The editors of Ab Imperio invite contributions to the journal's annual program in 2010.
For information on the journal, contact addresses and description of issues,please, visit http://abimperio.net or contact the journal editors directly at office@abimperio.net
Ab Imperio 2010: Friends, Foes, and Neighbors: Ascribing Meaning to Imperial Political, Economic, and Social Order
Visions of friend and foe remain focal points for studies of different processes, from formation of individual and collective identities to the making of a state's foreign policy. The "friend-foe" binary pair is immediately recognized as one of the most basic anthropological oppositions that structure the boundaries of individuals and groups. The image of the enemy serves as an important factor in defining the limits of political communities and in legitimizing sovereignty and political independence. For contributions to the four thematic issues of Ab Imperio in 2010, the editors invite prospective authors to shift their attention from the ontology and structuralist symmetry of the opposition of "friend-foe" to the fluctuations of the roles of "friend" and "foe"
and these roles functionality in imperial situation. The editors suggest exploring images and functions of "friend" and "foe" in the multilayered and heterogeneous imperial context. This allows us to discover and describe situations when a "friend" simultaneously appears to be a "foe"
(e.g., the Pole as a Slav and the Pole as an enemy of Russian imperial statehood).
We can also detect situations in which these very basic dichotomies lose their specific content and their normative component. Consider the category of "neighbor." Is "neighbor" a "friend" or "foe," or is the concept of "neighbor" associated with one of the poles depending on the situation and the intention of historical actors? Is there room for the category of stranger," a neutral social interlocutor, in the repertoire of social experience? In other words, instead of elusive structural statics we are interested in the historical dynamics of the imperial socio-political,cultural, and economic experience. This experience is reflected in discursive (and not only discursive) attachments and repulsions of groups, societies, and states.
In contrast to the ideals of multiculturalism and tolerance that dominate today's social sciences, historians have done much to show that past experience significantly deviates from these norms. How images of the enemy and of external danger were used for supporting and legitimizing political communities, national distinctiveness, and patriotic mobilization during wars and political crises has all been studied especially thoroughly. One cannot imagine today's nationalism studies without thematic foci on hostility, repulsion, resentment, and perceived dangers of the extinction of political independence and cultural distinctiveness of the national body. While recognizing the importance of these aspects of solidarity and conflict in past experience, the editors of Ab Imperio are proposing that we think about those (not necessarily obvious) important roles and situations that find themselves in the unmarked space between the extreme poles of friendship and animosity. Is there a difference between the experience of perceiving otherness and translating cultural differences into full-blown alienation and orientalization? Which particular levels of understanding of "friendship" and "familial ties" can be seen when we reconstruct developments of pan-ideologies, such as pan-Islamism, pan-Slavism, pan-Turkism? How different are projects of various political unions, commonwealths, and "common spaces?" What is the semantics and functionality carried by the categories of practical political language, such as Stalin's or revolutionary France's "enemy of the people" (and the French "friend of the people" conspicuously absent from the Soviet parlance), American "enemy of the state," Soviet "friendship of peoples"and "community of historical destiny?"
The dynamic and contextual interpretations of the "friend-foe" opposition allow one to overcome the inertia of a research method aimed at "natural"limits of sovereignty and national community. It also allows us to closely explore the historical experience of hybrid, confederative, and consociationist forms of political unions and identities. Despite the fact that the sovereign nation-state continues to be perceived as the main and almost "natural" political form, today's world order is not only composed of the mosaic of monochrome nation-states one sees on the map. Both inside and outside these political spaces there existed and continue to exist complex and mutually untranslatable hierarchies, incongruities, and lines of attachments and repulsions. The discourse of friendship and Hobbesian hostile anarchy that dominates analyses of foreign policy cannot reflect those lines of division and association. Hence, the search for a corrective in the form of analytical language capable of describing processes of encounters, conflict, and cooperation in the imperial situation is on our research agenda.
Consequently, in 2010 the focus of the journal will be on the practices of marking solidarity and differences and on motivations for these practices, from anthropological aspects of social interaction to the sphere of foreign policy.
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