2 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
Timothy Snyder's 2010 history of the 'bloodlands' — Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, the Baltic states — where Nazi and Soviet killing machines overlapped between 1933 and 1945, killing approximately 14 million civilians — arguing that the specific combination of two totalitarian systems created an unprecedented killing zone.
William McNeill's 1964 study of the borderland between the settled agricultural world and the Eurasian steppe — examining how the struggle between nomadic and sedentary civilizations shaped Eastern European history from 1500 to 1800.