographies\u2014from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean and the North Atlantic\u2014it zooms in on\u00a0key conjunctures at which colonial logics of race, empire, and development disarticulated place-based Armenian claims to Indigeneity while informing political imaginaries of the Armenian nation as a kind of colony. After discussing the entanglements of British colonial property regimes, international humanitarian\u00a0interventions, Soviet emancipation projects, and neoliberal\u00a0development\u00a0in post-Soviet Armenia, the lecture introduces the speaker’s original concept of \u201edevelopmentality\u201d\u00a0to theorize a\u00a0seemingly enduring rationality of government that exceeds\u00a0the state and operates through diasporic investment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What emerges is a critical rethinking of diaspora not as a condition to be resolved through national reconstitution projects but a\u00a0generative form of fragmentation that opens onto\u00a0political futures in and beyond Armenia, reimagined through a postcolonial feminist\u00a0lens.<\/strong>
<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Dr. Veronika Zablotsky<\/a> is a political theorist with an interest in global histories of migration and empire; Armenian diaspora studies; transnational solidarity and social movements; as well as postsocialism and neoliberal development in the SWANA region. She holds a PhD in Feminist Studies, Politics, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, and History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Among her publications are the co-edited anthology Beyond Sanctuary: The Humanism of a World in Motion<\/a><\/em> (Duke University Press, 2025) and the chapter “Affecting Appeals: Armenian Refugee Narratives in the Archives of Early Humanitarian Discourse<\/a>\u201c in The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives <\/em>(Routledge, 2023). She is based in Berlin and co-founded the Critical Armenian Studies Collective at the University of Pennsylvania. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When and Where: Wednesday, 17.06.2026, 18:15-19:45, Universit\u00e4t Freiburg, Max-Kade-Auditorium 1, Bertoldstrasse 17 (Alte Universit\u00e4t)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Organisation: Dr. Melanie Altanian<\/a>
In cooperation with the De\/Coloniality Now Centre<\/a> at Universit\u00e4t Freiburg
Please register by e-mail to melanie.altanian@ucf.uni-freiburg.de<\/a>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"De\/Coloniality<\/figure>
\n

<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Nation as Colony:Diaspora and Development in the Armenian Republic Invited speaker: Dr. Veronika Zablotsky This lecture presents the outlines of The Nation as Colony,\u00a0a book project that revisits\u00a0how\u00a0the\u00a0ambivalent positioning of Armenians as intermediaries between \u201cEast\u201d and \u201cWest\u201d shaped histories of displacement and resettlement in\u00a0the borderlands of West Asia. Moving across trans-imperial geographies\u2014from the Indian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":450,"featured_media":0,"parent":443,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_trash_the_other_posts":false,"editor_notices":[],"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-11877","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uni-freiburg.de\/ucf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/11877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uni-freiburg.de\/ucf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uni-freiburg.de\/ucf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uni-freiburg.de\/ucf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/450"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uni-freiburg.de\/ucf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11877"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/uni-freiburg.de\/ucf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/11877\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11909,"href":"https:\/\/uni-freiburg.de\/ucf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/11877\/revisions\/11909"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uni-freiburg.de\/ucf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uni-freiburg.de\/ucf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}