This paper introduces my doctoral project, which adopts a biographical approach to examine how military actors navigated uncertainty during periods of state collapse, war, and regime transformation in East Central Europe. Focusing on the life of Hans Koch, a German-speaking officer originating from Galicia, the study treats biography not as a narrative end in itself, but as an analytical instrument for exploring the production and transformation of political and military (un)certainties between 1918 and 1945. Hans Koch’s career unfolded across multiple ruptures: the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, the violent struggles over statehood in Ukraine in 1918–1919, shifting alliances during the Polish–Ukrainian–Russian conflicts, and the later radical reordering of Europe under National Socialist domination. As a mid-ranking military actor and intermediary figure rather than a political decision-maker, Koch offers a particularly interesting vantage point. Rather than assuming stable national or institutional frameworks, the project reconstructs Koch’s shifting networks, linguistic resources, and institutional affiliations as strategies of adaptation within unstable political topographies. In this sense, uncertainty is not treated merely as a background condition, but as a structuring force shaping perception, decision-making, and action. Methodologically, the study combines multi-lingual archival sources (German, Ukrainian, Polish, Russian) with a close reading of ego-documents, military reports, and later retrospective narratives. Koch’s positionality at the intersection of different political, military, and linguistic environments allows the project to trace how uncertainty was experienced in everyday professional decision-making. His biography makes visible the gap between strategic visions formulated by political elites and the practical constraints faced by actors responsible for implementing these visions on the ground. In this sense, Koch serves as a lens through which uncertainty appears as a lived and situational condition rather than an abstract structural concept. By situating an individual life within overlapping imperial, national, and transnational contexts, the project contributes to current debates on uncertainty, resilience, and adaptation in East European history. It argues that biographical micro-analysis can offer insights into broader processes of order-building and disintegration, demonstrating how uncertainty was lived, managed, and retrospectively rationalized by historical actors themselves.

The history of post-Soviet Russia can be characterised as one of intense, and often uncertain, state-building: the process of creating and strengthening state institutions and capacity via the establishment of a monopoly of violence within a given territory. Many scholars attribute the country’s painful transition during the 1990s to the underdevelopment of state institutions considered essential for economic growth, in particular property rights and contract enforcement. It was only after Putin’s ascension to the presidency in 2000 that scholars note a significant strengthening in the state’s institutions. However, what is often overlooked is the role that private security companies (PSCs) may have played in the country’s state-building and economy during this period. Private security companies matter for two key reasons: First, as private wielders of violence, they have significant implications for the state’s monopoly of violence. Second, by enforcing institutions like property rights, they represent an often-overlooked form of private institutional enforcement. Therefore, the study seeks to address three key questions: First, to what extent have PSCs contributed to or disrupted state-building in post-Soviet Russia since 1991? Second, what kind of state have PSCs helped to build or hinder since 1991? Third, what has been the resulting function of PSCs in the Russian economy since 1991? By addressing these questions, the study constructs a typology of PSCs based on two key dimensions: their relationship with the state (controlled or autonomous) and their relationship with businesses (protective or predatory). The resulting fourfold typology – State-Controlled Predatory, Autonomous Predatory, State-Controlled Protective, Autonomous Protective – provides a framework for mapping the regional and temporal variations in PSC behaviour in post-Soviet Russia since 1991. This study employs a mixed-methods approach, combining newly collated quantitative data on over 38,000 PSCs in post-Soviet Russia, with qualitative sources such as press reports and company statements. Preliminary findings suggest that PSCs hindered state-building in the 1990s but were co-opted into state structures under Putin. However, they became subject to elites embedded within a neo-patrimonial state, rather than a unified formalised state. Economically, while initially playing a destructive role, since the late 1990s they have served a largely productive function.

Cultural heritage has been involved in wars and their aftermath in various ways. With the development of nation states in the 19th century, heritage began to be used as a symbol of national identity to construct boundaries of belonging, making it a potential target in military conflicts. While, in previous centuries, cultural heritage was perceived as treasure and spoils of war, the symbolic value of cultural heritage became almost as important as its material value with the development of nation states. On the one hand, cultural heritage in wartime becomes an object of destruction, protection, restoration, or reconstruction. On the other hand, it also can be used as a weapon of war through propaganda to justify military aggression. The museumification of military artefacts is one of the oldest forms of museum activity. Nowadays, war dominates in historical museums, which, as Jay Winter notes, are never politically neutral. At the same time, the most important aspect of the presentation of armed conflicts in museums is 'the presentation of the discourse itself, the memory of events and their significance'. The political and ideological bias of a museum's narrative about wars depends on who owns the heritage of those wars. Just a few months after the start of full-scale war in Ukraine, exhibitions dedicated to the war in Ukraine began to appear, first in leading Russian historical museums and then in regional ones. The exhibitions about the current war differ greatly from other Russian museum exhibitions about wars in the past, even those whose heritage is actively exploited by the Russian state, such as World War II. Firstly, the new exhibitions on the current war construct an image of the enemy and an image of the victim. Secondly, they use contemporary objects that are hardly valuable enough to be placed in a museum. At first glance, these exhibitions may seem to represent a qualitatively new phenomenon. However, they are only new to us as contemporaries and eyewitnesses. The practice of museums representing ongoing wars is deeply rooted in Russian military history museums. This research focuses on the Russian museum exhibitions created during wars about these wars, examining them as instruments for the accelerated 'museumification' and 'sacralisation' of contemporary objects as heritage, which different Russian political regimes use for military propaganda. I address the main research question (RQ): What kind(s) of heritage are exhibitions representing ongoing wars making? I specify the RQ with the following sub-questions (SQ): 1.Who is involved in creating such exhibitions? What role do museological theory, the state and grassroots initiatives play in their emergence and development? 2.What features of such exhibitions remain unchanged despite the different political regimes under which they are created? 3.What happens to museum exhibitions and collections of new military heritage once wars have ended?