Global Invisible University for people hit by war, repression

The Global Invisible University (GIU), unveiled by the Central European University (CEU) last month, turns the Invisible University for Ukraine – developed in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine – into a stand-alone programme within CEU that will “support students and scholars affected by war and authoritarianism across multiple regions”, states the official press release.

“Global Invisible University reflects CEU’s founding mission and our commitment to academic freedom, open societies and educational innovation,” said CEU’s Interim President and Rector Carsten Q Schneider.

“Building on the remarkable success of the Invisible University for Ukraine, GIU demonstrates how universities can respond creatively to global challenges by ensuring that talented students and scholars continue to learn, teach and contribute to society regardless of war, political repression, or displacement. We are proud to make GIU a permanent part of CEU’s educational mission.”

As is the case for the Invisible University for Ukraine (IUFU) and its four sister programmes (the invisible universities for Georgia, Belarus and Western Balkans, and CEU’s Invisible University for Romani Access and Empowerment), the GIU will offer a suite of university credit-level courses that can be used in a CEU degree or via the Bologna Process in universities in 49 European countries.

Between 70 and 150 students are enrolled in each of the 11 courses currently being offered. Since 2022, more than 3,000 students have studied under 450 instructors in CEU’s invisible universities programmes, which also includes English academic writing courses, mentoring and a graduate programme, as well as psychological care for traumatised students.

In addition to sustaining the education of displaced students, GIU seeks to prepare students to participate in democratic renewal, civic practice and institutional reform.

‘An exercise in meaning-making for students’

In designing the GIU, CEU has leveraged its experience with Ukraine’s IUFU. Established in the spring of 2022, IUFU provided students in Ukraine and displacement (chiefly in Europe and the North) an intellectually rigorous online space in which they strove toward an understanding of their ‘life-world’ wrenched into existence by Russia’s bombs, missiles and infantry.

The IUFU “was an exercise in meaning-making for the students,” Oleksandr Shtokvych, director of the CEU’s Educational Outreach Office and of the Threatened Scholars Integration Initiative, and managing director of GIU, told University World News.

“They were looking for explanations for themselves but also for a language to talk about what was happening in Ukraine: where the root causes of the war are, and how Russia manipulates and weaponises both history and identity narratives.”

To align with CEU’s transnational education philosophy, each class, for example, ‘Rethinking Ukraine in Global Context’, was taught by two professors, a Ukrainian, Ostap Sereda (Ukrainian Catholic University) and a Hungarian, Balázs Trencsényi (CEU).

Soon, however, the students asked for more transnationality, so they could compare their experience with others who have experienced similar social and historical traumas.

In response, CEU created courses like ‘Belarus-Lithuania-Poland-Ukraine: Polycentric Narratives and Legacies’ by Elzbieta Kwiecinska (Polish Academy of Sciences) and Iryna Ramanava (European Humanities University) and ‘Post-Empire Transformations: Georgia and Ukraine in Comparative Perspective’ by Nino Gozalishvili (University of Georgia) and Rusudan Margiani (Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest).

According to Balázs Trencsényi, an historian of Eastern Europe and one of the co-founders of the IUFU, despite their shared Slavic linguistic background, Ukrainians and students from the Balkans (the former Yugoslavia) – what, under Western eyes, seem to be similar histories (for example, being under Hapsburg rule or experiencing state socialism) – were not an easy fit.

In the beginning, our conversations with our West Balkan colleagues were complicated by the fact that “their templates of how to explain ethnic war in Yugoslavia were very different from the intellectual templates the Ukrainians were using to interpret their own war”, Trencsény told University World News.

At times, “it was even ‘triggering’ for Ukrainians to listen to scholars telling them that this [that is, the war in Ukraine] was an ‘ethnic war’ or telling Ukrainians, ‘You will never prosecute most war criminals because most of the war criminals get away as long as their state gets away with it’,” said Trencsényi, with this last word meaning “state-sanctioned murder”.

Difficult or not, IUFU’s officials persevered, and comparative courses, such as ‘Semi-Periphery and Borderlands in European Integration: Rethinking Balkans for Ukraine’ and ‘Facing the Legacy of the Yugoslav Wars’, were created. The courses were taught by experts in the field such as Dejean Jovi (University of Zagreb) and Siniša Maleševi (University College Dublin).

Creating permanent dialogue and debate

The GIU “is not about knowledge transfer”, explained Trencsényi. “It’s not about how to transmit stable Western paradigms [or] how they were imagined in the 1980s or early 1990s. Then there was a kind of ‘Western normal science’ view that there were these Eastern Europeans who kind of didn’t know what to think about the transition to democracy, and now we need to teach them.

“What we do is very, very different. It is a permanent dialogue. It’s a permanent, sometimes confrontation, sometimes very interesting, challenging debate where new knowledge emerges,” he said.

A case in point about how knowledge was co-produced is what Shtokvych and the rest of the CEU team learnt from what the Balkan students learnt about the comparative Ukraine-Balkan courses of IUFU, for example, ‘Facing the Legacy of the Yugoslav Wars’, by Vladimir Petrovi (NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Amsterdam) and Miloš Hrnjaz (University of Belgrade).

“They told us that it was an unusual experience to be with so many students from other countries in the Balkans because after the disintegration of Yugoslavia, there was very little effort to engage in joint regional or cross-country educational programmes.”

We can talk about rebuilding narratives after a war or conflict ends, Shtokvych explained, but without a space (even a virtual one) to do so, to engage at the university level with students from different countries, understanding cannot advance.

Another example of the iterative nature of the invisible university programmes can be seen in the summer and winter schools, when 50 to 60 students are brought to Budapest and Lviv (in Western Ukraine).

On CEU’s campuses, Trencsényi explained, not only do students sitting face-to-face have more in-depth interactions, but also listening to them “shapes our understanding of how to moderate these conversations”.

In the same space, these classes may have a wide ideological spectrum representing, for example, the complexities of “liberal nationalism in the Western and Southern borderlands of the former Soviet space”.

For example, “you can be a Georgian nationalist and liberal democratic position, and you can be a Georgian nationalist who refuses any kind of Western alignment and is pro-Putinist. Belarusian nationalism in a way is almost by default pro-Western; it's very hard to be a Belarusian nationalist and to be pro-Lukashenko, yeah. So, I think it’s even broader.”

Similarly, “there are a variety of leftist and different anti-communist positions, sometimes conflicting, sometimes reinforcing each other”, said. Trencsényi.

“The aim of our courses is to make the students think and learn how to debate in a productive way. They don't have to agree on any master narrative. We, obviously, do not say this is how your country’s intellectual or politica tradition looks – and you have to kind of take it or leave,” he said.

Need for self-critical investigations of national histories

In the IUFU, at first, in their nation’s historical context of the war, self-critical investigations of national histories might not be welcomed, though Trencsényi told University World News, not only are they necessary, but students soon see the necessity for them.

In the months that followed Russia’s full-scale invasion, Trencsényi recalled, Ukrainian students were often “in a cancelling mood” saying, “we shouldn’t talk about it [Russian history]. It’s not us. It’s the ultimate ‘other’. We should study everything that is unrelated to Russia.”

Yet Trencsényi explained, you cannot study 19th century Kyiv or 1920s Kharkiv and pretend there is no Russia or Russian Empire or a broader Soviet space. To do so would be to completely undermine the academic project. “You cannot negate the context, even if it is obvious that this is not only relevant context.

Now the question is ‘What do you do with this? How do you produce knowledge taking into account the multiplicity of contexts’?”

In fact, students soon started saying: “We come to you [IUFU] partially because we want to have a kind of more adequate knowledge. Going beyond the Russo-centric narratives but also not reproducing a Ukrainian perspective that is detached from the multifarious imperial legacies (Hapsburg, Ottoman, Polish, Russian-Soviet) shaping its history.

“We don’t want to kind of, you know, erase this completely. We want to understand them, but we want to do it on our own terms, taking into account that Ukraine is not just a periphery of the Russian (or Polish or Hapsburg) cultural space,” said Trencsényi.

Students wanted a representation of history that showed that “Ukrainians are not just products of these imperial legacies. They have their own agency. They had their own cultural projects. They have their own politics.

“But all this is never homogeneous. Even in the 19th century, the Ukrainian political community existed in some way, so it is not its projection backward, but it is extremely pluralistic and has to be studied in a very contextual way,” said Trencsényi.

Ultimately, what the IUFU experience showed was that “many of the students actually want to engage with complicated questions”, said Trencsényi.

Accordingly, they “are creating for the students an opportunity to have conversations on many topics, engaging also with the Western knowledge production of Soviet or Russian studies, who traditionally didn't take into account Ukrainian positionality that much, and this is also a learning curve for them.

“It’s a very productive dialogue when the students bring up topics these ‘Western’ experts did not pay much attention to before, and they have questions that are not easy to answer.”

In the future, Trencsényi hopes to make these investigations even more transnational by bringing into the conversation Georgian and Belarusian scholars and students.

Interrogating the role of illiberal discourse

One of the courses planned for the spring 2027 semester is tentatively titled, ‘Conceptual Capture of Democracy’. Being developed by Dr Nino Gozalishvili, who is presently on a Fulbright Fellowship at the George Washington University Elliott School of International Affairs, it interrogates the role of illiberal discourse in preparing the ground for democratic backsliding; existing analyses examine the role of the media, courts, electoral roles and, indeed, the government itself in undermining liberal constitutional orders.

The course, Gozalishvili told University World News, shows that illiberal governments – including Russia’s and Türkiye’s – “appropriate democratic terms for anti-democratic purposes”.

Rather than repudiate the political language developed by the Enlightenment and the collapse of the idea of the ‘Divine Right of Kings’, illiberal democracies retain the terms and concepts – of “the people,” “sovereignty,” “real democracy” and “freedom” – but in redefined illiberal ways.

“The ‘democratic ideal’ is never or rarely put into question,” said Gozalishvili. “Even Orbán had elections. But he aspired to an illiberal democracy. Even populists [as in Brexit] attach themselves to the concept.”

Traditional democracy-antidemocracy analysis, the course will show, does not work under these conditions.

Instead, the students will see how illiberal democrats repurpose words like ‘sovereignty’ for their own agenda.

Germany’s far-right AfD party no longer uses the traditional language of the Eurosceptics; they’ve fashioned a new way of asserting sovereignty by calling for reforming the EU. In some cases, ‘sovereignty’, she said, is being used to justify local authoritarian measures such as crackdowns on immigrants.

According to Gozalishvili. “The formula is always the same. First, you have to identify the fifth column, the people inside the country who are not ours.

“They are working from the outside power, and then in the name of defending sovereignty, in the name of defending your own sovereign democracy, you can apply the restrictive measures, exclusionary measures and sometimes authoritarian laws against them.”

The course will be divided into three blocks. The first, classes one to five, will explore the genealogies of democratic discourse, from post-war reconstruction and the Cold War to the post-1989 transitions, establishing the historical and conceptual foundations of the course.

Classes six to eight will examine the symbolic capture of democracy, focusing on democratic backsliding and the illiberal appropriation of democratic languages in the post-1989 period.

The third block, classes nine to 12, flips the script and interrogates how to restore democracy – highlighting the diverse and often overlooked ways in which civil society actors, protest movements, and civic initiatives reclaim democratic meaning in the present.

The importance of developing transnational courses

As it rolls out, GIU will be working with partners in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Additionally, they are in discussions with the Arab Educational Council and drawing on experience of previous CEU programmes in Myanmar.

There are also ongoing discussions with partners in South America and Southeast Asia about working with Scholars at Risk about operating in an autocratic educational context.

Becoming more global will not result in the creation of new national hubs, Trencsényii explained. The GIU instead seeks to develop transnational courses.

In addition, with the course ‘Conceptual Capture of Democracy’, a team is working on politics and religion in the context of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and another course that discusses the different meanings and uses of the decolonisation paradigm from a broad comparative perspective is also under development.

Controlling the means of production

Carsten Q Schneider, whose work as a political scientist has focused on regime change, placed the need for CEU and, thus, GIU squarely in the political analysis mapped by the Italian political philosopher and journalist Antonio Gramsci.

“If you want to govern not just for an electoral cycle but want to build a regime, then Gramsci 100 years ago showed that you need to get control of the means of knowledge production. That’s what people like Orbán understood very well. The goal of wiping out or replacing or making impossible access to higher education is the same,” said Schneider.

CEU stands against this not only because of its commitment to academic freedom but also because of its mission to place excellence at the service of open societies and the fostering of academic dialogue.

“Throughout our history we have always had communities on campus who come from places that were at war. We have always managed to create dialogue and some form of understanding and transcending the conflict,” Schneider said.