Central European University Press – serie

Visited by violence and wars, border changes and political instability, authoritarian and totalitarian regimes as well as ethnic conflict, cleansing, and genocide, East-Central Europe in the twentieth century seemed an unlikely place of protection for refugees. This volume challenges this widespread view and explores a variety of forms of refugee protection, humanitarianism, and refugee agency in settings beyond the perceived stability of “Western” liberal democracies. Analyzing Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, and Yugoslavia over the twentieth century, the contributors provide a multi-faceted picture of refugee reception and aid, or its absence, across very different political regimes.

In this incisive book, Maria Todorova revisits the region she famously theorized, asking not only what has changed in the past thirty years but whether the conceptual tools used to understand the Balkans still make sense. Treating the Balkans as a historically contingent and ultimately transient construct, Todorova traces their rise, transformations, and anticipated exhaustion, while confronting long-standing silences—especially around race. She then turns a critical eye to Balkan studies itself, examining its institutionalization and the allure, limits, and misapplications of post- and decolonial frameworks. The final section shifts scale dramatically, using brief biographies to reveal how individuals are shaped—and distorted—by scholarly and political frames. Subtle, unsparing, and deeply reflective, this book reopens the epistemological question of the Balkans at a moment when easy paradigms have become impossible to sustain.

Russia’s war on Ukraine has been closely watched and widely debated worldwide. These discussions extend beyond the war itself to encompass its implications for the world order and the future of globalisation. This reader documents that debate by bringing together articles from all regions of the world published in newspapers, journals, magazines, and blogs between Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and Donald Trump’s election victory in 2024. The collection includes texts originally written in English as well as translations from Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Turkish, and Ukrainian. It offers reflections on international law and international organisations; postcolonial and decolonial critiques of power; rearmament, neutrality, and non-alignment; transregional religious solidarities; and the economic and environmental consequences of the war. As part of the series GWZO Studies on Central and Eastern Europe: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Culture, History, and the Environment, this reader seeks to provide new, nuanced, and multifaceted insights into the region within the broader context of global (dis)entanglements.

Notes from the EU's Eastern Edge is a bold, singular book—auto-ethnography with analytic bite, theoretically literate without scholasticism, and ethically self-aware. It shows how Kremlin “migration engineering” met a ready-made European script of fear, pride, and denial along the Belarus-Poland frontier. It traces how memory politics and securitized compassion turn migrants into symbols in border forests, as well as in newsrooms, museums, and classrooms, while bilingual gatekeepers launder hard edges into “responsible” discourse. The book’s core contribution is to shift Polish-populism studies from monist typologies to a processual account of a dialectical, polycentric regime of managed antagonisms, refusing the easy pejorative of “populism” and retaining an emancipatory horizon. Vivid reportage sits with compact documentary mini-cases to show how trauma, sovereignty and solidarity are being rewritten at Europe’s edge. Definitive for debates on borders, memory and the political unconscious in Central Europe.

During Russia revolutionary year of 1917, Emmeline Pankhurst and her secretary Jessie Kenney, both well-known suffragettes, traveled to the beleaguered country to talk with Russian women about suffrage, but also to persuade Russia to remain in the war. While there, Pankhurst and Kenney met many leading figures in Russia: Felix Yusupov, the ringleader in the murder of Grigorii Rasputin; members of the Provisional Government, including its president, Alexander Kerensky; and Maria Bochkareva, the commander of the Women’s Death Battalion. They spoke with officials from the YMCA and the Red Cross and gave talks to small groups of women in private homes. Throughout, Kenney kept a diary, which she later turned into a manuscript, “The Price of Liberty.” This volume introduces Kenney’s Russian diary to a general audience, offering a new perspective on the Russian Revolution and facilitating awareness of this unique episode in the story of the British suffrage movement.

This book explores constructions of the “good mother” within diverse nations and nationalisms, focusing on three contexts grappling with distinct forms of “demographic anxiety.” Inspired by Sara Farris’ inquiry into femonationalism and utilizing “maternalism” and “politics of care” as critical theoretical instruments, the book analyses the evolving political and social expectations imposed upon mothers in Lithuania, migrant mothers, including postsocialist migrant mothers from Central Asia and Caucasus in Sweden, and women in the militarizing authoritarian Russian state’s construction of maternity within its “traditional values” agenda. It also probes both how “good motherhood” is enacted and contested by individual mothers, as well as how it is mobilized in resisting conservative, ethnonationalist tendencies (in Sweden) and militarism (in the case of Russia). The book’s chapters illuminate the roles of political and social actors engaged with renegotiating materialist politics—such as grassroots birth activist movements and maternalist social policy campaigns—as well as those defying militarism.

In 1964, East Germany introduced an alternative, unarmed military service that recognized religious belief as a basis for conscientious objection. In a new category of military unit, pacifists performed construction tasks. While accepting a compromise to wear a military uniform, many construction soldiers (Bausoldaten) refused to conform to the military’s expectations. Some refused to take the service vow and to work on projects with a direct military orientation. They established the principle that there was more to Bausoldat service than simply getting through the eighteen months of wearing a uniform. As civilians, they continued their advocacy by forming networks and local peace groups that became the foundation of a broader social movement committed to peace. Drawing on oral history interviews, Party-State files, military and secret police documents, and church records, Constructing Peace focuses on the development of this activism amongst the first two cohorts of Bausoldaten in the mid-1960s.

This volume is the outcome of a collective research project examining collaborations among interwar Balkan and East-Central European feminist and women’s associations, as well as their engagement with intergovernmental alliances and diplomatic forums. It brings together thematic case studies on the Little Entente of Women, the Unity of Slavic Women, the Balkan Women’s Conferences, and women’s participation in the mainstream Balkan Conferences. The book explores how feminist cooperation intersected with national politics and diplomacy in the region, highlighting the efforts of the Little Entente of Women to promote a shared political and feminist agenda alongside other women’s and socialist collaborations. It also analyzes the reception and impact of these feminist actions in different national contexts and traces the activities of leading feminist figures across the region.Overall, the volume illuminates the intricate interplay between nationalism, feminism, pacifism, and internationalism, addressing key themes such as women’s citizenship, suffrage, labor rights, and the entanglements between socialism and feminism.

Women in Poland 1945–1989: Modernity, Equality, Communism offers a compelling and deeply researched exploration of women’s lives under state socialism in Poland. The book reveals how communist promises of emancipation intersected with everyday reality – shaping work, family life, political participation, and personal identity. It examines women’s political engagement, experiences of work in both urban factories and rural fields, the management of household and family life, childhood and education, as well as biopolitics and the evolving culture of beauty. Juxtaposing the Polish experience with developments across Europe in the second half of the twentieth century, this insightful study uncovers the ambitions, contradictions, and lived realities of communist projects directed at women.

On an August afternoon in 1910, a Polish nationalist gunned down an alleged Russian spy on the streets of Kraków. Afterward the murderer claimed that he had done a great deed for “Poland,” though no such country existed at the time. The press lionized the assassin, justifying his act as necessary for the defense of the nation. When the defendant stood trial, a jury composed of local citizens acquitted him, and he walked free.How does an ordinary, working-class man transform into a political executioner? And how does a society reach the tipping point where premeditated murder is celebrated as a civic duty?This gripping historical investigation unravels the environment and conditions of radicalization in fin-de-siècle Europe. Societal shifts, mass political movements, the popular press and espionage paranoia all contributed to a fearful community, wary of outsiders and ready to do anything to defend itself.

Using the foundational framework of political representation first introduced by Pitkin’s seminal book The Concept of Representation, this work explores the progress made within women’s political representation in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). After the region’s history and collective present are explored, later chapters discuss three countries, Serbia, Poland and Moldova, in greater depth. The work argues that despite the many durable challenges that women face in CEE, women politicians and activists continue to advocate for progress and, in some cases, succeed in passing meaningful reforms. But the fate of this progress remains tenuous, given the many pervasive and enduring challenges that exist in the region, including a rise in authoritarianism and accompanying right-wing populism. The book also situates the CEE region in a global context, recognizing that the impediments CEE women in politics face are shared by women in politics around the world, suggesting a difficult path ahead.

The authors of this volume challenge conventional notions about Habsburg and Czechoslovak politics, arguing that they were more democratic than they often appear. They use the consociational model of democracy as a means of combining political science and history. The theory, associated with Arend Lijphart, asserts that consociationalism guarantees minorities a say in government and helps preserve democracy in societies that experience deep ideological, cultural, or ethnic divisions. Consociationalism enables the main segments to be isolated organizationally from each other, thus avoiding conflict but affording the leaders opportunities to make compromises for the good of the whole. Consociationalism has proven its worth as a model for describing contemporary democracies and diagnosing their ills. By exploring the institutions and practices of the Habsburg Monarchy before 1918 and the Czechoslovak First Republic, Howe, Lorman, and Miller prove the value of the consociational theory in analyzing the past. They hold that a multitude of parties, frequent cabinet changes, and reliance on cabinets of experts do not necessarily signal flawed democracies. In fact, they are features of consociationalism. This volume challenges historians and social scientists to view the Austrian half of the Habsburg Monarchy before 1918 as evolving toward consociational democracy and the Czechoslovak First Republic as a fully consociational state.

Few thinkers have contributed more to the understanding of modern civilization than Norbert Elias. Given the significance and relevance of his ideas in explaining social reality, this book seeks to make his complex concepts more accessible. A biographical account of his life (1897-1990) facilitates the comprehension of Elias’s concepts. Elias’s most famous work, “The Civilizing Process”, is the focus of this discussion of his theoretical frameworks, with class structure, the patterns of behavior, and the role of the state as key factors. The book also dedicates special treatment to figurational sociology, an important research field linked especially to Elias. Elias was an innovator. He criticized accepted concepts and introduced numerous new constructs (habitus is perhaps the best known) discussed in this book. Respective chapters review Elias’s theory of knowledge, the concept of de-civilization—with an emphasis on violence, his analysis of nations and nationalism, and emotions—and his focus on shame. Elias borrowed ideas from iconic figures in philosophy and the social sciences such as Edmund Husserl, Karl Mannheim, Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, and Talcott Parsons. This book describes the characteristic way Elias interprets them. The book concludes with an overview of the most significant critiques of Norbert Elias's work.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 and people began to flee the country, the hospitality of neighbouring countries towards Ukrainians was set in stark contrast to their reluctance to accommodate refugees from Africa and the Middle East. Critics suggested that Europe was treating refugees from Ukraine better than those from the Global South, and attributed this difference to race. Using Romania as a case study, and drawing on fifty-one interviews with civil society stakeholders, community activists, and Romanian state officials, and twenty-five interviews with international students who were in Ukraine at the time of the invasion, Decentring Race complicates the story that singles out race as the primary factor in the categorization of refugees as either deserving or undeserving. Alongside nationality, ethnicity, religion, class, gender, and local racial politics, it brings to the fore geopolitical realities and the bipartite EU-Ukraine legislative framework as factors that shaped the granting of transnational mobility rights.

This edited volume focuses on the effects that Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine had on Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). It includes chapters covering fourteen countries situated in different corners of the broader region. Individual contributions shed light on how these CEE countries positioned themselves vis-à-vis the war and (re)defined their own regional identities and geopolitical belonging. The chapters offer a rich survey of the local discourses and perspectives, grasping the region in its persisting complexity and diversity.

The aggravating food shortage was the central internal crisis in Habsburg Austria during the First World War and posed a major challenge to the consolidation of the successor states. Nourishing Victory offers a fresh comparative perspective on food and the collapse and rebuilding of political legitimacy from the regional vantage point of the Bohemian Lands and Slovenia before and after 1918. Zooming in on multiple levels of society, the book explores how politicians, local officials, and grassroots protagonists navigated collapsing supply systems, relied on black markets, and sought to make sense of the chaos around them. Since this was a crisis of international proportions, the book also examines foreign food aid and the contradictions it entailed. At the same time, to emphasize the local dynamics of food supply and political legitimacy, it explores how food became a political weapon in struggles over contested borderlands such as Teschen Silesia and Prekmurje.

In 1921, the legendary American dancer Isadora Duncan arrived in post-revolutionary Russia with an audacious goal: to build a new kind of dance school for a new world. Already celebrated for her groundbreaking performances across the Russian Empire from 1904 to 1913, Duncan had become an influential figure in the cultural life of the Silver Age, inspiring artists, writers, and thinkers alike. This monograph offers a compelling exploration of Duncan’s Russian years—both before and after the October Revolution—drawing on rare archival sources and never-before-published Russian materials. It illuminates her artistic vision, her role in shaping early Soviet cultural debates, and the shifting political and aesthetic landscapes she navigated. From Silver Age reimaginations of antiquity to the rise of Socialist Realism and the modern revival of Duncan’s dance, this book traces the enduring legacy of a revolutionary artist in a world undergoing radical transformation.