Lectures are former public presentations that have been reworked for publishing in print.
When looking at transitions from imperial to post-imperial rule, scholars have tended to look either at ruptures or at direct continuities of structures, laws, relationships, etc. I want to suggest a different approach. I believe we need to study more closely how political projects of a hugely different nature interact with one another across the divide of state collapse — and how this dynamic interaction raises expectations across long stretches of time. With a focus on East Central Europe, I would therefore like to present a specific, hopefully original narrative, but I also want to propose a research agenda.
By
Klaus Richter
January 23, 2022
Conversation with Slavenka Drakulić, Croatia; Samirah Kenawi, Germany; Tamara Hundorova, Ukraine; Ewa Kulik-Bielińska, Poland; and Olga Lipovskaia, Russia.
By
Witness Seminar
February 27, 2020
More than anything else, the avant-garde is the area of the production of the past: the colossal amounts of memoirs, artefacts, and photographs that are accumulated in archives — in different kinds of archives, including personal ones, but also state archives, and many others of different kinds.
By
Mikhail Iampolski
December 30, 2019
Policy-making is an applied process. We can ask: towards what end or goal are policy-makers striving? At present, as far as domestic and increasingly foreign policy-making in Russia are concerned, an important policy direction can be described with reference to development.
By
Marina Khmelnitskaya
October 25, 2016
The escalation around Ukraine calls for a larger historical re-assessment of social change in Eastern Europe – and indeed of the European project at large. The current moment of historical re-assessment requires a full-fledged competitor to liberal theory.
By
Don Kalb
November 19, 2015
Whatever might be said of pop art techniques and art-historical discourses used in Hungary, and later in Estonia, (and less frequently in other countries), one would be hard-pressed to say that the 1960s was an era of pop in the region, especially one with North American influences. Why then?
By
Piotr Piotrowski
November 19, 2015
Communism has failed, not only on political and economic, but especially on moral grounds, the author claims; "Every communist state was a far cry from the paradise the doctrine proposed.".
By
Edward Kanterian
January 21, 2015
The only functioning system for transactions in the Soviet Union was in fact blat, the system of corruption and tacit agreement and alliances among all parties involved in a given transaction, is here argued. The “knowing smile” was a shared signal for those in the system.
By
Alena Ledeneva
April 29, 2014
Linnaeus’s ideas and the acts of his apostles coincide with a general definition of economy as the doctrine of wise stewardship of scarce resources, which could be applied to both nature and human society. But beyond this, the philosophical, economic, and scientific thinking of Linnaeus and his contemporaries was historically distinguished by the belief that resources, as for example the number of species, could normally increase in one place simply by shrinking in another.
By
Arne Jarrick
May 14, 2013
As the topic of tolerance became more and more “politically correct” and fashionable in the wake of postmodern relativism, its contours began to blur argues the author.
By
Andrei Plesu
January 9, 2013