Globalization's effects on sovereignty have long been viewed in a simplified, unidirectional manner: state sovereignty was to wither as global networks, international institutions, transnational firms or NGOs gained relative power, with interdependence deemed a pacifying force. Not least Russia's invasion of Ukraine has exposed such narratives’ flaws. We explore both the long-term historical and current trajectories of the mutually constitutive nature of security and sovereignty in the multiple Europes and Americas. We trace the erosion and empowerment of sovereignty as entangled on the scales of individuals, societies, state authorities, nations, and empires. The provision of security, we argue, becomes more, not less, demanding under the conditions of networked systemic and great power rivalries. While traditional security concerns, like territorial defense, conventional war and nuclear deterrence, are back on the agenda, hybrid wars and the inexorable securitization of the economy, technology and digitalization demand new answers.

This research trajectory builds on the translational turn to explore processes of knowledge translation, with emphasis on the transfer of norms, institutions, discourses, genres, aesthetic forms, and political configurations. We trace the dynamics of relations between Europe and the Americas in the modern world, their grounding in the colonial period generating complex, multidirectional interconnections still today. Going beyond translations positioned as epistemological and cultural one-way streets, we focus instead on complex forms, contents, interactions, and contestations of cultural transfer. Epistemological emphasis is on the (productive) re-transfer or re-translation of cultural translations into the original (regional) contexts and on post-colonial and post-socialist en-tanglements. Our approach builds on new perspectives in cultural studies that combine area studies and translation studies, bringing them into multidisciplinary dialogue with area studies focused social science and law research.

The spatial dimensions of economic organization are eminent in international economics and economic geography as sources of comparative advantages and uneven economic development. The international economy’s spatiality and issues of interrupted supply chains, fair income distribution, multinational corporations’ responsibilities, and strategic national perspectives in production have gained prominence in public and policy debates owing to the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s war against Ukraine. Equally, policy responses to the climate crisis create new entanglements, as evident in the mutual enforcement of industrial policy in the EU and the US triggered by concerns about unfair subsidies on the ‘other’ side of the Atlantic. There is clear need for knowledge on economic and business development, and the economic geography of flows of goods, cap-ital, and services between Europe and the Americas from multiple perspectives: economic, environmental, political, and social.

Russia’s war against Ukraine has produced the largest number of refugees in Europe since World War Two while political repression and economic despair lead to growing numbers of inter-American migration movements. We focus on refugees’ agency in realizing their mobility projects and trying to make new homes in often transitory socio-spatial conditions. Our approach combines explorations on the micro-level of refugees and their communities with broader, macro-explorations of respective past and pre-sent structural conditions, including legal and state contexts or institutional interventions. Viewing the multiple Europes and Americas as a triangular space opens perspectives for tracing multi-directional and highly mobile networks and flows (of people, policies, artefacts, semantics etc.). It generates comparative contexts on how racial hierarchies affect the framing of migration, encouraging critical engagement with the concept of migrants’ (non)whiteness, and on the cultural repertoires and knowledge refugees mobilize to make sense of their migration experience and the multiple spaces they inhabit and transform.

The synergetic AreasLab offers two interlinked reflection spaces for thinking through and working towards Augmented Area Studies.

Reflection Space 1: Augmented Virtual Communication aims to comprehensively integrate digital methods and virtual spaces in multi-audience publications, in teaching, and in participatory, people-centered outreach and research. It will collaborate with the new UR Digital Humanities program, A. Ensslin’s Digital Area Studies Lab at DIMAS, and the IOS electronic research infrastructure led by T. Tegeler. The AreasLab will facilitate alternative forms of knowledge communication, promote academic and non-academic democratic co-creation of knowledge, and stimulate effective communication with users of traditional media, including policymakers and the public.

Reflection Space 2: Augmented Multi-Perspectivity and Self-Reflexivity emphasizes critical self-reflection on limitations of existing knowledge, critically prob-ng our research positions, practices, implied audiences and modes of evaluation (thus seeking “beneficial epistemic friction,” Medina 2013), while addressing practically and critically research ethics, data management and algorithmic bias, epistemic privilege and epistemic asymmetries. It opens area studies to ‘alternative,’ indigenous, peripheral knowledge forms, methods, and materials, giving prominence to neglected epistemologies and emerging empirical realities. This reflection space contributes to the provincialization of (white) Western knowledge (de Sousa Santos 2018; Chakrabarty 2007; Kresse/Sounaye 2022; Ferguson 2019), promoting methodological non-nationalism (Amelina/Faist/Glick Schiller/Nergiz 2012), epistemic diversity, and intersectional approaches. It gives a platform to “knowledge at risk” (Shami 2022) due to war, oppression, exploitation, imprisonment, dictatorship, dislocation, and censorship, thus countering “detrimental epistemic friction” (Medina 2013). Overall, the AreasLab is envisaged as a hub for translating self-reflexive multi-perspectivity and transdisciplinarity into in-person and digital teaching, outreach and transfer work, and multimedia research outputs.