Physical Violence

International Joint Research Project “Physical Violence and State Legitimacy in Late Socialism”
First Annual Conference

Physical Violence in Late Socialism:
(Dis-)Entangling Statehood, Labor, and the Nation

Jens Gieseke, Michal Pullmann and Jan Behrends have published essays on the role of violence in 1989 in the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia and the USSR. See their contributions in Martin Sabrow (ed.): 1989 und die Rolle der Gewalt, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012. <further information>

The Fourth International Social Science Summer School in Ukraine will provide a unique forum for the presentation and discussion of the latest research on violence issues, involving specialists of the topic, as well as young promising researchers.

The School is interdisciplinary. The organizers welcome proposals from the disciplines of history, sociology, anthropology, political science, economics, and adjacent fields. While the primary focus will be on the socialist and post-socialist era (in the former Soviet Union, Central, Eastern and Southern Europe), pre-Soviet history may also be examined. The discussions and presentations will analyze different dimensions of violence: war and non-war situations; state management of violence, as well as individual and collective strategies; mechanisms of violence outbreak; violent practices and post-violence situations; perpetrators and victims; sources and methods.

Dr. Jan C. Behrends presented the Project “Physical Violence and State Legitimacy in Late Socialism” at a roundtable talk at the 43 Annual Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) in Washington, D.C.   

While in the United States Dr. Jan C. Behrends together with Prof. Dr. Thomas Lindenberger introduced the Violence project at a lunch time workshop (brown bag seminar) at Columbia University, New York on 16^th November.

The Institute for Southeast European Studies in Regensburg has invited the PhD candidates and the current Research Fellow of the group to present the project "Physical Violence and State Legitimacy in Late Socialism" at the research colloquium on Southeast and East European history on December 2, 2011.