[Bilimsel Haber] JOURNAL/CFP- Ab Imperio 2010: Friends, Foes, and Neighbors: Ascribing Meaning to Imperial Political, Economic, and Social Order

[Gonul Pultar]

JOURNAL/CFP- Ab Imperio 2010: Friends, Foes, and Neighbors

Posted by: Sergey Glebov <sglebov at smith.edu>



Dear Colleagues,

The editors of Ab Imperio invite contributions to the journal's annual
program in 2010.

For information on the journal, contact addresses and description of
issues, please, visit http://abimperio.net or contact the journal
editors directly at office at abimperio.net

Ab Imperio 2010: Friends, Foes, and Neighbors: Ascribing Meaning to
Imperial Political, Economic, and Social Order

Visions of friend and foe remain focal points for studies of different
processes, from formation of individual and collective identities to
the making of a state's foreign policy. The "friend-foe" binary pair
is immediately recognized as one of the most basic anthropological
oppositions that structure the boundaries of individuals and groups.
The image of the enemy serves as an important factor in defining the
limits of political communities and in legitimizing sovereignty and
political independence. For contributions to the four thematic issues
of Ab Imperio in 2010, the editors invite prospective authors to shift
their attention from the ontology and structuralist symmetry of the
opposition of "friend-foe" to the fluctuations of the roles of
"friend" and "foe" and these roles' functionality in imperial
situation. The editors suggest exploring images and functions of
"friend" and "foe" in the multilayered and heterogeneous imperial
context. This allows us to discover and describe situations when a
"friend" simultaneously appears to be a "foe" (e.g., the Pole as a
Slav and the Pole as an enemy of Russian imperial statehood). We can
also detect situations in which these very basic dichotomies lose
their specific content and their normative component. Consider the
category of "neighbor." Is "neighbor" a "friend" or "foe," or is the
concept of "neighbor" associated with one of the poles depending on
the situation and the intention of historical actors? Is there room
for the category of "stranger," a neutral social interlocutor, in the
repertoire of social experience? In other words, instead of elusive
structural statics we are interested in the historical dynamics of the
imperial socio-political, cultural, and economic experience. This
experience is reflected in discursive (and not only discursive)
attachments and repulsions of groups, societies, and states.

In contrast to the ideals of multiculturalism and tolerance that
dominate today's social sciences, historians have done much to show
that past experience significantly deviates from these norms. How
images of the enemy and of external danger were used for supporting
and legitimizing political communities, national distinctiveness, and
patriotic mobilization during wars and political crises has all been
studied especially thoroughly. One cannot imagine today's nationalism
studies without thematic foci on hostility, repulsion, resentment, and
perceived dangers of the extinction of political independence and
cultural distinctiveness of the national body. While recognizing the
importance of these aspects of solidarity and conflict in past
experience, the editors of Ab Imperio are proposing that we think
about those (not necessarily obvious) important roles and situations
that find themselves in the unmarked space between the extreme poles
of friendship and animosity. Is there a difference between the
experience of perceiving otherness and translating cultural
differences into full-blown alienation and orientalization? Which
particular levels of understanding of "friendship" and "familial ties"
can be seen when we reconstruct developments of pan-ideologies, such
as pan-Islamism, pan-Slavism, pan-Turkism? How different are projects
of various political unions, commonwealths, and "common spaces?" What
is the semantics and functionality carried by the categories of
practical political language, such as Stalin's or revolutionary
France's "enemy of the people" (and the French "friend of the people"
conspicuously absent from the Soviet parlance), American "enemy of the
state," Soviet "friendship of peoples" and "community of historical 
destiny?"

The dynamic and contextual interpretations of the "friend-foe"
opposition allow one to overcome the inertia of a research method
aimed at "natural" limits of sovereignty and national community. It
also allows us to closely explore the historical experience of hybrid,
confederative, and consociationist forms of political unions and
identities. Despite the fact that the sovereign nation-state continues
to be perceived as the main and almost "natural" political form,
today's world order is not only composed of the mosaic of monochrome
nation-states one sees on the map. Both inside and outside these
political spaces there existed and continue to exist complex and
mutually untranslatable hierarchies, incongruities, and lines of
attachments and repulsions. The discourse of friendship and Hobbesian
hostile anarchy that dominates analyses of foreign policy cannot
reflect those lines of division and association. Hence, the search for
a corrective in the form of analytical language capable of describing
processes of encounters, conflict, and cooperation in the imperial
situation is on our research agenda.

Consequently, in 2010 the focus of the journal will be on the
practices of marking solidarity and differences and on motivations for
these practices, from anthropological aspects of social interaction to
the sphere of foreign policy.

No. 1/2010 "Ascribing Stance: Making Friends and Enemies in Imperial 
Contexts"

  * Genealogy of political formulae such as "enemy of the people,"
    "friend of the people," "friendship of peoples," "blood enemy,"
    "comrade," "internationalism," "union"
  * deconstruction of the political rhetoric of "union:" Union of
    Libration, Union of the Russian People, USSR, Bund, Union of
October 17, etc.
  * "fraternal obligation" and "friendship of peoples"
  * revision of anthropological, political, cultural interpretative
    models of friendship and conflict in imperial situations
  * practices and canons of visualization of friend and enemy during
    political crises and wars
  * images of friends: representations of social and political
    proximity and affinity in empire
  * gendered metaphors of socio-political affinity and alienation
  * who is the main enemy in empire?: hierarchies of primary and
    secondary dangers
  * "our infidel" - conceptualizations of a special "Russian Islam" and
    hypothetical proximity of Orthodoxy to Eurasia's muslims
  * before the cultural revolution: Kulturkampf in the Russian Empire
  * pogroms and the search for the heavenly kingdom
  * familial and genetic metaphors in the political language of
    constructing empire and nation
  * history of social etiquette: mister, comrade, sir, madame
  * the function of the traitor's image in imperial, Soviet and
    post-Soviet historiographies
  * the sacred duty of retribution and the construction of memory of the 
enemy.

No. 2/2010 "Political and Economic Unions: Dialectics of Poverty,
Wealth, and Political Domination"

  * Integration of post-Soviet states into supranational unions
  * history of federalist projects
  * coalitions - unions - federations as forms of overcoming of
    normative sovereignty
  * federative formulas in strategies of national and neo-imperial movements
  * "Little Entente," Warsaw Pact, and others: "the fiercest friends"
  * the sweet poison of "people's democracy:" consumer culture and
    culture of socialization of East-Central Europe in the USSR
  * Soviet projects of "socialist friendship": festivals of students
    and youth, competitions, congresses
  * Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the beginning of the internal
    transformation of the Soviet regime
  * pan-ideologies: pan-Islamism, pan-Turkism, pan-Ottomanism, 
pan-Slavism, etc.
  * genealogy of the concept of "Slavdom"
  * "poor relative," "rich friend:" structures of economic partnership
    and political domination
  * the revolutionary potential of poverty awaiting the hegemon of
    rebellion: true and false friends and enemies
  * cooperativism, corporatism, and other "third ways" in economics
  * imperial economy and ethno-confessional division of labor
  * professional unions and dilemmas of social protest and national
    mobilization.

No. 3/2010 "Neighbor: Social and Political Encounters in the Imperial 
Context"

  * Is a neutral "neighbor" possible between the extremities of
    "friendship" and "animosity?"
  * When does a "neighbor" become an "enemy?"
  * The friend as intermediary: the role of southern Russian orthodox
    clergy in Petrine reforms
  * Germans in the Russian Empire
  * national elites integrated in imperial governance
  * multiple situations of the borderlands
  * Finland: archetypical neighbor
  * colonization as forced "neighbor-hood:" perceptions of other
    cultures in the space of the Russian Empire/USSR
  * post-Soviet states and societies: neighbors, friends, enemies?
  * the modern city as a social melting pot or a social sieve: from
    strangers into neighbors or enemies?
  * "backyard culture" of the Soviet city
  * migration of bureaucratic cadres in the Russian empire/USSR
  * paradigmatic situations of "neighbor-hood:" Cossacks and the
    peoples of North Caucasus, the Western borderlands
  * national diasporas and discourses of good neighbor-hood and internal 
danger
  * schemes of fraternization: twin cities in the USSR
  * politics of good neighbor-hood: Soviet practices of overcoming the
    past after 1945
  * the neighbor is back: history of exile and return of Soviet
    rehabilitated peoples
  * the neighbor as "alter ego:" the Russian Empire in the mirror of
    the Habsburg Monarchy (history of perception and borrowing from
    Habsburg experience)
  * hierarchies of "aliens" in the Russian Empire: "cultured,"
    "civilized," "assimilable," "savage," etc.

No. 4/2010 "War and Imperial Society: Dynamics of "Friendship" and 
"Hostility""

  * War as a means to foster exchange of experience and
intensification of contacts
  * war as a test of the regime's stability in cases of culturally
    diverse societies
  * "the Fifth Column:" discursive homogenization and mobilization of
    "unfriendly" populations
  * spy-mania as a reflection of the desire for cultural and political
    integrity of society
  * history of irregular military formations in the 18th-20th centuries
    from Cossacks to partisans
  * the impact of permanent warfare on Russian imperial society in the
    18th-19th centuries
  * under new colors: former foes in the sovereign's service in
    17th-20th centuries
  * history of deserters and draft-evasion in the Russian Empire and the 
USSR
  * anthropology of male communities and discourses of "violation of
    service regulations" in the imperial and Soviet armies
  * the regular army and practices of self-organization of armed
    collectives: ethnic, social and regional boundaries (landsmanshafften,
    hazing, etc)
  * "brotherly help:" the Soviet military in twentieth century conflicts
  * the front line behind the front line: military conflicts of states
    that emerged from the ruins of the Russian Empire
  * diplomacy of the Old Regime: between dynastic, state and national 
interests
  * "justified war:" political theory and moral economy of aggression
  * an ideal army in a real empire: history of projects of reform and
    technological rearmaments of the Russian/Soviet army.

Sergey Glebov



Distrib. by: Central-Eurasia-L - Announcement List for Central Eurasian 
Studies