Ab Imperio annual program in 2013: Freedom and Empire: Dialectics of Diversity and Homogeneity in Complex Societies

[SergeGlebovy]

Dear colleagues,

Ab Imperio editors would like to invite manuscript submissions to our 
annual program in 2013. Guidelines for submission can be found at 
http://abimperio.net/cgi-bin/aishow.pl?state=portal/contributor&idlang=1

Please, direct all questions to office at abimperio.net or 
ai_us at abimperio.net




2013 annual theme: Freedom and Empire: Dialectics of Diversity and 
Homogeneity in Complex Societies

№ 1/2013 How Do We Understand Freedom Today? Free Interpretations and 
Predetermined Models
Freedom and liberty ● dialectics of freedom and sovereignty ● “natural 
rights” and the problem of their defense and maintenance ● “anarchy is 
the mother of order” ● does the class-based approach have a future? ● 
are human rights contrary to freedom? ● “hierarchy of freedoms”: 
paradoxes of emancipation movements and decolonization ● whose freedom? 
● “progressors”: can freedom be imposed? ● imperial liberties and modern 
conceptions of freedom ● body as the space of freedom and object of 
freedom and bondage ● phenomenon and concept of legal pluralism ● 
imperial law and imperial rights ● common law and modernization of legal 
discourses ● “for our freedom and yours!”: national and imperial 
emancipation movements ● concepts of autonomy and federalism in colonial 
and continental empires ● concept of historical justice and its 
connection to the right for autonomy and for a sovereign state ● 
Siberian oblastnichestvo yesterday and today ● Cossack concepts of 
self-government and invention of the Cossack tradition in the early 
twentieth century ● modern citizenship and imperial subjecthood ● 
historical precedents of multiculturalism ● twentieth-century 
humanitarian interventions and new post–Cold War world order.
№ 2/2013 Freedom and Order: Interpreters and Intermediaries – 
Entrepreneurs of Groupness
Subjects of freedom ● concepts of freedom and privileges in empire and 
nation ● freedom as the new order: democracy or nationalism? ● 
unrecognized freedom and invented traditions of liberty: regional and 
corporate regimes of self-government and democracy from the moment of 
incorporation into empire to the invention of traditions in the era of 
mass national movement and politics ● imperial “peoples–intermediaries” 
● authoritarian tendencies of emancipator messianism from Slavophilism 
to communism ● comparative history of political representation and 
constitutionalism in land-based empires: Russian parliament of the early 
twentieth century, Ottoman parliament of the nineteenth and early 
twentieth centuries ● Russian revolutionaries and projects of 
revolutionary nation ● Mensheviks are for spontaneity, Bolsheviks are 
for discipline? – rethinking the old model ● pogrom and Aktion: the 
other side of emancipation? ● is there diversity under socialism? 
gradient of freedom: thawing out of the Soviet regime ● freedom to be a 
nation under socialism ● Soviet dissidents ● politics of childhood: 
pedagogy as a guardian of group identity.
№ 3/2013 Freedom as an Object of Intellectual Import and Export: Lost in 
Translation, Found in Translation
Translatability and untranslatability of languages of self-description: 
how to recognize freedom? ●translatio imperii and hegemony as a problem 
of translation ● interpreters in the system of administration and 
foreign policy of Muscovy and the Russian Empire ● a breath of freedom: 
the school of Soviet literary translation ● emancipation and 
kulturtraegershaft: projects of translation into and from languages of 
the peoples of the USSR ● misusing the right to groupness: ethnic 
conflict as a Soviet invention ● translation of historical knowledge 
into politics and administration ● post-imperial reinventions of 
groupness and collective identities ● languages of codification as 
politics of translation of legal traditions ● translating and mediating 
urban spaces ● education: disciplinary practices of shaping freedom of 
thought ● transfer of educational models into Russia ● subtexts of 
emancipation and discrimination: politics of gender in education ● 
alternative forms of socialization and politics of (self)education ● 
private schools and universities in late imperial Russia ● Soviet 
education: site of modernization, indoctrination, or social engineering? 
● did Russia have colonial institutes? ● imperial subalterns as products 
of educational systems: unification of subjugation and protest ● exile 
as a laboratory of imperial knowledge ● postcolonial and post-imperial 
knowledge: emancipation, freedom of manipulations, violence.
№ 4/2013 Emancipation of Researchers Through the Decentralization of 
Normative Models: Reciprocal Comparisons
Academic freedom today: institutional mechanisms and cultural norms of 
stimulating and limiting scholarly research ● innovation or 
trickstering? recognizing innovation in the humanities ● freedom from 
stereotypes: the principle of historicism and method of estrangement 
from historical experience ● comparative history of key social and 
political conceptions ● modernity beyond Eurocentrism ● hierarchies in 
the production of knowledge ● reciprocal comparison: circulation of 
knowledge and interwoven institutions and practices in historical 
dynamics ● instrumentality of translation for comparative history ● 
historians after postmodernity ● deterritorialization of analytical 
models ● decentralization of narrative without “toxic relativism” ● new 
horizons, conceptual traps and dead ends of normalizing the 
exceptionalism of historical experience.

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