Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society

Zusatztext

This special issue provides a forum for discussion of what Belarusian Studies are today and which new approaches and questions are needed to revitalize the field in the regional and international academic arena. The major aim of the issue is to go beyond the narratives of dictatorship and authoritarianism as well as that of a never-ending story of failed Belarusian nationalism¿interpretive schemes that are frequently used for understanding Belarus in scholarly literature in Western Europe and Northern America. Bringing together ongoing research based on original empirical material from Belarusian history, politics, and society, this issue combines a discussion of the concept of autonomy/agency with its applicability to trace how individual and collective actors who define themselves as Belarusian¿or otherwise¿ have manifested their agendas in various practices in spite of and in reaction to state pressure. This issue offers new approaches for interpreting Belarusian society as a dynamically changing set of agencies. In doing so, it attempts to overcome a tradition of locating present Belarusian political and social dilemmas in its socialist past.

Autorenportrait

Julie Fedor is Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Melbourne. In 2010-13, she was a postdoctoral researcher on the Memory at War project based in the Department of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge (www.memoryatwar.org). She has taught modern Russian history at the Universities of Birmingham, Cambridge, Melbourne, and St Andrews. She is the author of Russia and the Cult of State Security (Routledge, 2011); co-author of Remembering Katyn (Polity, 2012); and co-editor of Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013) and Memory, Conflict and New Media: Web Wars in Post-Socialist States (Routledge, 2013). Andreas Umland (ku-eichstaett.academia.edu/AndreasUmland), CertTransl (Leipzig), AM (Stanford), MPhil (Oxford), DipPolSci, DrPhil (FU Berlin), PhD (Cambridge) is a researcher of contemporary Russian and Ukrainian politics with a focus on the post-Soviet extreme right at the National University of "Kyiv-Mohyla Academy" (www.ukma.kiev.ua/ua/faculties/fac_soc/politology/index.php ), and the Eichstaett Institute for Central and East European Studies (http://www.ku-eichstaett.de/forschungseinr/zimos/ ). He is also initiator and co-director a Master`s program in German and European Studies administered jointly by Kyiv`s Mohyla Academy and Jena`s Schiller University (www.des.uni-jena.de/).

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