Pilecki Institute Berlin; Jan Nowak-Jeziorański College of Eastern Europe in Wrocław (KEW); Stus Center (Стус Центр) (Web)
Zeit: 16.-17.11.2026
Ort: Pilecki Institute Berlin
Einreichfrist: 31.08.2026
A close reading of Ivan Dziuba’s classic 1965 essay Internationalism or Russification? offers a useful lens through which to understand a distinctive feature of Russian colonialism: its operation not only through discrimination and coercion, but also through the language of brotherhood. Written from within the Soviet system, this insight anticipated questions that postcolonial theory would not fully engage with for decades. It also serves as a reminder that Eastern and Central European intellectuals were thinking rigorously about imperial power long before postcolonial frameworks entered broader academic discussions of the region. The Making of Solidarity takes this intellectual tradition as its point of departure — not merely as historical background, but as a body of thought that continues to illuminate the present. To do so demands a particular approach to history: one that treats dissident thinking as a form of knowledge production in its own right, and that attends carefully to how the memory of dissidence has itself been shaped — which figures have been canonized, which forgotten, and by what institutional, political, and cultural processes those selections have been made.
The conference challenges the dominant understanding of Eastern European dissidence that took shape in international academia during the Cold War and became further entrenched in the years following 1989. This understanding tended to privilege figures who had already established networks in Paris or London, while overlooking workers and labor activists, as well as religious, national, and cultural communities whose resistance took different, less readily translatable forms. It elevated Russian voices, at times even those inflected with imperial nostalgia, while failing to fully recognize the anti-imperial thought of Ukrainian, Hungarian, Lithuanian, and other dissidents. The Making of Solidarity proposes a reorientation: toward those whose resistance has been harder to recover, and toward what Václav Havel famously described as “the power of the powerless”—the refusal of ordinary people across the full breadth of Eastern and Central Europe to live within a lie.
The conference also marks the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Polish Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR) in 1976—one of the most consequential initiatives to Continue reading
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Arbeitskreis Historische Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung (AKHFG); Interdisziplinäres Zentrum für Geschlechterforschung (IZG); Abteilung für Geschichtswissenschaft der Univ. Bielefeld 
traverse. Zeitschrift für Geschichte. Revue d’histoire 1/2028 
Fem*Fém 72 in Zusammenarbeit mit NADIA BRÜGGER (StopFemizid)