Workshop | Redefining connections across state collapse

Sala Bortolami, Dipartimento DiSSGeA

08.05.2024

Workshop
Redefining connections across state collapse
Economic actors, state agencies, scientific institutions in the USSR, Hungary, and Yugoslavia before and after 1991

8 May 2024, 10 AM - 5 PM | University of Padua
Sala Bortolami (DiSSGeA), Via del Vescovado, 30, Padova

Department of Historical and Geographic Sciences and the Ancient World (DiSSGeA)
Department of Political Science, Law and International Studies (SPGI)
University Centre for the History of the Resistance and the Contemporary Age (CASREC)

Organisers: Giovanni Cadioli, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Law and International Studies (SPGI), University of Padua, and Niccolò Pianciola, Associate Professor, Department of Historical and Geographic Sciences and the Ancient World (DiSSGeA), University of Padua.

The workshop approaches 1991 by recognising its importance as historical watershed year, seeking however to highlight how the transformative power of state collapse did not only spell the end for established connections of different kind (economic, political, cultural, scientific) at the global scale and within the crumbling multinational socialist states, but it also did reshape and redefine others. These processes ushered into multiform attempts at keeping alive existing connections, at infusing into others radically different contents, whilst preserving links that dated back to the socialist era.

The workshop seeks to focus both on state and non-state actors, exploring the trajectories of institutions and organizations whose very roles become themselves radically redefined during the transition period. Presentations will cover firms and academic institutions, which transitioned from direct State oversight to novel degrees of freedom; state organizations such as Soviet and Yugoslav State security agencies; and politico-administrative bodies.

The core aim of the workshop is to bring into conversation researchers who have looked at specific economic and institutional actors during transitional periods before and after the collapses of communist regimes in the Soviet Union and Central-Eastern Europe, in order to make clearer the context and possible connections of individual case studies. Geographically, presentations will cover events in Russia, Ukraine, the Baltic states, the former Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Central Asia.

Participants
Stefano Bottoni, University of Florence
Giovanni Cadioli, University of Padua
Evgenia Lezina, Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam
Steffi Marung, Leipzig University
Niccolò Pianciola, University of Padua
Alfredo Sasso, University of Florence
Isaac Scarborough, Leiden University