Zbornik Vzhodno-srednjeevropski krizni diskurzi v dvajsetem stoletju
We are pleased to announce that Routledge has recently published a new volume titled East-Central European Crisis Discourses in the Twentieth Century. Isidora Grubački from our Institute of Contemporary History was part of the editorial team of the volume, together with Balázs Trencsény, Lucija Balikić and Una Blagojević. The edited collection also includes three chapters written by members of our Political History programme: Mark Zajc’s chapter “The Nova revija Magazine’s 1986 Survey on the Yugoslav crisis”; Tjaša Konovšek’s chapter “Crisis as Political Criticism: Slovenia, Post-communism, and the Conservative Turn” and Isidora Grubački’s chapter, co-authored with Kristina Andělova of the Institute of Contemporary History in Prague, “Crises of Feminism and Democracy in the Interwar Period. Yugoslav and Czechoslovak Entanglements”.
The term “crisis,” with its complex history, has emerged as one of the pivotal notions of political modernity. As such, reconstructing the ways the discourse of crisis functioned in various contexts and historical moments gives us a unique insight not only into a series of conceptual transformations, but also into the underlying logic of key political and intellectual controversies of the last two centuries. Studying the ways crisis was experienced, conceptualized, and negotiated can contribute to the understanding of how various visions of time and history shape political thinking and, conversely, how political and social reconfigurations frame our assumptions about temporality and spatiality.
A historical region wedged in between various competing imperial centers, East Central Europe has been an area often associated with crisis phenomena by both internal and external observers. Seeking to employ the regional gaze as a vantage point to reflect on issues which are relevant well beyond those countries between the Baltic and the Adriatic, this project is also in dialogue with a number of recent transnational attempts to rethink political and intellectual history with regard to the recurrent epistemological frames that structure the political and cultural debate.