CREEES Professional Resources Forum

Deadline for Submissions: December 01, 2018

First Congress of SFERES
French association for Russian and Eastern European studies in social sciences
(ICCEES member)

1989 in the East : Between Order and Subversion

Organized with the support of CERCEC (Centre d’études des mondes russe, caucasien et centre-européen – EHESS, CNRS), ISP (Institut des sciences sociales du politique – Université Paris Nanterre, ENS Paris Saclay, CNRS), CEFR (Centre d’études franco-russe – MAEE, CNRS), CERI (Centre de recherches internationales – Sciences Po, CNRS), Revue d’études comparatives Est-Ouest (RECEO) and The Journal of Power Institutions in Post-Soviet Societies (PIPSS)

Call for Papers

The political events that unfolded in Eastern Europe around the year 1989 have constituted one of the largest upheavals that the European continent has seen since the end of the Second World War and the dawn of the Cold War. The congress intends to re-examine the processes that led to the disintegration of communist regimes in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe as well as in the Balkans and the USSR. This disintegration appears to be the product of complex mobilizations based on new forms of action and it crossed the most established political borders within Sovietized regimes: between “dissidence” and involvement in the official sphere, between “conventional” political action and street-level mobilization, between national spaces. During this period, the repertories of action, the institutional ties, the ideological preferences, and the actors’ identities, including the most official, have been profoundly changed. The modes of contestation have gone from a self-limited subversion of established institutions, one that could accompany forms of collaboration with the regime, to much clearer and radical head-on opposition. These same oppositions were led by actors often integrated within the system, according to the rhythms and modalities specific to each country (and, in the USSR, to each republic), perhaps to each social sphere, and correlated to the phenomenon of circulation between these spaces. Everything occurred as if the events linked to 1989 had resided in the blurring of routine landmarks of the orderandof the subversion of the “system.”
In spite of the considerable number of research projects dedicated to the “fall of communism,” there are few that systematically examine these transformations in the making, taking into account the entire social field and its blossoming since the second half of the 1980s. The congress seeks to explore these transformations by highlighting their heterogeneity in the different countries and in transcending binary categories of analysis inherited from transitology: power/opposition, conservative/reformer; authoritarianism/democracy; planning system/capitalism, etc. Underscoring the complexity of these processes and the strategic anticipations that they raised at the moment of their unfolding impels the most attentive possible reading of the events to the practices of actors of the different social spheres and to the manner by which the transformations of relationships and the interdependences between these sectors affected the practices. Empirical materials, whether newly available or already known, can thus be questioned or revisited in the light of these methodological requirements. How did the existing order’s actors and institutions adapt or how were they discarded? How did the reconfiguration of the system, using elements of the past, reshape actors’ practices? Which new forms and configurations of competition have emerged? How does one understand the role played by the “grassroots” actors or those situated at the periphery of the elites? Continue reading “CFP: 1989 in the East : Between Order and Subversion (Paris, France)”