Deadline: September 1, 2025
Proposed title: Political Thought in Central and Eastern Europe
Guest editors:
Aurelian Craiutu, Department of Political Science, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA, acraiutu@iu.edu
Venelin Ganev, Department of Political Science, Miami University of Ohio, USA, ganevvi@MiamiOH.edu
Rationale:
Ideas have always mattered a great deal in Central and Eastern Europe where they had lasting and wide-ranging political implications. The major world wars that started there upended the old global order and redefined the map of the entire world. Regrettably, unlike the case of Russia, the political thought of Central and Eastern Europe has remained understudied in Western academic circles. To give just an example, the influential series of Cambridge History of Political Thought has had virtually no place for Central and Eastern European thinkers. The impact of the ideas of the Enlightenment and Romanticism on intellectual and political life in Central and Eastern Europe has been understudied, along with the emergence of emancipatory national movements or the growth of irrationalism and anti-Semitism in the twentieth century.
It would not be an exaggeration to claim that the political thought of the entire region has remained a terra incognita for the scholarly community. This has changed with the recent publication of the two-volume A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe by a team of Central and Eastern European scholars led by Balázs Trencsényi (CEU). By using a sophisticated methodological approach, the contributors to this project managed to shed fresh light on the surprising richness of political thought in the region, beginning with the Enlightenment, continuing with long nineteenth-century and the interwar period, and ending with the period of communism and the first post-communist decades.
The purpose of this special section for EEPS is to build upon the path-breaking scholarly contribution made by A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe. We want to examine further the extent to which it is legitimately speak of a genuine Central and Eastern European Sonderweg in political thought and intellectual history. We plan to include articles written by scholars in several fields (political theory, philosophy, political economy, history, law, sociology, and religion). They are expected to explore in detail the diversity of ideas, venues, and approaches and explore common themes discussed by Central and Eastern European authors. The selected papers will analyze the interaction between the institutional and intellectual contexts and explain how ideas emerged from these contexts and contributed to their revision over time. Special attention will be paid to the development of political ideologies in the region and how Central and Eastern European political thinkers developed unorthodox and, sometimes, original solutions and theories of resistance to the communist regimes.
We expect the authors to focus on individual authors or themes that can be studied in diachronic manner, perhaps considering 1989 as a Sattelzeit, a major threshold. Authors will be invited to place the thinkers of Central and Eastern Europe in a global market of ideas and follow the complex ways in which they communicated with other colleagues in the region and beyond. They will also be encouraged to trace the important differences within Central and Eastern Europe and draw any relevant comparisons between countries and authors, where possible. We envisage the contributions to this special section as part of a new trend in comparative thought whose main aim is to enrich our political imagination and vocabulary.
Schedule:
Submission of abstracts and short bios (250 words each): September 1, 2025
Selection of abstracts and communication of decision to authors: October 15, 2025
Deadline for manuscript submission: October 1, 2026
Publication: Spring 2027
Submission instructions:
Abstracts of 250 words should be accompanied by titles and short bios. Invited manuscripts, typed double-spaced, should be submitted to the two Guest Editors as e-mail attachments (with “For special section on political thought in CEE” in the subject line). The author’s full address should be supplied in the e-mail message. Each submission should have an abstract and a list of key words.
Length: 8,000-10,000 words (including Endnotes and Bibliography). Please follow the Instructions for Authors on the journal’s website when preparing your paper: https://journals.sagepub.com/author-instructions/EEP.