CFP: Conference “1989 in the East: Between Order and Subversion” (Paris, October 2019)

The French Association for Russian and Eastern European studies in social sciences invites scholars to participate in a conference “1989 in the East: Between Order and Subversion” that will take place in Paris in October 2019. 

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. This 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. During this period, repertories of action, institutional ties, ideological preferences, and actors’ identities, including official ones, were profoundly changed.

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.

More information on the conference and organizers can be found here.