2019 annual program

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2019 annual theme:

Hybrid Conflicts and Diverse Societies: Civil Wars and Global Peace

In his famous Leviathan, published in 1651, Thomas Hobbes offered a pessimistic vision of the social condition: 

"Nature hath made men so equall, in the faculties of body, and mind … From Equality Proceeds Diffidence … From Diffidence Warre … Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man. For WARRE, consisteth not in Battell onely, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the Will to contend by Battell is sufficiently known …. For as the nature of Foule weather, lyeth not in a showre or two of rain; but in an inclination thereto of many dayes together: So the nature of War, consisteth not in actuall fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is PEACE."

Hobbesian belief in the fundamentality of the war of “each against all” has repeatedly been challenged by other social thinkers (first and most famously – by John Locke). However, his truly systematic framework of analysis remains relevant to this day, suggesting the existence of a structural interconnection between the inclinations of individuals and the general state of society. Hobbes also demonstrated a way of thinking about social processes without drawing a rigid divide between “domestic” and “international” contexts, thus allowing the study of civil discord and a war with foreigners as analogous and often interconnected phenomena. This makes the three-and-a-half-centuries-old treatise, Leviathan, look surprisingly relevant today, especially given the propensity of modern historians and social scientists to rigidly segregate the continuum of social self-organization and disorganization into distinct departments of domestic and foreign policies, of conflicts and social cohesion. The point is, of course, not to call for a return to Hobbesian abstract generalizations. Rather, we need to contextualize and historicize the broad categories of “men,” “power,” and the like that framed Hobbes’s philosophical thinking. Moreover, these categories need to acquire the same multifaceted and syncretic meaning as the concept of “war” that was so keenly understood by Hobbes, who was writing his treatise during the decade-long English Civil War and under its direct influence. 
In 2019, Ab Imperio invites contributors and readers to think about the ambivalence of the phenomenon of social strife, which can precede the “civil state” (Hobbes) or result from its collapse, and can be regarded as an internal or an international conflict (depending on the scale of analysis). Every familiar notion becomes problematized when “society” stops being seen as a homogeneous entity with clear borders, and appears in a more realistic light – as a multilayered amalgamation of social networks and communities of solidarities of various sizes. If some of these are confined to a village while others are intercontinental in scale, some are based on common economic interests and others on shared culture, then how do we differentiate a civil war from a world war, and societal disintegration from the implementation of universal trends in a global society? 
Peace and stability, as the opposite of war, are no less puzzling. Do those societies and historical periods that are described as “peaceful” or even “stagnant” find ways to resolve grave conflicts, or do they just “outsource” them beyond the limits of the officially recognized community (overseas or in the gray zones of domestic marginality)? Will the change in the scale of analysis – from the local to the global, and from the global to the microhistorical – help locate the fractures and breaches in the fabrics of states and societies that are camouflaged by the dominant narratives of social cohesion? How does the historical optics that takes into account multiple forms of diversity change our perception of the dynamism and internal conflict of those societies that appear to have achieved a Hobbesian state of peace? Whether it is the “reaction” in imperial Russia between 1907 and 1914, Stalinist “totalitarianism,” or Brezhnevite “stagnation,” how can historians understand these periods as containers of social conflicts articulated not just in political programs but in the production of agency in variegated ways, from national claims on multinational spaces to low-scale civil war? In other words, what appears to be the victory of a particular sociopolitical disposition may equally be seen as an ongoing conflict when viewed through a different set of theoretical lenses. 
These questions and ambivalences are reflected in the journal’s annual theme “Hybrid Conflicts in Diverse Societies: Civil Wars and Global Peace.” Imagining purity:
    
1/2019 Encounters and Disengagements in the Imperial Situation

Macro- and microanalysis of historical encounters, conflicts, and disengagements in an imperial situation that is implicitly or explicitly based on difference and differentiation ● Hegemonic narratives of history and the problem of diversity ● The dialectics of allies and foes in the imperial situation ● Nativist interpretation of history and the history of cultural and political transfers ● Historical memory and the accommodation of past diversity ● The concepts of national minorities, dominant foreign elites, and global migrants ● Modern epistemologies and the problem of difference: Enlightenment universalism, evolutionism, and multiple modernities ● Political mobilizations and political indifference in diverse societies.

2/2019 Civil Wars in Empires and Nations
 

International law and civil wars: disruption of the global order of sovereignties ● Nationalization of space and its contestations under the “old regime” ● World War I as a series of civil wars: the impact of World War I on the colonies of maritime empires ● Point of no return: from imperial revolution and national movements to civil war ● The Russian Civil War and national (Finnish, Ukrainian, Georgian) wars of independence and civil wars: porous boundaries, contested subjectivities ● The Paris Peace Conference and the problem of recognition of newly sovereign states ● Stalin’s order as a civil war ● World War II and the Great Patriotic War as civil wars ● National wars and civil wars in the Post-Soviet world ● Russia’s cultural wars: between Kulturkampf and Cultural Revolution ● The human body as a medium and a battlefield: politics of gender and sexuality.

3/2019 The Social Contract: In Theories and in Practices
 
Historical formats of accommodating diversity in society (empire, federation, confederation, commonwealth) and their future ● Colonialism as a common project ● Writing history of nation-building and empire-building ● Social harmony and class collaboration as a political alternative and utopian goal ● Gender and sexuality as a foundation of social cohesion and an embodiment of social discord ● Pseudo-constitutionalism and imperial practices of co-optation of local elites: the problem of democracy in an imperial setting ● Was the Austro-Hungarian Empire doomed by the constitutional experiment? ● The development of Soviet-bloc welfare states and the politics of disengagement after 1989 ● Projects of united Europe and their political implications ● The world government as a political ideal and urban legend.

4/2019 Adjusting Scale: Global Conflicts – Local Consequences, and Vice Versa
 
Minority as a global concept and political problem ● Overlapping networks: religious, social, linguistic ties and state boundaries ● Scale effect: how a global community becomes a country’s minority ● Local implications and consequences of world wars and global conflicts ● War and the collapse of empires ● Postimperial arrangements: from global to local or a different global? ● The Cold War’s concept of the three worlds revisited ● Roots of contemporary globalism: institutional, political, legal, and cultural ● Roots of contemporary anti-globalism: local reactions to global “threats” ● New globalities (Global South, global consumption) and their discontents ● Multilayered societies: elements of different worlds in a single polity (Russian Empire and the USSR in the first, second, and third worlds) ● Gender identities: between local and global ● Religion as a global network and identity framework ● Global and local in the age of new technologies.

Permanent Sections:

Theory and Methodology ■ History ■ Archive ■ Sociology, Anthropology & Political Science ■ ABC: Empire & Nationalism Studies ■ Newest Mythologies ■ Historiography and Book Reviews.

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