Religion and Forced Displacement in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia

This book examines the social and political mobilisation of religious communities towards forced displacement in relation to tolerance and transitory environments. How do religious actors and state bodies engage with refugees and migrants? What are the mechanisms of religious support towards forcibly displaced communities? Religion and Forced Displacement in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia argues that when states do not act as providers of human security, religious communities, as representatives of civil society and often closer to the grass roots level, can be well placed to serve populations in need. The book brings together scholars from across the region and provides a comprehensive overview of the ways in which religious communities tackle humanitarian crises in contemporary Armenia, Bulgaria, Greece, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.

Victoria Hudson is a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. She completed her PhD at the Centre for Russian and East European Studies (CREES) at the University of Birmingham, submitting a thesis on contemporary Russian soft power in Ukraine, with a particular emphasis on the contemporary role of the Russian Orthodox Church in Russian foreign policy. Her publications include: Victoria Hudson, ’The Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate as a Potential ’Tool’ of Russian Soft Power in the Wake of Ukraine’s 2013 Euromaidan’, Europe-Asia Studies, 2018, 70:9, 1355-1380; and, Victoria Hudson, ’The Georgian Orthodox Church and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate: ’Tools’ of Russian Soft Power?’ in A. Makarychev and T. Kruessmann (eds.) Europe in the Caucasus, Caucasus in Europe Perspectives on the Construction of a Region (ibidem-Verlag, 2019). Lucian N. Leustean is a Reader in Politics and International Relations at Aston University, Birmingham, United Kingdom. His publications include, as author, The Ecumenical Movement and the Making of the European Community (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Orthodoxy and the Cold War. Religion and Political Power in Romania, 1947-65 (Palgrave, 2008), and, as editor, (with Grace Davie) The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Europe (Oxford University Press, 2021), Forced Migration and Human Security in the Eastern Orthodox World (Routledge, 2019) and Eastern Christianity and Politics in the Twenty-First Century (Routledge, 2014). He is the Founding Editor of the Routledge Book Series on Religion, Society and Government in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet States.