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

[Sergey Glebov]

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


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