Public lecture “Tourism Makes States: State Legitimisation and Nation-Building in Ukraine and Transnistria since 2022“

📍 Lossi 36-306

The event will be held in English.

Target group

Anyone interested is welcome to attend!

General information

Tourism is rarely read as an instrument of geopolitics, yet in contested spaces it does some heavy lifting of state-building. This talk examines how two neighboring, highly securitized entities – sovereign Ukraine and the unrecognized breakaway region of Transnistria – mobilize tourism toward state legitimisation, nation-building, and resilience.

Paraphrasing Tilly’s “war makes states,” it traces three mechanisms through which “tourism makes states”: territorialization, through infrastructure and itineraries that materialize control over space; nation-building, through museums, memorials, and shared experiences that make the nation tangible to its own citizens; and nation-branding/public diplomacy, through the image a state or para-state projects to the outside world.

In both cases, these mechanisms narrate the nation internally and externally. In Ukraine, they are meant to anchor sovereignty. In Transnistria, they work to normalize a breakaway border and project statehood despite non-recognition.

Tracing tourism across these paired cases shows how ordinary, seemingly apolitical practices – visiting a museum, following a route – become political: tourism is not a vacation from politics, but politics in the shape of a vacation.

Facilitator

Professor Magdalena Dembińska, University of Montréal, Canada.

Magdalena Dembińska is Full Professor of Political Science at the Université de Montréal. Her research and teaching in comparative politics center on ethnic politics and conflict, state- and nation-building, and nationalism and diversity, with a regional focus on Eurasia and Central Europe.

The lecture will be moderated by dr Shpend KursaniLecturer in International Relations at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies.

Contact

For further information, please contact Kristel Vits, kristel.vits@ut.ee.

Estonian Doctoral School for Social Sciences.