Fremde Peripherie - Peripherie der Unsicherheit?

The decline of empires in Eastern Europe led to the transformation of state structures from monarchies to nation-states. The First Czechoslovak Republic (1918-1938) was composed of various territories from the fallen Habsburg monarchy, resulting in significant differences in legal, social, cultural, and economic aspects across its regions. This study demonstrates how security perceptions were shaped by the knowledge of the respective actors and how this influenced security discourses. This is exemplified by the largely unknown eastern periphery of the First Czechoslovak Republic, Podkarpatská Rus. This region was characterized by a population structure in which members of the titular nation of the new nation-state—namely Czechs and Slovaks—were predominantly present in administrative centers and their surroundings in their roles as civil servants. For them, the 'unknown periphery' and its inhabitants in the east of the country, due to its geostrategic location between Poland, Romania, and Hungary, became the subject of numerous securitization discourses.