Bøger udgivet af Central European University Press

This collection of essays offers an analysis of the roots of the armed conflicts in the Donbas region of Ukraine, by exploring local society and traditions, interpreting recent events and assessing efforts to bring the war to and end. The book concludes with four key insights that could help to establish a durable peace in Donbas.

Despite an increase in the number of EU and government initiatives in their favor, the situation of Roma in Europe has only worsened.

Water potential is a significant natural wealth of most parts of the Balkans which gave rise to a surge in hydropower investments unparalleled across Europe. As part of the process, a dam was planned to be built on the Una River which runs through the Bosnian town of Bihac. This alarmed the city's residents, culminating in a protest in 2015. The book begins with this protest and it explores how the threat of dam construction transformed the seemingly apolitical love of the river into a powerful political force around which thousands of people mobilized: riverine citizenship.The book is based on interviews with stakeholders, archival research, and over twenty years of ethnographic investigations. The analysis focuses on the tension between ecological sustainability efforts in favor of renewable energy on the one hand, and citizens' historically shaped, deeply felt love for the river, on the other. The book examines how the language and promises of green transition often mask the forces of capitalist accumulation that drive this change -- whether in the form of building hydroelectric dams or promoting eco-tourism -- and thus set in motion another cycle of environmental degradation, social dispossession, and economic exploitation.

The volume offers a comparative and transnational exploration of women's work in the twentieth century, concentrating especially on the turbulent periods after both World Wars and the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s. The spatial focus of the analysis is the northeastern Adriatic region, which includes the border areas of Italy and Austria, Croatia, and Slovenia. The study is one of the results of an international research project carried out with the support of the European Research Council. The seven studies in the book represent a cross-section of specific professional groups of women. The spectrum ranges from female teachers, clerks, tobacco and textile workers to intellectual, artistic or entrepreneurial activities of women. Although "gender" is a central category of analysis in the book, the aspect of representativeness was also observed in relation to other social factors such as race, class, generations, educational and religious background, etc. The main question of the study was the extent to which new state affiliations, geopolitical boundaries, and the establishment of new political regimes affected the women's labor market in the three postwar constellations.

This is the story of the Habsburg Garrison at Trebinje in peace and war. Habsburg power was imposed upon Ottoman Bosnia and Hercegovina in 1878. Although the Trebinje citadel surrendered, there was resistance elsewhere. A new garrison was constructed, rapidly transforming Trebinje into a tree-lined city dominated by the army. In 1882, local guerrillas, mostly Orthodox, targeted the regimes's vulnerabilities but were rapidly defeated. Hospitals, cisterns, schools, roads, and railways were then built and educated soldiers produced new work on botany, geology, or archaeology in their spare time. There were peaceful years, but the 1914 assassination of Franz Ferdinand led to more persecution of the Orthodox. Border villages were burnt, people executed in public or deported to camps. Slowly the infrastructure failed, partly because shepherds had been attacked; food shortagesand news of military defeats left the Habsburg population beleaguered and they left rapidly at the end of 1918.

The chapters in this book represent successive phases of one story - that of Mariupol, formerly Ukraine's tenth largest city, and the second-largest in the Donbas region. The author, a young Slovak academic conducted her ethnographic fieldwork in this coastal town between November 2018 and August 2021, being among the last academics to research Mariupol before its invasion and ultimate occupation by Russia.During these years, Hana Josticová was overwhelmed by acts of mobilization and resistance that went in opposite directions: supportive of a pro-western direction of Ukraine's future, and the established status quo that the victory of the Euromaidan seemingly threatened.She noted the sequence of events presented in media pieces and through the lens of individual frames and narratives. Her book is a collection and interpretation of memories and testimonies from both sides: those who actively resisted Russian influence and those who sparked their own revolution, the 'Russian Spring.' The focus is on self-mobilized individuals who resorted to action outside of established organizational structures: spontaneously, autonomously, without resources and guarantees of safety. The evidence confirms that popular support for the Russian Spring had less to do with Russia than with the social, economic, or cultural characteristics of the Donetsk region. Years of immersive field research convinced Hana that individuals are as important as masses, ideas as powerful as material resources, and beliefs and emotions as critical as weapons.

Born in 1918, the First Czechoslovak Republic was keen to project a distinct image of the new state in others. Participation in World Fairs offered the perfect opportunity to make such an effort, which Czechoslovakia did not hesitate to seize. The comprehensive picture of Czechoslovak efforts at the largest international exhibition events of the interwar period is not, however, a mere survey of the national participation in world's fairs in a chronological sequence. Marta Filipová looks beyond the sleek façade of the modernist pavilions to examine the intersections of architecture, art and design with commercial interests, state agendas, individual action and the public, and offers a complex insight into the production and reception of national displays. The rich collection of images - mainly photographs - provides a closer look at the Czechoslovak pavilions. The design, content and context of the displays convey the idealized narrative, that was created for the fairs, and the myths on which the Czechoslovak nation and state were built. Heavy machinery, modern art, tourist destinations, or food and drink were presented as Czechoslovak, while many aspects of social life - particularly women or ethnic minorities - were strikingly underrepresented or absent. The book argues that the objects and ideas that the pavilion organizers put on display legitimized and validated the existence of the new state through the inclusion and exclusion of exhibits, people and ideas.While the book focuses on Czechoslovakia, it also offers substantial insight into how other emerging new nations projected and sustained their image during this historical period and how interwar world's fairs accommodated them.

In this book, Makarychev and Medvedev examine the importance of biopolitics in fueling Russia's confrontation with the West. In their view, the development of Putin's illiberal authoritarianism was largely triggered by what they call a biopolitical turn. This shift is exemplified by the use of an increasing number of regulatory mechanisms to discipline and constrain the human body. Such political practices concern issues of sexuality, reproductive behavior, adoption, fertility, family planning, public hygiene, and demography. This turn created a new disciplinary framework for the population and the elite. Bans and restrictions of a biopolitical nature, became one of the main tools for articulating the rules of belonging in the political community and drawing its political boundaries. Biopolitical discourses have taken up the core of the Russian identity formation, which contrasts a positive "conservative Russia" with a supposedly vicious "liberal West."The presentation of the political genealogy of the body-centric structures of power and hegemony in Russia implies their transformation from bio- to necropolitics. Necropolitical (repressive and life-depriving) components are inscribed in the biopolitical regimes of power: they form the core of Putin's rule over Russia and are a key factor behind the war against Ukraine.

The main issues arising from the encounter between Roma people and surrounding European society since the time of their arrival in Medieval Europe until today are discussed in this work. The history of their persecution and genocide during the Nazi era, in particular, is central to the present volume. Significantly, some authors sought to emphasize the continuing history of prejudice and persecution, which reached a peak during the Nazi era and persisted after the war. Current questions of social integration in Europe, as well as that of ethnic definition and the construction of ethnic-national identity constitute another principal pillar of the book. The complexity of issues involved, such as collective memory, myth-making and social constructionism, trigger intense debate among researchers dealing with Romani studies.

Alexander Tvardovskii was not only one of the finest, most popular and most important poets of his epoch, but also the editor of "Novy Mir", the most prominent Soviet literary journal of the post-war period until the 1970s. This book is a detailed biography of the writer and journal editor who probably changed the literary culture of the Soviet Union more than any other person in the two decades after Stalin's death. Geoffrey Hosking shows how Tvardovskii gradually evolved from being an ardent Stalinist who renounced his own so-called "kulak" family to becoming a convinced advocate of tolerance, an all-human morality, civil rights, and free literary creativity. By giving a balanced account of his strengths and weaknesses, his achievements and failures, the author succeeds in giving the fullest picture available anywhere of a controversial man who turns out to be more complex than he has been portrayed so far. To understand him better is to understand why the Soviet intelligentsia changed so fundamentally in the USSR's final decades, a change that helps to explain the rise of Gorbachev twenty years later. The study - which includes an in-depth analysis of Tvardovskii's major works - also helps to better understand the fate of culture under an authoritarian regime and the intricacies of the struggle against censorship.

"This memoir about the experiences of German occupation during the siege of Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) was written by Moscow-born Evdokiia Vasil'evna Baskakova-Bogacheva (1888-1976), an âemigrâe in Australia, at the age of eighty-one. The text had been forgotten in the Museum of Russian Culture in San Francisco since 1970 until the editors of this volume discovered it. ... After accounting her youth spent against the background of the First World War and of the two Russian revolutions of 1917, Evdokiia describes the inferno of the Nazi occupation as experienced in a suburb of Leningrad in 1941-43. She survived for nearly two years almost on the front line, within a few kilometers of the blockade ring. As a medical practitioner, she became useful for the occupational authorities and the ever-shrinking town population, until her family was evacuated to the west in October 1943. Besides hunger, discord, disease, [and] the hunt for food and firewood, along with violence and death, Evdokiia's account deals with various forms of cooperation between Soviet citizens and the new authorities"--Provided by publisher.

This novel is the first part of the Ukrainian Trilogy of Polish poet and novelist Józef Lobodowski. Written between 1955 and 1960, the action of the trilogy plays out, for the most part, in the Kuban areas of Russia. Here Ukrainian, Russian, and Cossack live alongside and interact with Tatar and Circassian; there was also a large influx of other nationalities subject to the Tsar, such as Armenians and Poles - to which latter nation belongs Stas (Stanislaw), the main character of the trilogy. The Thickets presents the reader with a vivid picture of the chaos that reigned in the former Russian Empire following the toppling and execution of the Tsar, and the fall of Kerensky's government. Young Stas, who had studied at the local classical gymnasium, is now reduced to peddling contraband on the black market, discovers to the reader's eyes the chaos of war and occupation in an especially visceral way.

"Assessing issues related to the Orthodox Church from an academic, secular point of view is a sensitive matter. However, through a kind of "methodological agnosticism," this volume has managed to tackle the subtle topic in a very delicate and value-neutral way. The book traces and interprets the mnemonic engagement of the Serbian Church with the memory of Serbian heroic victimhood in World War II. The author examines the motivations, forms, strategies, and outcomes of these activities in post-2000 Serbia, arguing that for late modern societies, a compact presence of the past in the present is of crucial importance. The search for a collective memory is particularly urgent in the face of societal uncertainty, to which Churches can provide an effective response. Religious institutions therefore often use their memory potential to reaffirm their public relevance. The Serbian Orthodox Church could develop a wide range of activities within the memory fields framed by the post-communist, post-conflict, and post-secular horizons. In doing so, the Church was motivated by its long-term goal of (re)establishing its position of power and (re)asserting its legitimacy in the public sphere of post-2000 Serbia. Its public engagement in this regard took liturgical and non-liturgical forms, often involving a hybrid fusion of the two. As a result, the author argues, the Church has become omnipresent at all levels of World War II-related memory production"--

"Andrâas Koerner is the author of a number of critically acclaimed, award-winning CEU Press titles on the cultural history of Hungarian Jews and Jewish cuisine. This volume continues that tradition by discussing the phenomenon of exhibits on Jewish culinary culture in museums and galleries around the world.The first part of the book provides an overview of the cultural history of "foodism" and the proliferation of Jewish museums. In addition, it examines the role of cuisine in Jewish identity. It offers an analysis of the history and recent examples of exhibitions on Jewish culinary culture, a subject that has not received scholarly attention until now.The second part complements this by offering a detailed case study of the book's subject. It showcases a 2022 exhibition in Budapest on the History of Hungarian Jewish Culinary Culture. Andrâas Koerner was the co-curator of the show, thus he is able to offer an insider's account of its implementation - concept, scope, goals, audience, and design. He also openly discusses the compromises made and mistakes committed in the exhibition's preparatory work.This subjective account, quite different from the dry objectivity of catalogues, offers an unusual, behind-the-scenes look at how a complex exhibition like this is prepared. At the same time, the book's appendix includes images of the display boards and some of the exhibited objects - thus it can also stand for a valuable ex-post catalogue"--

"Bijeg" is a novel by the Croatian writer Milutin Cihlar Nehajev, here translated into English by Damir Janigro with the title "Fugue." Regarded as a paramount example of Croatian literature from the Modernist era, it offers a captivating portrayal of the culture in pre-World War I Austro-Hungary. The story revolves around Duro, a talented and aspiring writer who abandons his studies in Vienna to take up a teaching position in Senj, a small coastal town in Croatia. Duro's aspirations include marrying a woman from Zagreb, but his plans are thwarted when her family objects due to the absence of the inheritance he had hoped for from his deceased uncle. The central theme of the novel explores the struggles faced by a gifted and principled individual in an inhospitable environment that often fails to comprehend his efforts to improve the world. The male and female characters are well-crafted and captivating, and the novel contains breathtaking descriptions of the natural beauty of the Croatian coast.

"A complex array of individual responses to the abuse of power by the state is represented in this book in three horrific episodes in the history of East-Central Europe. The three events followed each other within a span of about ten years: the deportation and murder of Hungarian Jews in Nazi death and labor camps; the Arrow Cross terrorist rule in Budapest; and finally the Stalinist terror in Hungary and East-Central Europe. Through the prism of survival, Lâaszlâo Borhi explores the relationship between the individual and power, attempting to understand the mechanism of oppression and terror produced by arbitrary, unbridled power through the experience of normal people. Despite the obvious peculiarities of time and place, the Hungarian cases convey universal lessons about the Holocaust, Nazism, and Stalinism. In the author's conception, the National Socialist and Stalinist experiences are linked on several levels. Both regimes defended their visions of the future against social groups whom they saw as implacable enemies of those visions, and who therefore had to be destroyed for sake of social perfection. Furthermore, the social practices of National Socialism were passed on. And although Stalinism was imposed by a foreign power, some of the survival skills for coping with it were rehearsed under the previous hellish experience"--

The life of Töhötöm Nagy (1908-1979), Jesuit, Mason, and secret service agent, offers fascinating insights into interwar Hungary, the Catholic Church and Vatican diplomacy, Freemasonry, and the activities of communist state security service.As a young Jesuit Nagy was one of the leaders of a successful Catholic youth movement in interwar Hungary. After World War II he played an important role acting as an intermediary between the Vatican, the Red Army, and the Hungarian Catholic Church. After being sent to South America, he was attracted by liberation theology, but left the Society of Jesus, joined the Freemasons, and did social and philanthropic work in the slums of Buenos Aires. However, in the late 1960s he agreed to work for the Hungarian state security service in return for his repatriation. This latter period is reconstructed from the files of the Historical Archives of State Security in Budapest. Éva Petrás writes with empathy but with a sense of distance of the courage and restless energy of her subject. Her discussion of the limits of free choice and Nagy's intense struggle to live a meaningful life make this biography breathtaking.