CALL FOR PAPERS

2010

annual theme:

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.

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