The article deals with the memoir of gulag survivor and political prisoner Liziko (Elisabed) Kavtaradze. It discusses the hierarchies and power relations within the camp system by drawing boundaries between the inmates and functions as a successful medium for the author to reconstruct herself as an intellectual.

The Neighbourhood Europeanisation is argued to be instrumental for the diffusion of the European values in Ukraine and increased attachment of the Ukrainian population towards Europe. The paper inquires how the idea of Europe has evolved and has been perceived in Ukraine since the country’s independence. Mixed methods approach combining both qualitative and quantitative methods are employed in this paper in order to draw on the theoretical underpinnings of the Europeanisation process and better explore Europeanisation narratives in Ukraine. Based on survey data, the analysis depicts how the idea of Europe has acquired legitimacy in the eyes of Ukrainians.

The following text analyzes the reception of the very significant theological concept of dwelling Jesus’ in the apocryphal Acts of Thomas and tries to underline the dynamics of this reception as re-contextualization with Jesus, one of his attributes or the Holy Spirit in the center. The dwelling expressed first of all through σκηνόω/ἐν-σκηνόω/ κατα-σκηνόω is linked with the activity and manifestation of Jesus as Logos and of the Holy Spirit. Meanwhile refers also οἰκέω/κατοικέω to the gradual dwelling of Jesus and his Holy Spirit in the bodies
and souls of people. Nevertheless, implies dwelling also a human action.

The present article inquires into the philosophical conceptions of spontaneity and chance, fate and necessity, free will and divine providence employed by Nikephoros Gregoras (d. ca. 1360) in his historiographical project Historia Rhōmaïkē. Based on examples from Gregoras’ letters, First Antirrhetics and his History, the author argues that Gregoras drew on Aristotle and Ptolemy for his
views on chance and spontaneity, whereas with respect to historical agency and causality, he emphasized the role of the free individual will which he understood as independent from necessity and fate and reconciled with divine foreknowledge.

The aim of the present paper is a critical evaluation of Virgil Madgearu’s economic ideas from the perspective of classical liberalism. As the paper emphasizes, in the light of the classical liberal tradition, Madgearu’s ideas appear as having an obvious anticapitalistic blend, although without embracing the socialist perspective. Madgearu advocates a middle of the road policy or government intervention in the market economy, in the middle of an age with splendid scientific contributions in favor of the free market.

L’article se propose de reconstituer le rôle de Kilia dans la vie économique de l’Europe orientale au bas Moyen Âge. Il considère plus précisément le devenir de ce comptoir de la deuxième moitié du XIVe siècle, quand il se trouve aux mains de la commune de Gênes, à son intégration à l’Empire ottoman, sur la fin du XVe siècle (1484). Pendant la période envisagée, la vocation marchande de la ville évolue considérablement. Sous la domination génoise, Kilia devient l’un des comptoirs où les esclaves, le grain, la cire et le miel des rives septentrionales de la Mer Noire sont embarqués vers Péra, Constantinople et Gênes. Sous le gouvernement moldave, elle se transforme en marché international du poisson, exporté avant tout en Pologne, mais aussi en Transylvanie. La conquête ottomane, si traumatisante, favorise toutefois énormément l’économie locale: à la fin du XVIIe siècle, Kilia est devenue le plus important lieu de pêche le long du Danube. Sur le marché de la ville, on peut trouver chaque jour au moins mille deux cents grands esturgeons et silures glanes, ainsi que du caviar. Les acheteurs viennent de Constantinople, de la Pologne, de la Hongrie et de la Moldavie.

This article focuses on issues of knowledge migration across disciplinary borders, and represents an extended case study in “mode 2” knowledge production (Gibbons et al. 1994), which presupposes multi-disciplinary teams working to solve a specific research problem. Within this theoretical framework I am analyzing the metamorphoses of archaeological knowledge when incorporated into historical narratives and blended with historical knowledge, and when used, together with the latter, to produce so-called “realistic” visual models of ancient monuments. I attempt to redefine archaeological epistemology from two different, but converging perspectives, with similar underpinning issues of knowledge transfer and compatibility. The aim is to produce a theoretical device that may help to bridge the conceptual gap between different categories of data, between e.g. marble tesserae found in the trench, the talk of luxury in literary sources, and reconstructions of baths with opus sectile decoration. The urgency of the topic also comes from archaeology’s new approach to outreach, as well as from the heated debate around the impact of
interdisciplinarity on archaeology today. Importantly, the two paradigms, textual and artefactual, must be analyzed in terms of commensurability. It is often assumed that they are directly comparable, where in fact they speak different languages. A middle-range theory is needed to overcome the issue of the perceived incommensurability between them. The main case study used is that of the ancient site of Troy.

This article addresses the relationship between personal identity, political commitment and scholarship in the biography of anthropologist John Victor Murra (Isaak Lipschitz). Born in 1916 into a Russian‑Jewish family in Odessa, he grew up, studied and became involved in Communist politics in Romania before his departure for Chicago in 1934. His 1956 Ph.D. thesis at University of Chicago on the Inca state helped Murra to become an influential figure in the field of Andean anthropology. Based on archival work and several testimonies, this article traces the influence of his upbringing and political commitment on his academic career.

In post-1918 national states, cultural and educational policies were subordinated to the strengthening of the nations. Romania also implemented thorough cultural and educational reforms by extending the school network and by unifying the education systems in the new provinces. Youth became an important link in the state actions designed to transform the profile of Greater Romania from a
heterogeneous multi-ethnic state to a consolidated national entity. High school youth was assigned with strategic roles, as it represented the recruitment pool of the middle class, contributing to the formation of the bureaucracy, and even of the intellectual, political and economic elite. Thus, starting from the idea that the adolescent society was the future adult society, the state strived to prepare the
youth in the spirit of discipline and nationalism. This study analyzes high school youth and educational policies in interwar Romania, from the perspective of the power relation between school authorities and adolescents. By using a great amount of laws, regulations, and archives, the aim of this demarche is to show how discipline worked as an instrument connecting nation building process in a multiethnic state, educational policies and youth.

Focusing on the regulations of the wine-tax, my article engages the role of such documents in the transformation of the state in Wallachia from 1740 to 1831 in a context determined to a large extent by the Ottoman fiscal pressure. By analyzing the form, content, and employment of the regulations, I claim that the princely power expanded its area of routine intervention in society. At the same
time the regulations, while sanctioning the extant social hierarchy, subjected it to the “law” and produced the notion of a homogenous state territory, divided in counties. The main argument is that the fiscal regulations accelerated the transition from the judicial princedom, mainly arbitrating disputes among his subjects, to a more interventionist administrative princedom.

The article discusses two far right movements that took part in the Ukrainian revolution in 2014. The author argues that, although the fact of the involvement of the far right in the revolution cannot be denied, the Russian media deliberately exaggerated this involvement to discredit the opposition to former President Viktor Yanukovych. Thus, the article provides a more nuanced picture of the Ukrainian far right before, during and immediately after the revolution. This research draws on the interviews conducted by the author, video and photographic evidence, online and offline publications, results of public opinion polls, and secondary literature on the Ukrainian far right.

Ethnographic research among a Gypsy population from Transylvania, the Cortorari provides me with insights for advancing the theorization of Gypsies’ attitudes towards temporality, and the understanding of their survival as a group.
Contrary to other Romany people who are uninterested in the material world around them, and whose attitudes towards time are informed by a presentist orientation, the Cortorari convey a strong commitment to the ownership of some objects of wealth and status, namely the chalices. Practices related to the possession of chalices reveal a stance on time which accommodates pulls towards the past, the present, and the future. Coming from the ancestors, chalices circulate as male heirlooms, and are central to practices of marriage. What is critical about chalices is that, on a temporal dimension, they secure permanence and immutability. I look at how different kinds of time, memory and historicity relate to each other and are weaved into the social reproduction of the group.

Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms offered the theoretical framework for a unified study of culture, including such nonrational forms assumed by human understanding of the world as mythical thinking. At the same time, Cassirer defended the role of mathematics and natural science as models of rationality in the Kantian sense. This paper offers a discussion of the role of mathematics in Cassirer’s philosophical project, given the fact that he first developed the notion of symbolic form in order to account for the rationality of theory change in physics. The historical perspective of Cassirer’s approach suggests that rationality depends not so much on the assumptions of some specific theory as on the unifying power of mathematical method. He argued for a model of rational thinking which, owing to its symbolic character, can be articulated in various ways without being contradicted by the fact that there are different symbolic forms.

This research intends to contribute to historical household studies for Moldavia and Wallachia, taking on an approach still new in Romanian historiography: micro-analysis of population samples. We used data from two 19th century censuses (1838 and 1859) to help develop a historical paradigm as an alternative to a field in which sociologic theories elaborated since the 1930s are still Influential. While not perfect, our results show that knowledge on this subject can be improved through a systematic demographic approach. There is great
potential to reconceptualize the inner workings of the household and to connect them both with international frameworks, as well as to different socio-economic contexts of the age, otherwise ignored.

This paper argues that a cautious anti‑Jewish sentiment developed contours among the Soviet state’s bureaucracy during the German‑Soviet war and gradually solidified after the end of the war. Popular antisemitism among the various lower strata was the first to appear on the Soviet territory during this period, and it was primarily nourished by Nazi propaganda and the difficulties caused by the prolonged war. The same cannot be said about Soviet state officials. The latter’s anti‑Jewish sentiment was primarily a reaction to the “hardening” of Jewish identity among Soviet Jewry and the mobilization of Jewish elites for promoting the rights and
interests of their co‑ethnics.

Georgia has been the world frontrunner in terms of economic reforms. Its economy experienced a double digit growth before the 2008 crisis and it has been the receiver of a record high volume of the foreign direct investments. However, the small and medium size enterprises of Georgia are among the most inefficient in the world, which prevents the inclusive development of a narrow market thus creating the risks of a spiralling downturn. Romania too has been among the fastest growing European Union economies. Despite the impressive growth of the national income, Romania experiences severe uneven growth across its regions. The existing surveys of the small and medium enterprises do not give an answer to such “abnormalities”; however, they give an impression that the current failure is created due to the “transitional process” of the economies of both countries, among other reasons.
The aim of this paper is to research the event in detail through the qualitative methodology, to be able to identify very specific reasons for this deviation and develop a theory based on the empirical findings which would explain or contradict the “transitional” phenomena. Also, to identify the specific drivers – the categories behind the “transitional” process that have strong negative influence over the developments of small and medium size enterprises. The research used unstructured as well as semi‑structured interviewing
instruments to identify the positive and negative impact factors. The findings suggest the “transitional” process from the socialist bloc countries to the market economies has strongly negative input in the enterprises development; however the findings also suggest that the relative underdevelopment during the “socialist governance” does not play an important role; it is rather its economic structure
prohibiting individual entrepreneurship that is the most negative muddling force. In addition, the in‑depth interviews suggest that in both countries the “socialist past” has been an additional disruptive layer to the already existing social‑economical texture, thus its sole role might be exaggerated. It also suggests the governments were passive in correcting the “distortion” and the correction or transition process was left on its own, however heavily contributed to by other economic partners. The findings fully support a holistic approach theory. Based on the findings it is possible to conclude that the pro‑active “holistic involvement” approach is the only viable solution to improve the development speed of the small and medium enterprises in Georgia and Romania.

The present contribution interprets the results of the statistic of explicit sources employed in the first volume of Pelbartus of Themeswar’s Rosarium. This author was a late 15th century Hungarian Observant Franciscan who wrote a number of texts that were real “bestsellers” in his time and in the century following his death. The Rosarium is his work of theoretic theology and the one closest to what might be called a medieval philosophical endeavor. By seeing who he quotes and in what way, we get to showcase his doctrinal preference for the Scotist school and, as a bonus, identify some of the works that the 15th century library of the “Saint John” Observant convent of Buda, where he worked during the last period of his life, owned.

The specific aim of this article is to make as clear as possible the structural, socio-cultural differences between the Romanian literature before 1990 and after, integrating examples (Romanian writers) that are not only representing “artistic” exceptions, but also general cultural rules. That is why important and representative Romanian writers such as Marin Preda or Nichita Stănescu, Norman Manea or Mircea Cărtărescu, Radu Aldulescu or Dan Lungu have been selected. The interest is in examining (and making visible) the contexts in which our writers manifested and constructed themselves. I am referring to social and ideological contexts, material determinations and implications, not “ideal” and idealistic ones.

The 2014 referendum in Scotland, which brought victory for unionists, was characterised by a high level of involvement of religious organisations. Most Christian Churches chose to be neutral on the referendum dilemma; this was inspired by prevailing viewpoints among the clergy, who objected Scottish independence. Analysing the stance of the Church of Scotland, Roman Catholic Church, Episcopal Church of Scotland, and Free Church of Scotland, I argue in this paper that the chosen path of neutrality played more in favour of unionists. The Churches’ influence on the referendum’s outcome was far beyond statistical error: had Churches publicly supported independence, it would have been likely that Edinburgh would now be negotiating the terms of “divorce” with London.

This paper discusses the nature and purpose of foreign assistance in the Western Balkans through an examination of donor strategies and practices for supporting civil society. It draws on a series of interviews with donor representatives across the region to challenge the current conceptualisations of foreign assistance as a tool for promoting democracy and building good governance. I argue that donor intervention in the region should be understood as a short-term support to the region’s integration in the EU, rather than a long-term developmental project. As a result, donor practices have contributed to the emergence of a project-based,
donor-driven NGO scene that is detached from the local communities.

The topic of this project lies at the intersection of philosophy, cultural history and, to some extent, history of literature and art. Its starting point is the thesis that making historical promises – i.e. describing a future state of society/humanity based on an explanation of what has lead to their current situation – has been the very driving force of modern philosophy. But this is a project of cultural history because, instead of focusing on the conceptual content of modern philosophy, it attempts:
a) to clarify the role that modern philosophy – as a philosophy of promise – has assumed within the cultural space of modern society and to distinguish the structure of its promissory work from other kinds of cultural promises in modern societies, such as the promises of societal change made by certain avant-garde movements;
b) to determine why contemporary philosophy has drifted away from the historical promissory work that had undergirded its discourse for almost two centuries.

At the Plenum session of the CC of the RCP of April 1968, Alexandru Drăghici, minister of Internal Affairs and head of Securitate between 1952-1965 was identified as the main responsible for the crimes and abuses that took place in the Gheorghiu-Dej era. With this occasion, he and his associates have produced an important corpus of documents regarding the political violence in Romania. This study analyzes those narratives with the purpose of identifying the main justifications given by Drăghici and others officers of Securitate for what they
had done

The paper discusses the features of witch‑hunts in the ethnically and religiously diverse society of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The sources demonstrate the involvement of some Christian (German, Russian) and non‑Christian (Jewish, Tatar) minority groups in witch accusations in different roles: as accusers, defendants or suspects. The specifics of their involvement originate from their social and economic roles as well as from their cultural traits. The article attempts to explore the reasons for the accusations, the variety of beliefs about witchcraft and strategies to counter it and also the way they reflected the relations between the mentioned aliens and the surrounding majority.

The purpose of this research is to examine whether and in what sense one could identify an apophatic approach to the human being in Augustine’s writings. It also explores the relationship between the negative theology and the negative anthropology in Augustine’s thinking. Augustine’s conception of human interiority as dwelling place of the divine, his reflections on the deepness of the heart, on
illumination, on transfiguration through love or divinisation of the human being, bring to light fundamental traits of a genuine apophatic discourse.

This article investigates the political and social role of the song Die Wacht am Rhein in the context of the Great War and focuses on its presence in the Transylvanian Saxons’ repertoire. I examine the social and political connotations of its performance before and during the Great War. I demonstrate how the song was instrumentalized to serve the processes of mobilization and how it was able to keep up the morale of both combatants sent to fight and of the ones on the home front. I insist on the capacity of the song to be integrated in a polyphony of national repertoires and even to transgress ethnic borders. I also show the migrating power of the metaphor of “border watch” and its capacity to overlap various other geographical and political realities from the Eastern front.

This paper has three objectives: first, to propose that it is philosophically propitious to understand madness as a problem of the order of meaning. Second, to illustrate the intrinsic link between madness and meaning in Michel Foucault’s History of Madness,
1 in which he suggests that the changing nature of madness renders impossible any talk of the meaning of madness. Third, to foreground the shortcomings of Foucault’s account and to provide an alternative approach to the meaning of madness, drawing on a handful of key concepts from Edmund Husserl’s work and centering on a notion of madness as meaning‑distortion.

Jenia Isaac, a secondary character in Mircea Eliade’s novel “Maitreyi,” decides to come to Bucharest around 1990 upon reading the novel, because she wants to see the places associated with the author. She debates, with her young guide (and Eliade scholar) Andrei Florescu, the nature of her relationship with Eliade and what it means to be a secondary character. Their interaction forces Andrei to make a momentous decision that will impact the rest of his life.

I argue that direct attention has a limited disclosive capacity. First, I argue that there are certain phenomena that direct attention is
fundamentally incapable of disclosing, since there exists a fundamental tension between the nature of these phenomena on the one hand and direct attention on the other. Second, I show that situations in which we aim to access our own higher‑order thought processes constitute a further category of cases in which direct attention is limited. Third, I argue, drawing on Heidegger, that direct attention is not only limited when we aim to gain knowledge of ourselves and our own minds, but also with respect to knowledge of our existence and the world around us.

In 1859 the Russian Empire’s new policy for answering the “Jewish Question” makes an important development. The “merger” policy was supported by Jewish intellectuals and became a window of opportunity for tens of thousands of migrants. Migrant Jews had only one chance—personal integration into a society beyond the Strip of Settlement. However, migrants actually “brought” with them all social institutions typical of the traditional Jewish community. Between the Jewish population of Kharkiv and the local authorities there had been a certain model of relations which may be considered typical of the southern regions of the Russian Empire. The authorities and Jews mostly tried to avoid clashes. However, this in no way meant equal dialogue, and force was applied at will.

The goal of this paper is to come up with an interpretation of miracles based on the thought of the Byzantine theologian Saint Maximus the Confessor (580-655). The thesis championed here is that Maximus’ conception of the dyothelite dogma of Christ’s two energies and wills provides us with a consistent interpretation of miracles from both a theological and philosophical point of view. The argument shows that by following Maximus’ conceptual tools for the formation of the dyothelite dogma together with some of his reflections about miracles one can consistently interpret miracles as the change of the modes of existence of beings.

With this study, I intend to focus on the challenges of secularization and spiritualization impacting the traditional ways in which most people approach death in contemporary Romania. As it has become all the more evident after Colectiv nightclub tragedy, Romanians’ religiosity can no longer be un-problematically linked to institutional religion. If the growing number of non-dogmatic experiences of the sacred and, consequently, the multiplication of personal death ways have long been an acknowledged reality in the Western world, Romania is still uncomfortably stuck in the interstice between two major death patterns (traditional and modern) both being perceived as menacing and unconvincing. This may have led to conflicting versions of “good death” that have created small, unstable comfort zones, and fast, unpredictable swings from meaningful to meaningless versions of dying.

In eighteenth-century classical theory, the notion of architectural order was formed by the gradual distillation of the vitruvian formula (genus), the Renaissance interpretations and debates of the Academy. Although present in Vitruvius, the possibility of the extension
of the canon of the five orders generates, during the seventeenth-eighteenth centuries, a long series comprising variants of a new order – the national order. In this context, the project of the architect Ribart de Chamoust, developed in his theoretical work of 1783, deals with a singular conception of French order that goes against the decorative remodelation of its predecessors and defines it as a constructive system. In addition, he imagines a possible  adaptation of the “primitive cabin” to the Cartesian rigor of the architectural order, by creating links with the Discourse of the Enlightenment on nature.

This paper outlines the impressive circulation of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) at the beginning of the twentieth century in Europe. In particular, the paper deals with the topic of translation from another translation and analyzes the French, German, Russian, and Bulgarian sources of the Romanian translation of Walden in order to offer a better understanding of the circulation of literary
texts, of their impact on national literary histories, and of their global influence.

This chapter investigates how the EU’s human rights conditionality operates in the enlargement context, and what is its real impact in the target countries on existing human rights practices. The fundamental question about the efficiency of conditionality is ultimately whether it can induce the transformation of existing norms and practices going beyond formal compliance. First, the
various inconsistencies characterizing the EU’s human rights promotion will be reviewed here, because the resulting lack of credibility seems to undermine this transformative effect. The second half of this chapter will demonstrate how these inconsistencies play out in an actual case through studying the EU’s conditionality policy in Bosnia and Herzegovina before 2008. It will be shown that the credibility of conditionality policy was seriously compromised during this period as the EU practically accepted partial measures, which were never quite enough for putting the reforms in place as they were originally intended.

In this paper, I investigate how industrialization and urbanization changed Western— and East‑Central Europe between the mid‑nineteenth and mid‑twentieth. I aim to analyze the relationship between economic development and their environmental consequences in Great Britain, Germany, and Hungary. I aim to point out the connection between extensive economic development
and environmental pollution, and to show the uniformity of industrial and urban changes and their environmental consequences, whether they unfolded in Western–, or in East‑Central Europe.

With some exceptions, research on development-forced displacement and resettlement has been confined to a theoretical ghetto, virtually severed from explicit social scientific reflection. While the processes accompanying displacements are of staggering magnitude and complexity, the theoretical tools to approach them are relatively rudimentary. This paper suggests that the injection of an explicit theoretical point of view and the articulation of a new argument could revitalize the social scientific imagination in understanding displacement and resettlement. By drawing on Georg Simmel’s reflections on the stranger at the turn of the twentieth century, the
paper suggests a possible interpretation of displacement in the form of a dialectic of estrangement which, it is assumed, accompanies displacements caused by development projects. The three moments of the dialectic – the making of the developer stranger, the estrangement of the locals and the new strangers – show how discontinuities emerge in the experience of resettlement. The main implication of this approach is that the complexities and ethical issues arising from development-induced displacements could be more adequately understood if resettlers are viewed as individuals capable of performing their stranger roles in highly variable ways.

The paper examines the exemplary films of the Soviet “Thaw” cinema in light of Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the crisis of the action-image elaborated in the context of post-war European cinema. I argue that, besides aberrant movement as the key characteristic of such a crisis, Thaw cinema could be characterized by other tendencies, such as the proliferation of films foregrounding the sublime action-image, as well as its radical enfeeblement in the 1970s, which similarly testify to the overall crisis of the Soviet action-image. The ambiguous or aporetic form of the Thaw action-image, which both celebrates the sublime revolutionary spirit and emphasizes its utter futility at the same time, serves to problematize the dogmatic aesthetic of socialist realism, as well as helps us explain the constitutive contradictions of Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization.

This paper discusses one representative segment of the Serbian interwar conservative identity discursive formation. Being transposed to the Serbian interwar context, European spiritual, cultural and socio-political crisis frames such a discursive configuration that implies diverse programmatic strategies for its overcoming.The analysis of this “conservative palingenesis” permutation in Serbian context would be organized around the set of rhetorical figures and would-be analytical devices, such as: counter-adamism, doubled-liminality and substance without form.

This paper addresses the aesthetic appreciation of indigenous creative practices, with a focus on the mental processes at play in such acts of appreciation. My hypothesis is that to develop an understanding of human cognition through art, it might be useful to look at art more expansively, by considering creative practices that are not usually within the purview of Western philosophical systems. More
specifically, I will draw on examples from indigenous societies of the Pacific Northwest that encompass everything from utilitarian objects to ritual artefacts used in ceremonial circumstances and dance performances etc. to argue that aesthetic appreciation is shaped by a shared cognitive repertoire1 of processes and capacities.

This article focuses on a corpus of late-medieval documents, the fiscal accounts (computi) of the castellanies, or territorial-administrative units, of the principality of Savoy. Its aim is to shed new light on the possibilities for interpreting the data of the computi. Because of their wealth of detail about institutional reform and socio-economic trends, the Savoyard castellany accounts represent an extraordinary source for medievalists. And yet, although significant contributions in the last two decades have advanced our understanding of institutional reform and societal change in late-medieval Savoy, the computi must still be ranked among the least
explored medieval manuscripts.1 In part this is due to the sheer volume of the evidence and the history of its archival conservation in the twentieth century. But in my opinion the underlying cause of this neglect has to do with the challenge of devising an interpretive framework that makes the most of the primary data. This involves analyzing the manuscripts’ structure and internal logic in conjunction with the institutional practices based on them, and tracing the effects of the institutional reforms on both the political designs of the House of Savoy and the socio-economic life of local communities. This exploratory essay addresses itself precisely to this task.

On 19 August 1937, the Romanian daily newspaper Curentul published a virulent anti-Semitic statement of Miron Cristea, the patriarch of the Orthodox Church. Cristea claimed to have spoken those words to a delegation of British Jews during his 1936 visit to the United Kingdom. The visit was the culmination of a decade of intense interfaith relations between the Anglican and the Romanian Orthodox
Churches. This article explores the context and content of the visit. It also examines the reactions of the Anglican Church to Miron Cristea’s anti-Semitism and its effect on the bilateral relations between the two Churches.

When the Ottoman Empire entered into the ongoing Great War in Fall 1914, the Euxine Sea became a new theater of naval operations in WWI. The struggle between the Imperial Russian and Ottoman navies (this latter reinforced by the German Mediterranean Naval Division) was heated in the following years of WWI, with Bulgaria joining the Central Powers in 1915 and Romania siding with the
Entente in 1916 albeit the former two empires and their naval forces remained as the principal actors of operations. Based on a multi-national documentation, this article aims to analyze, compare and assess the naval assets, capabilities and strategies of the Ottoman and Russian empires in the Black Sea in WWI.

The paper explores to what extent the Transnational Humanitarian assistance for the Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s shaped the post‑communist transformations of the social sector, using as case study the humanitarian aid for children and the government politics towards institutionalized children in Romania (1990‑2007). By humanitarian aid I refer to the material or logistical assistance provided for humanitarian purposes, as it evolved during the twentieth century and culminated with the emergence of a new, transnational humanitarianism, with permanent, professional actors. For this study the social sector includes the policies regarding health, education and sanitation. The paper discusses how the humanitarians understood to work (or not) with the Romanian partners, what was the response of the Romanian government and with what consequences. The text analyses the first and only official scientific tool meant to solve the trust issues of all the parties involved in the humanitarian aid to Romania after the fall of the communist regime (Study on the difficulties of the Alliance between Romanians and Westerners).

The Ottoman Empire framed its relations with non-Muslim states through peace agreements known as capitulations. While their renewals also came with additional articles, in the early seventeenth century the Ottoman-Venetian peace agreements took a unique twist: the capitulations’ texts remained unchanged, with new articles being implemented through separate documents labelled as “imperial signs” (nişan-ı hümayun). In this paper, I will argue that two such documents, granted to Venice in 1604 and 1639, differ both in form and function from other nişans and that they played a crucial role in the peace-making process, along with the capitulations.

The aim of this study is to bring together – in a somewhat panoramic, but plausible manner – two of the main interests of Kantianism, as it emerged in recent exegesis: temporality and politics. In spite of the differences between and within the two fields of interpretive study, we consider that the topics central to them can be reduced to a small number of issues that are intimately related, thus offering a coherent line of critical interpretation, as follows. Temporality is a recurrent hallmark of the Kantian tradition, needing no special inquiry as to its legitimacy; however, a short overview of its contents seems necessary. The passage towards politics unavoidably
involves practical temporality, different from the temporality understood within the metaphysics of the subject as presented in the first Critique. The idea of life, being the link between theoretical and practical philosophy, between the rational and the acting subject, presents itself as the first focal point of the discussion. Whereas the main interest of Kantian politics, on the other hand, seems to be its cosmopolitan purpose, this being clear from the outset as a consequence of universalism, its pragmatic side, however, namely, Kantian
anthropology, remains an ambiguous issue all along the interpretive tradition. Here, Michel Foucault’s seminal work is called for, as a fruitful intersection of political and existential interests. Last, we give a hermeneutical account of the historical language-play in Towards Perpetual Peace, in order to exemplify Kant’s political authorship as a pragmatic activity – as an example of the very intersection of philosophical theory and political practice qua discursive performativity

In pursuit of their national histories, historians in the successor state of the Ottoman Empire in Europe and the Middle East have tended to identify neat paths of national development going back deep into the late Ottoman imperial context where they point out the intellectual ‘roots’ and politically significant moments—known as watershed moments—that have ostensibly contributed to the
development of their national histories. Such an examination of the late Ottoman world from the perspectives of the post-World War I nation-states has accordingly carved a set of ethnic compartments out of late Ottoman history that came to embody neat analytic utilities in scholarship. One way of going beyond such nationalist teleology is to approach the late Ottoman history in a thematic manner rather than bowing to the appeal of ethno-centered categories of analysis. This study takes one such approach and examines the Ottoman Balkans right before and after the turn of the century as a site of technological contestation between revolutionary political actors and Ottoman state apparatus. In doing so, it shifts the unit of analysis to more global processes and locates revolutionary political conduct as deeply connected to transnational flow of commodities and technologies. Under the impact of modernist theories on nationalism, technologies such as print capitalism have often been framed as the vehicles of fulfilling ideological dissemination and cultivating ethnic and religious loyalties. Another strand of scholarship, on the other hand, frames technologies such as telegraph,
railroads, and the steam engine as the tools with which the state apparatus extends its reach into otherwise uncontrollable territories. Critiquing such linear constructs, I argue that the late nineteenth century saw the democratization of the means of contention and violence. In the Ottoman Balkans, the major struggle between revolutionary actors and the Ottoman state apparatus had been that of establishing authority and monopoly on the technologies and commodities of violence. I therefore examine when and under what conditions new technologies empowered actors and when it made them vulnerable.

The paper addresses how small states shape and conduct their foreign policy while caught between rival interests of global powers in a regional context, using Armenia as a case study. By assessing the evolution of the interplay between Armenia and the European and Eurasian Economic Unions and discussing the nature of commitments and depth of Armenia’s participation in the EAEU and the EU’s bilateral agreements and neighborhood programs, the paper investigates the extent to which Armenia’s membership in the Eurasian Economic Union affects its Eurointegration policy, providing possible explanations of Armenia’s interests vis-à-vis the European Union and the main motives for the subsequent change of its integration model

This paper brings into to discussion the preliminary findings of an ongoing research project on the characteristics and dynamics of Baku’s middle class. More exactly, it aims to examine the relationship between state‑led modernization and class transformation in the capital city of Azerbaijan in the context of the modernization and de‑Sovietization processes. Azerbaijan inherited a particular
pre‑revolutionary stratification, influenced by oil discoveries and the first stage of oil exploitation, combined with almost a century of Soviet dominance. During the last two decades, Azerbaijani authorities redirected the revenues from the extraction industries to transform the capital city, Baku, into an architectural mix of the European and Dubai models. However, transforming the face of the
country brought with it the transformation of its inhabitants. Eventually, to fulfill the new standards, the government aimed to create a new class which was schooled in “a different, occidental way”. Based on ethnographic data collected throughout 2016 and 2018 in Baku, this contribution examines how the perceived need of modernization of the country, and its citizens, basically comes through the importation and implantation of Western goods, manners and education on local values and norms. However, the modernization project seems to focus mostly on the capital city and only recently have some modest modernization projects started in the other cities of the country. The concentration of the development projects, beautification of the city, expansion of the luxurious shops and shopping centers, and the policy for the importation of skilled foreign specialists, were developed to cater for the local emerging middle classes’ new aspirations. The imported occidental lifestyle combined with the luxurious Dubai style, led to the new emerging middle classes’ need to distinguish themselves through consumption.

The paper investigates the aesthetic modes in which Chinese writer Lu Xun has been staged in China throughout the last century, and how the performing of such powerful symbol of Chinese modernity redefines the concept of realism within the contemporary Chinese performance discourse. At present, the theatre scene experiments with a multitude of possible social realities which are of a moral
condition, meant to redirect Chinese decayed social realities on a path to self-awareness and self-rediscovery of the beauty of morality. Rising state-powered Neoconfucianism, meant to revive patriotism and a sense of morality among the Chinese youth, theatre makers manage to challenge its genuinity through a much more authentic approach to redefining the human soul, a cause at stake for contemporary Chinese theatre.

The article analyzes the relationship among epistemic communities, symbolic geographies, cultural diplomacy, and Cold‑War politics in the Balkans. It historicizes the hegemonic internationalization of Southeast European studies from the periphery. The epitome of this phenomenon was the International Association of Southeast European Studies (AIESEE). This organization was an environment where regional scholars tackled perceived marginalizations and re‑ignited pre‑1945 traditions. It was a framework within which academics negotiated their societies’ and cultures’ Europeanness among three symbolic pillars: the ‘Balkans’, the‘West’ and the ‘East’. It was also a stage where epistemic multilateralism was a proxy for political entanglement. There were four spaces of institutionalization within the AIESEE. First, there were its leadership dynamics – who were the most prominent decision‑makers within the association. Second, there were the local specialized institutes and, more generally, national communities involved in the production of knowledge about the Balkans in world and continental contexts. Third, there were AIESEE’s specialized commissions, laboratories of transnational regional narratives. And fourth, there were the international congresses of Southeast European studies –pinnacles
of international academic‑political exchange. The hegemonic aspect underlying the evolution of these four spaces was that they were constantly managed by Balkan academics. The study focuses on the first three spaces of institutionalization, only hinting at the role of the fourth.The objective of my approach is twofold: to reveal the mechanisms of institutional hegemony; and, to characterize some of the outcomes of this phenomenon. The study concludes that AIESEE established itself 22 N.E.C. Ştefan Odobleja Program Yearbook 2014-2015as the locus of Balkan episteme’s projection of “counter‑circulation” into the general context of Cold War humanities. It was the springboard for the dissemination of knowledge that rehabilitated, de‑colonized, and de‑marginalized the Southeast beyond the Iron Curtain. Within AIESEE, scholars found a modus parlandi. It reflected varying degrees of historiographical peaceful coexistence and trans‑localism as conduit for particularisms.

This article offers critical re-examination of the recent scholarship on the so-called Kosovo myth. This popular oral and literary tradition surrounding the Battle of Kosovo that the Serbs fought against the Turks in 1389 traditionally occupied central space in Serbian national narrative. By revisiting the formation of the Kosovo epic in the collections of Vuk Karadžić, the founder of modern Serbian culture, I trace his role in making Kosovo the foundational myth of the whole Serbian nation from the nineteenth-century surge in Romantic nationalism
onwards. In particular, I scrutinize Karadžić’s editorial procedures as parts of a process of cultural inscription representing a cultural transformation that made the Kosovo epic an instance of the invention of national tradition in Eric Hobsbawm’s terms.

In the 17-18th centuries radical changes occurred in different fields of art connected with new cultural preferences and tastes of the time, new understandings and the growing influence of the European culture, especially of the printed book and its dissemination. European printed books decorated with etchings, engravings and woodcuts were to have an important impact on Armenian art
providing inspiration for the masters in different fields of art. In this paper the main iconographic features as well as the iconographic transformations and innovations typical for the time are presented on the examples of the collection of altar curtains
kept in the Armenian museum in Bucharest.

Far from being uncomplicated celebrations of individual heroism, Germanic heroic poems are often tragic tales foregrounding the reckless pursuit of personal glory and the burden of shame as the sources of complex societal problems. This article explores how shame and honour are conceptualized and experienced in texts like Beowulf and Hildebrandslied. Concretely, it will analyse how these poems articulate ambivalences about heroic culture and its hypermasculine poetic paragons in light of the lived realities of their Anglo‑Saxon and Carolingian martial elite audiences. Methodologically, this research builds on recent work on the sociology and psychology of honour and shame and its negative societal and individual effects. This article aims to clarify the socio‑emotional dynamics of honour and shame on which the heroic ethos is based inside the texts and for their audiences.

Publius Ovidius Naso became a peculiar symbol of Eastern Europe after he had been exiled to the very limes of Western civilization by the emperor Octavian Augustus. His impressions from living in Tomis (present-day Constanta) for a long while became the keynote of West-European thought, astonished by the description of the exotic region, where severe barbarians ruled. This research describes stable stereotypes existing on the East-European borders, it is about the neighboring peoples, who we consider to be barbaric for the lack of knowledge about them, and about the frontiers often laid not on the ground but in our heads.

How did international bankers see the end of the Cold War? How did they evaluate the trajectory of late socialist Eastern Europe? What might they contribute to our reassessment of 1989 in the newfound “global context”? This article unfolds in three steps. In the first one I provide a brief overview of the recent historiography on the global aspects of state socialism. Why, I ask, have historians turned to the optic of the global and what new topics of empirical research have they ferreted out in so doing? This is not meant as a balance-sheet.
This historiography is yet in its infancy and much more research will be needed before any reasonable stock-taking might be attempted. Rather, I merely want to point out that, on a conceptual level, capital is still a missing object of analytical focus. In the second part I let myself guided by international banker Lawrence Brainard through the maze of late socialist Eastern Europe’s financial affairs. This
is a heuristic exercise the role of which is to pick up on Brainard’s often sober analysis of Eastern Europe’s debt problems and raise afresh several questions about the region’s insertion in the global circuit of capital. Finally, in the last part, I reflect on Eastern Europe’s potential to serve as an archive of the world in which “capital has moved onto central stage”, and to illuminate the central tension of the Cold War, that between the politics of empire and the interests of capital.

This paper presents an explorative thesis: it discusses the logic of discursive trajectories of power operations between, on one side, the Serbian Orthodox Church’s involvement in politics and its hegemonic identity ideology promulgated by so called traditionalists, and on the other side the secularist politics of identity championed by progressivists who (re)present secularism as an epistemological truth and an analytical category for the interpretation of social life in Serbia as a society on a semi-periphery, i.e. as a society which is ‘neither here
nor there’ in its comparison to the notion and image of the West. It is argued here that in their respective quests to define “the State”, to vest it with power of determining public identity, and to shape worldviews of the citizenry in the public arena by defining appropriate and inappropriate scopes of reference, both secularist and identitarian ecclesiastic discourses perpetuate exclusivism in their strategies for advancement of their own worldviews.

The post-reform decades in imperial Russia witnessed an unprecedented expansion of schooling and the growing involvement of medical professionals in the school life. This article studies medical inspection and the activity of school
doctors at Moscow municipal elementary schools between 1889 and 1914. The institutionalization of the school medical control was motivated by sanitary concerns and articulated through the language of hygiene. The article shows that school doctors performed a systematic, highly-valued and well-paid work and influenced legal norms and policy on the city level. It argues that school hygiene was one of the instruments of constructing a “non-coercive classroom” and promoting a more inclusive, fair and humane social policy in imperial Russia.

This paper examines rural support for authoritarian populism in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Supporters of authoritarian populism are commonly portrayed as “simple people”, who vote against their own interests as they are not sophisticated enough to resist the propaganda they encounter. This study rejects this simplistic approach and investigates the objective and subjective factors that shape
political views and preferences of rural Russians, who are the main supporters of Putin’s regime. In particular, this study discusses the agrarian transformations and historical legacies that gave rise to rural support for the authoritarian regime. Special attention is devoted to analyzing discourses in which villagers express their opinions about strongman leadership, democracy, national interests, the
‘others’ at home and abroad and other elements of authoritarian populism.

In this paper we take a new look at how the modern Romanian monetary and banking system took shape between the Unification of the Principalities and the founding of the National Bank of Romania in 1880. We are primarily interested in showing that the ideas that influenced its creation were richer than previous historical accounts imply. For this purpose, we first take a look at the Western debates between the Currency School and the Banking School, and in particular at the ideas of French participants. Against this background, we will then evoke the Romanian echoes of this great 19th century controversy.

Research on societal transformations after the collapse of the socialist regimes in Eastern Europe showed the role crossing-border practices played in sustaining the people’s livelihood. During state socialism, Eastern European countries were seen as “large scale prisons” where people’s mobility was very much restricted; international mobility, such as tourism (to Western Europe and North America especially), migration, or even crossing-border practices, were considered detrimental to the “social order” of the totalitarian state (see Horváth 2008). Nevertheless, after the collapse of the communist regimes, international mobility, migration and also informal trade became alternatives to impoverishment and economic risks. In this paper, I explore how different forms of international
mobility developed after 1989. My research is carried out in the region of Bukovina (Suceava county – the Northeastern side of Romania bordering Ukraine), where different types of border crossing practices are described. I conclude by arguing that these practices should not be seen only in terms of interaction practices developing between Romania and Ukraine, but also as everyday practices, a sort of „dispositional transnationalism“, including various amounts of petty trade, border crossing practices and weak institutional cooperation.

This article offers a Byzantine iconographic understanding of creativity to reveal how today’s screen technologies may activate an iconic vision—a feeling of (divine) invisibility as present in the physical space. In using the Byzantine theology of the icon in conjunction with Marion’s phenomenology of images, it outlines a symbolic and realistic mode of seeing that expose the ongoing metaphysical issues of representation. These views on images underline how the illusory aspect of televisual images and their appearance of real-presence can mark the end of metaphysics of presence, and consequently the impossibility of having an iconic experience. In this regard, a parallel is made between Lidov’s hierotopic description of the Hodegetria icon and Verhoeff’s performative inquiry into mobile touch screens to define a iconic (symbolic-realistic) vision that reconsiders the evocative/creative aspect of televisual images.

What does Spinoza tell us about immigration, and how does this connect to the fundamental tenets of his philosophy? In this article, I will argue that the striving for collective liberation that guides Spinoza’s political philosophy is based on an inclusive impetus favourable to the welcoming and integration of migrants, and that the laws and institutions that facilitate this objective can gain the support of the people if their imagination is governed by the precepts of “true religion”. Furthermore, I will argued that Christ-inspired religious imagination is most likely to promote the goal of peace, safety and harmony among the options considered by Spinoza. This will help us better understand the many continuities between the TTP and TP on the role of religion, as well as highlight the difference marked by Spinoza’s focus on charitas as a universal value and abandonment of justitia as an integral part of the essence of true religion.

Approcher la contestation en Roumanie, c’est plonger dans les méandres d’une historiographie schizophrène. L’abondance des analyses avant 1989 qui labellisent toute manifestation de la contestation sous le sigle du socialisme, révèle la préoccupation des communistes de légitimer leur autorité. Et l’obsession des historiens post-1989, de revenir sur les origines du libéralisme, laissant la contestation en marge du récit, semble relever d’un mécanisme inverse, non moins en proie aux déterminismes historiques. L’objet de cet article est de proposer une méthodologie sortant des catégories déterminées, afin d’élaborer un récit de la contestation en
Roumanie. La révolte paysanne de 1907 en est le point de départ.

This article investigates the postwar change of Griviţa neighborhood in Bucharest, Romania, between 1944 and 1958, from a neighborhood traditionally inhabited by workers of the Romanian Railway Company to a space governed by the
new socialist ideology. This modification consisted in the reconstruction of the dwellings destroyed during the war, the building of new apartment buildings insocialist style (and the search for the adequate form that the socialist architectural ideology should take), but also in changing the names of the streets and of the institutions, a massive propaganda on radio and written press, an investment in
sports activities, a new approach to women’s urban needs and a different way in distributing the new dwellings. The socialist authorities considered Griviţa as probably the most suitable district in Bucharest to start the reform with due to the large number of communist supporters among the workers of the Railway Company. As early as September 1944, the new authorities started the reshaping
of the district and, by 1958, when a new approach towards the city planning was adopted, Griviţa represented the district towards which the attention of the authorities and opposition had turned. My study sheds light on the motivations of the reformers and the ideological print of socialist ideology in this large-scale process of urban building, as well as on the administrative resources involved and the reaction of the tenants in the neighborhood to these transformations.

This paper deals with the late Byzantine reception of Gregory of Nyssa’s teaching about perpetual progress (epektasis), with a focus on
Gregory Palamas and Kallistos Angelicoudes. As attested most notably in his Triads, Palamas readily appropriates Nyssa’s theory by adapting it to the problematic of the hesychastic controversy, without further personal reflection. Kallistos Angelicoudes offers a more complex case. He appears to have been sensitive to Maximus the Confessor’s insistance on the aspect of rest which must balance that of mouvement. He also combines speculative insights on God’s infinity with more direct and personal testimonies. And, finally, in composing a refutation of Summa contra Gentiles, he becomes aware of the quite different ways in which Aquinas and the most proeminent of the Eastern authors conceive the dynamics of the eschatological beatitude.

The study is centered around a series of anatomical engravings made in the first half of the seventeenth century in Rome after anatomical drawings by the famous painter Pietro da Cortona, but first published over a century later. This case study allows, through the analysis of its intricate history, the inquiry into numerous issues fundamental for the understanding of the scientific image in the early modern era: issues related to technique (drawing, engraving), the role of reproduction in the history of science, problems of authorship and investment of the image with authority, as well as the destination and audience of the books containing these images.

The traditional narrative on nineteenth century cossacks in the Russian Empire portrays this period as a time of “unification” and “regularization”. Still, the preconditions that led to the 1820s-1840s homogenizing reforms of irregulars’ military service are often omitted or oversimplified. Thus, as a step towards better understanding of the later period, in this article I will overview the problems
encountered by Russian imperial officials regarding the organization and administration of cossack units that, presumably, largely influenced the course of later reforms.

Large groups of emigrants have been leaving former Soviet space since the late 1980s and during almost the entire post-Soviet period, heading for the different EU countries for permanent residence. This wave of emigration led to an increase in the number of so-called Russian-speaking communities in these countries. In the past few years, processes of construction of the transnational urban communities among emigrants from the post-Soviet area have been of an increasingly greater topicality. Now translocal networks emerge too. Thus the paper is focused on the process of transnationalization and translocalization of the post-Soviet Russian-speaking urban communities by the example of Odessites, Leningraders/St. Petersburgers1 and Bakuvians. The main goal was to understand, explain and
describe this process.

In the last two decades ethnic Azeris living in USA, EU and CIS countries started to organize into a united ethno-national diaspora,
with political, ideological and also financial support from the political leadership of the Azerbaijani Republic. A major component of the process of construction of diaspora was the creation by ethnic activists of a large number of diaspora organizations. The Azerbaijani political regime pursues various goals in its aspiration to influence the activity of diaspora organizations and networks. Special place in the policy is given to the holding of collective events on the occasion of various memorable dates and symbolic practices of interstate monument swaps.

This study examines the background, causes and consequences of population movements, the significance and implications of displacement and refuge during World War I in Romania, as well as the socio-demographic factors related to the above-mentioned evolutions. The article investigates the dimension of individual and collective trauma associated with the experience of refuge, the connection between violence and aggression, on one hand, and displacement and refuge(associated with pauperization) on the other hand. The paper also undertakes the way Romanian authorities have dealt with the prolonged issue of refugees, mainly the social and humanitarian dimensions of it.

This article addresses the entangled relationship between various genres of popular music and official culture in socialist Romania during the last part of the communist regime, the 1980s. It provides an analysis of the cultural and political context of late socialist Romania, focusing on the communist regime’s attempts at cultural control and uniformization and on the negotiations with various popular music
scenes which emerged throughout the country. Furthermore, the article addresses issues of censorship, cultural transnational networks, and it explores the relation between amateur and professional artists, both in the official context of political festivals and in the often informal one of local music festivals and performances, in an attempt to go beyond the received wisdom of 1980s Romania as a closed
society.

The study of plants in mid-seventeenth century England concentrated less on the external and internal features of plants for taxonomic purposes and more on the investigation of fundamental processes of nature such as vegetation, fermentation, germination, etc. It constituted itself into a novel discipline that opposed scholasticism by trying to identify alternatives ways of interpreting nature and it was based on a process of empirical investigation of nature that included new methods and techniques such as direct observation and experimentation, or the use of instruments and measurements. This new discipline used plants as instruments of inquiry into nature in a bottom-up methodological framework that had more to do with practices and experiments than with theoretical commitments.

The present contribution examines how, in late-nineteenth-century Romania, a subversive political object transformed the dynamics of nation-building. Brought in by Russian peddlers selling religious icons on transregional routes, engravings of the Russian tsar in peasants’ homes attracted the attention of political elites and catalysed top-down attempts at nationalizing the peasant majority. By
considering a case in which the rural masses were exposed to the “wrong” political symbols before official nationalizing and dynastic paraphernalia could reach them, the study homes in on the attempts of both state and church to solve a surprisingly long-standing state of affairs, from 1888 to 1916.

The beginning of the twenty-first century has brought an intensifying rise of what is commonly known as xenophobia on a worldwide scale. Xenophobic sentiments are nowadays commonly used in a propagation of a discriminatory discourse, commonly as a means to achieving electoral support, eventually reaching the status of official state policy. This article explores several discursive cases regarding contemporary xenophobia, as well as xenophobic policy. In addition, it argues a lack of an appropriate designation referring to policies of discrimination based on a person’s citizenship – that is, passport – offering the term passportism as a viable solution.

Organized by the United States Information Agency, the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow, along with consumerist goods from cars to kitchens, introduced contemporary American visual art to millions of Soviet people. By displaying works of abstract artists such as Jackson Pollock, curators sought to showcase freedom of artistic expression in America, which was allegedly unavailable within the framework of Socialist Realism—the only official style in the totalitarian Soviet Union. Exploring diverse novel materials from drafts of the exhibition catalog to original comment books, this essay provides a nuanced accounted on the curatorial message and the visitors’ reception of the art show. Updating dominant narratives on the exhibition, this piece concludes with a discussion of challenges one encounters when evaluating success of the show.

One of the questions regarding the Parmenides is whether Plato was committed to any of the arguments developed in the second part of the dialogue. This paper argues for considering at least one of the arguments from the second part of the Parmenides, namely the argument of the generation of numbers, as being platonically genuine. I argue that the argument at 142b-144b, which discusses the generation of numbers, is not deployed for the sake of dialectical argumentation alone, but it rather demonstrates key platonic features, such as the use of the greatest kinds and the generation principle. The connection between the argument for the generation of numbers and Plato’s philosophy of mathematics is strengthened by the exploration of a possible reference in Aristotle’s Metaphysics A6. Taken as a genuine platonic theory, the argument could have significant impact on how we understand Plato’s philosophy of mathematics in particular, and the ontology of the late dialogues in general – that numbers can be reduced to more basic entities, i.e the greatest kinds,
in a way similar to the role the greatest kinds are assigned in the Sophist.

My essay investigates the artistic practices made in Romania in the decades 1960- 1970 which employ media and technology as principal means of production and presentation, while offering an insight into the cultural, social and political determinants underlying their production. By Media art I understand art forms produced by electronic means and which are mainly time-based: video, experimental film, sound, computer-based images, presented as single channel works or as installations. The focus of my study is equally on the means of expression (the (un)problematization of the medium, themes, narrative strategies, technologies, apparatus) and on the conditions of manifestation of these artistic productions (the cultural and political framework of the period in Romania and
Eastern Europe, issues related to cultural and technological (de)synchronization, institutional and public reception, critical positioning and subversion, humor and irony as survival strategies, processes of signification and the regimes of
memory associated with media art practices). Three representative artists and groups of the period will be discussed – kinema ikon, Sigma, and Ion Grigorescu. They are different in terms of approach, strategy and artistic values, but their common ground is equally represented by their significant interest in the moving image, and by their constant efforts to innovate the artistic language and the
relationship with the context.

In this paper, I put forward a temporal approach on migration experiences in terms of life planning. Drawing on narratives of Moldovan migrant workers in Italy, I study how temporary labour migrants co‑produce, experience and make sense of prolonged temporariness. I illustrate how migration plans change over time and look into the factors determining this change. More specifically, I provide insights on how projected temporariness as a temporal horizon deeply affects one’s lifestyle and crucial life decisions. I show that maintaining a
temporary mindset correlates with a halting migrant behaviour in terms of time strategies. I examine how this temporariness is reflected in their everydayness, family life, qualities of time and how it affects long term decision‑making in practical domains such as occupational career, access to social benefits, pension and health system. By and large, this paper addresses the time management of those who are not always in the position to “own” time, have a clear vision of what lies ahead and make informed decisions.

It has been generally assumed that the Byzantine emperor John III Doukas Vatatzes – today venerated as a saint by the Orthodox Church – was formally canonized soon after his death in the second half of the thirteenth century. This paper aims to challenge this widely accepted notion by exploring the phenomenon of Byzantine imperial sainthood through the extraordinary case of Constantine I
and the presence of emperors in the Synaxarium of Constantinople. By looking into accounts that offer literary representations of John III, the paper then moves towards a contextualization of the canonization of this Byzantine sovereign, with a particular focus on his ‘reappearances’ during important historical moments for the Greek communities.

It has been generally assumed that the Byzantine emperor John III Doukas Vatatzes – today venerated as a saint by the Orthodox Church – was formally canonized soon after his death in the second half of the thirteenth century. This paper aims to challenge this widely accepted notion by exploring the phenomenon of Byzantine imperial sainthood through the extraordinary case of Constantine I and the presence of emperors in the Synaxarium of Constantinople. By looking into accounts that offer literary representations of John III, the paper then moves towards a contextualization of the canonization of this Byzantine sovereign, with
a particular focus on his ‘reappearances’ during important historical moments for the Greek communities.

The present paper investigates the efforts of the EU to create an institutionalized external energy policy vis-à-vis the South Caucasus. It elucidates the drivers and evaluates the effectiveness of the EU’s external energy strategy towards the South Caucasus, highlighting the obstacles that may hamper the EU’s external energy agenda in the region.

This paper reflects on the possibility of expanding the normative options available within a naturalized epistemology using strands of thought that emerge in Hume’s account of the role of philosophical relations in causal judgments. Working within the confines of a naturalized action‑focused epistemology it will be demonstrated that standards of taste generate evaluative judgments regarding causal inference. Such judgments of taste are characterized as objective to the extent that they are fixed not merely within the individual but also in the community and are subject to evaluation against a steady and general point of view. This process attempts to moves beyond instrumental normativity and bestow these judgments with epistemic justification. In avoiding the positing of
irreducibly normative facts and properties it will be demonstrated that we can expand this account to the wider context of epistemic justification within a naturalized epistemology.

The Armenian polemical literature from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries proliferated in relation to the surge of confessional consciousness within the Armenian communities under the Ottoman and Safavid rule. Early Modern inter- and cross-confessional debates on the orthodoxy shaped the broad context in which polemics with the Muslims have to be placed. The scarcity of anti-Islamic
texts in the Armenian manuscript heritage compared to the abundant extant anti-Catholic polemical material has laid grounds for the assumption that Armenians were not interested in the religion of the rulers in the confessional age regardless of the fact, that the heuristic potential of the age enhanced the necessity of learning through questioning and answering. Drawing upon manuscript material this paper analyzes broader socio-historical context the polemics with the Muslims transpired within. It examines the switch in debated topics, argumentations, vocabulary and language to reveal the dialogic and heuristic aspects of anti-Muslim Armenian polemics in the age of confessions.

Contemporary local cultures, generically referred to as “traditional,” have their own dynamics, and an important part in this is played by the relation between oral and written culture, a relation that must be considered as early as the pre‑fieldwork stage of each ethnological research. Drawing on a case‑study from Buzău region, namely the narratives of the places situated in the vicinity of villages, the paper illustrates the flexibility and the dynamic nature of a local oral culture, its dialogue and complementarity with the literate culture, as well as its adaptative nature. It does so, by presenting the characteristics of three types of orality (see Zumthor 1990) encountered in the field: mixed orality, second orality (stressing the role of the intellectuals), and mediatized orality.

This paper discusses the distrust between fellow villagers in a Romanian community as a form of moral attitude. I argue that distrust is neither a pathological inclination, nor a stable and indiscriminate feature of cultural representations, but an expression of moral relationships and folk epistemology in the village society.

This paper aims to outline a preliminary study of the founding figures and narratives of the aulos in Late Antiquity, addressing their structure, popularity / reception, and discursive uses against the changing socio-cultural and ideological background of their production. After following the dominant synthetic Athenian narrative in the culture of Imperial and Late Antique paideia, I focus on John Malalas’ radically revised account of Marsyas’ invention of the aulos and death, arguing for its origins in the rationalizing and euhemeristic Greco-Roman mythography. A wider analysis of the musical references in Malalas’ book IV brings to light an underlying, coherent succession of musical protoi heuretai rooted in the tradition of Classical and Hellenistic musical historiography.

The article touches upon literary tastes of a prominent orator of the second century C. E. M. Cornelius Fronto, which are reflected in the correspondence with his two royal pupils – Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus. After discussion of literary canons in antiquity, the reading list of Fronto is compared to the most famous canon of Greek and Latin authors compiled by Quintilian at the end of
the first century C. E. The main difference between these two lies in neoclassical tastes of Quintilian and pre‑classical of Fronto who is guided by his archaist interests. A separate section studies Fronto’s account of Cicero in the light of these predilections.

This research explores living conditions in the Soviet Gulag, as they emerge from the memoirs and autobiographical texts of deportees from the former territories of the Romanian Kingdom to Kazakhstan. It focuses on recurring elements found in testimonies: the journey to the deportation sites; living conditions in exile (special settlements, housing arrangements); work performed by the deportees and their remuneration; the acquisition of food, clothes and consumer goods (available resources and supply strategies). I aim at clarifying how the new living conditions and social circumstances influenced the subjects’ socio–cultural values, their vision of the world and of themselves, and, conversely, in what way their prior identity helped them in their efforts to survive.

The fall of the communist regimes in the East Central Europe can be seen as a momentous historical juncture for reclaiming the ‘repressed’ memories’ during the past regime. The revolutionary changes of 1989, which mark a multifarious transition could trigger a different representation of the past. Long after regime change, the emergence of Institutes of Memory in most of the countries of East
Central Europe, constitute a new empirical reality, which continues to be addressed within the framework of politics of memory, or transitional justice. In this paper, I propose a different theoretical perspective and focus on the case of Romania, given that issues of the past since December 1989 have been central to different actors at different levels. On the other hand, it is a case that can help understand the shift from the symbolic politics of the 90s, to memory production as a legitimating frame of the new democratic regime.

The paper examines the complex interconnection between rape legacy, silence and transmission of sexual scripts through traumatic memories of survivors. By the help of narrative analysis the study shows, how framing the experience of sexual abuse and violation in the paradigms of shame, guilt and silence, supports to maintain the patriarchal ideas of women as inherently ‘rapable’ and the very rape culture as the accepted cultural norm. For this breaking the silence is not essential only for women survivors to recover from the trauma in order to get free of the past, but becomes crucial in transforming patterns of rape culture, actively and critically addressing it and nevertheless, in establishing future effective practices of prevention of sexual violence, both in peace and conflict.

Lorsque l’économie daigne s’esquisser une généalogie, elle tend souvent à se projeter rétrospectivement comme une discipline qui lutte
pour atteindre son autonomie naturelle. Imitant l’ancienne manière de l’histoire des sciences – qui se représente en accumulation de savoirs et dévoilement progressif de la vérité – et loin de se percevoir comme le résultat d’un processus constitutif ouvert et contingent, elle ne reconnaît parmi ses ancêtres légitimes que les théories qui ont fini par s’imposer ou celles qui s’apparentent aux notions libérales : ainsi peut-elle les traiter en « précurseurs ». Pour cette histoire dominante de l’économie, téléologique et continuitiste, qui identifie le « vrai » et le « faux » dans des doctrines méritant d’être enregistrées ou au contraire oubliées dans un récit du progrès de l’esprit humain, la pensée économique de Jean-Jacques Rousseau peut apparaître comme une branche morte, une excentricité démentie par les développements ultérieurs de la science économique moderne.

This case study of a provincial protest at the University of Strasbourg is an early reflection on the value of microhistory in understanding antisemitism in late interwar France, a topic which has hitherto remained poorly theorized. The article begins to set up a framework for a broader project studying the social life of antisemitism, too often relegated to the realms of ideology, culture, and national politics – worlds located in Paris. It attempts to move beyond clichéd formulations of a “wave of antisemitism” sweeping across Europe, formulating more interesting and complex proposals regarding perception, behavior, and quotidian interactions in a diverse urban community in a volatile borderland between France and Germany. In exploring holistic visions of ideas’ “lives” in a particular socio-economic context, this approach may also lend insight into the mechanics of the expression of other kinds of prejudice – words and acts – we continue to see across Europe and other societies today.

This case study of a provincial protest at the University of Strasbourg is an early reflection on the value of microhistory in understanding antisemitism in late interwar France, a topic which has hitherto remained poorly theorized. The article begins to set up a framework for a broader project studying the social life of antisemitism, too often relegated to the realms of ideology, culture, and national politics – worlds located in Paris. It attempts to move beyond clichéd formulations of a “wave of antisemitism” sweeping across Europe, formulating more interesting and complex proposals regarding perception, behavior, and quotidian interactions in a diverse urban community in a volatile borderland between France and Germany. In exploring holistic visions of ideas’ “lives” in a particular socio-economic context, this approach may also lend insight into the mechanics of the expression of other kinds of prejudice – words and acts – we continue to see across Europe and other societies today

Cette étude se propose de suivre les grandes lignes de l’évolution de la figure de Narcisse dans la littérature française médiévale en langue vernaculaire. Récupéré au XIIe siècle dans un lai qui développe le scénario ovidien et l’adapte à la mode littéraire de l’époque, Narcisse sera, à tour de rôle, une figure exemplaire du fin amant dans la lyrique des troubadours et des trouvères et une figure de la beauté
idéale. À partir de la seconde moitié du XIIIe siècle et jusqu’au XVe siècle, le discours littéraire moralisateur, accentué à la suite de l’apparition de l’Ovide moralisé au XIVe siècle, le transforme en exemplum censé illustrer le lien entre sa beauté excessive et l’orgueil.

Cet article cherche à étudier la mise en place de l’enseignement primaire public des minorités ethniques dans les zones rurales de Bessarabie, au cours de l’entre-deux guerres (1918-1940). L’imposition de l’obligation scolaire a fait l’objet d’une relation inégale de pouvoir entre les autorités d’Etat responsables de l’enseignement et la population des villages. Ce processus, réalisé à travers une relation difficile – de conflits et de négociation – entre la population civile et les autorités étatiques, a été déterminant pour l’expansion de l’Etat national dans les zones rurales et la formation du statut de citoyenneté et en même temps de nationalité au sein de la population civile, ethniquement et linguistiquementhétérogène, de cette province roumaine nouvellement intégrée. L’article conclut avec l’ouverture d’une perspective comparative en esquissant le cas de l’enseignement primaire des minorités ethniques comme moyen d’acculturation étatique en Transnistrie soviétique, dans la même période.

The literature standing behind the concept of autobiography, as it was consecrated in France by Philippe Lejeune at the beginning of the 70’s, slightly becomes dysfunctional if we take into account the paradigmatic switch triggered by non-literary, filmic or photographical autobiographies. The retrospective autodiegetic discourse of Jean-Paul Sartre, Hervé Guibert or Jacques Derrida places itself at the confluence of several artistic practices that disqualify the structure and limits of a genre that can only be apprehended in terms of intermediality and transgressivity.

Phenomenology, in its Husserlian design, appeared as a form of descriptive psychology that aimed to overcome the boundaries of an empiric science and become a pure, eidetic discipline. In this paper, I reevaluate the relation between Husserl’s phenomenology and Brentano’s descriptive psychology or psychognosy. I argue that despite Husserl’s famous retraction of his initial characterization of phenomenology as descriptive psychology, in Brentano’s specific method of psychognosy exists a step that is not specific to any empirical
science, does not imply any positing, and it is not bound to the actual world, namely: induction in a broader sense or the intuitive grasping of laws that arise from concepts

The paper focuses on critical writings by the Catholic theologian Hans Küng, following the intertwining of the discourse strands “birth control” and “authority of the magisterium”. In doing so the present paper employs a combination of interpretation methods inspired by Critical Discourse Analysis, aiming to show how discursive strategies are used to construct an opposition between the supposedly
backward teachings of the Church and the own critical and progressive stance. Based on the microanalysis of the sample texts, the paper argues that Küng`s approach is not free of populist rhetorical devices and topoi such as the opposition between the few and the many, the ad hominem argument, the use of collective symbols or the idea of crisis and rebirth.

This research examines the possibility to improve the way courts of law decide on the issue of architectural infringement. In doing so, we will examine the originality criterion – the sine qua non of copyright – from a philosophical and legal perspective, suggesting that theories of personality from the past can, and must, still play a major role in judicial proceedings. Therefore, we suggest a new test for originality (the continuum test), in accordance with the latest CJEU decisions and taking into account the international homogenization that we
are seeing in intellectual property law, one that is better suited to probe the personality of the author.

The main objective of the article is the evaluation of the place that Romanian sociology occupied during the communist regime, in
reconstructing the domestic and international political context that led to a (re) institutionalization of the discipline. After a very rich activity between the Two wars, Romanian sociology was banned as a discipline after the World War II and the rise to power of the communist regime. After two decades of “misery”, sociology has been institutionalized in the 1960s in the context of  an intellectual and political “liberalization”. The article aims to explain the institutional development of Romanian sociology during the communist regime,
through the analysis of the role played by various factors (the pre-war tradition, the political system).

This research explores the role of increasing creative urban interventions in and about the transformation of Bucharest. Various
aspects of post‑socialist public space are seen together as complexity, the starting point of placing interventions and their role in the city. Theoretical discussions about connections between anthropology and contemporary art practices illustrate how these notions extend to creations in other disciplines. The research of these discussions together with interventions in Bucharest, studied through ethnographic engagement, shows how public space, participation and Bucharest’s makeover is imagined and contested by creative actors working in this direction.

L’étude compare les idéologies autour du français et du roumain, dès lors que ceux-ci deviennent langues nationales et sont investis d’une valeur symbolique. À partir de l’analyse des discours esthétiques, scolaires, législatifs et scientifiques concernant la langue nationale, l’article sépare les contenus des idéologies – essentiellement le purisme prospectif et rétrospectif et le « génie » de la langue – des politiques linguistiques que ces contenus ont pu marquer, et identifie les nombreux points communs entre la situation du français et celle du roumain.

Crimean Tatar ethnical identity was investigated in the context of their attachment to different places such as Crimea, Turkey, and Romania. Mythologization of these places was detected. The fact of losing and restoring their ethnic identity throughout time, which depends on political and historical circumstances, was surveyed. The study of identity of Crimean Tatars helped to understand the characteristics of their folklore in emigration. The religious character of Crimean Tatar folklore in Romania was discovered. Double ethnic identities in the Crimean Tatar case were found. The concept of the others in the construction of ethnic identity was analyzed using the Romanian folklore material.

The article examines how the Greek Catholics of Eastern Slovakia viewed the ambiguous role of Orthodoxy, one of the fundamental components of all-Russian ideologies, in discussions about religious and national belonging among local Ruthenians/Ukrainians. The unfolding polemics illustrate the process of the reinterpretation of the image of the self among local Greek Catholics, who understood that it had become impossible to adhere to the old “Orthodox” rhetoric and who were looking for new words and meanings to re-describe their
role in the region. The case of Hrabské is typical, but at the same time particularly interesting, because it reflects the reaction of different levels within the structures of the Czechoslovak state to a quite ordinary conflict between the Orthodox and Greek Catholic inhabitants of one East Slovak mountain village.

This paper addresses some of the challenges that Euromaidan, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and the armed conflict in the East of Ukraine present to the work of researchers who study Ukraine-related issues. Firstly, I explore the consideration of “doing no harm” to the research subjects and avoiding the possible hazards to the researcher themselves. Secondly, I look at the conflict’s limiting impact
on scholarly writing. Thirdly, I look at potential tensions and splits within research communities that might affect the processes of collaborative production of knowledge. Based upon a series of interviews with scholars of Ukraine, this paper seeks to analyse some of the difficulties facing academics in politically sensitive situations.

This paper addresses the issue of corruption in higher education in Ukraine and its negative impact on universities. This paper discusses factors of external pressure on the higher education sector, which may be found in such areas as changes in higher education finance, research and quality of education, academic corruption, and the standardized testing initiative. The study argues that external pressure on universities comes primarily from the central government and is supported in part by the large scale education corruption. The external pressure experienced by universities manifests the duality of the aspirations for institutional independence with the de facto acknowledgement of financial dependency on the central government.

The publication of Neighbors by Jan Gross generated a wide debate in Poland about the participation of the Poles in the Holocaust. Jedwabne was a Polish village where the titular nationality massacred the Jewish population. The name of this village became a generic name for the participation of the other Eastern European nations in the Holocaust. In this paper, I examine the particularities of the Holocaust in Rybnitsa – a small town in the Transnistrian region of the Republic of Moldova.

This article is dedicated to the study of the Crimean Cossacks’ impact on the way interethnic relations unfold in the Crimean Peninsula. Therefore, the study aims to discover if Cossacks’ presence in the Peninsula has led to any conflictive consequences in the physical and social space. Moreover, the aim of the study is to examine if the Cossacks’ presence in the Peninsula has impacted the way interethnic relations unfold and if this led to conflictive consequences in the social and physical space. In the study of the Cossack impact on the interethnic life, this work tests how such causes relate to the perception of the past, the land and the formation of collective memory and identity.

The paper is strongly guided by the importance of historical sequentiality as a source of tension for the present. One can play an
18th century clavichord after the instrument’s revival in 1900, but one cannot hear it after two intervening centuries of the pianoforte in the way it was heard in 1700 (Daston and Galison 2008). The same goes for the reconstitution of communal ownership practices in contemporary Romania, and particularly taking into account the intervening decades of socialism. Inevitably, the resurgence of the communal in Romania and elsewhere in Eastern Europe invites also inquiry into the ways in which the socialist collectivization of everyday life has subtly transformed previous communal and cooperative practices. In this sense, historical sequentiality affects not only the practical realization of social forms in the present, but acts also retrospectively on their very conceptualization. That is, contemporary understanding of 19th and early 20th century scholarship on these issues has to contend with a certain degree of indeterminacy
(Hacking 2002).

Zum ökonomischen Denken deutschsprachiger Aufklärer des 18. Jahrhunderts ist nach wie vor kaum geforscht worden. Auch die Schriften des bekannten Göttinger Professors August Ludwig Schlözer sind bislang nicht für seine ökonomischen Stellungnahmen bekannt, was nicht zuletzt daran liegen mag, dass er bisweilen in ein und demselben Text verschiedenen sich grundsätzlich
widersprechenden Theorien zustimmte. Dies hat in der Forschung dazu geführt, dass Schlözers Wirtschaftstheorie sowohl vom Liberalismus, der Physiokratie oder dem Merkantilismus beeinflusst dargestellt wurde. Der vorliegende Artikel zeigt auf, dass Schlözer dagegen viel mehr von empiristisch argumentierenden und praxisnahen Autoren beeinfluss war und theorieimmanente, vom historischen
und sozio-ökonomischen Kontext abstrahierende Argumentationen explizit verwarf. Sein ökonomisches Denken und insbesondere seine Auffassung vom Handel und dessen Verhältnis zum Staat werden im Kontext seiner Geschichtsund Staatstheorie verständlich.

Zum ökonomischen Denken deutschsprachiger Aufklärer des 18. Jahrhunderts ist nach wie vor kaum geforscht worden. Auch die Schriften des bekannten Göttinger Professors August Ludwig Schlözer sind bislang nicht für seine ökonomischen Stellungnahmen bekannt, was nicht zuletzt daran liegen mag, dass er bisweilen in ein und demselben Text verschiedenen sich grundsätzlich
widersprechenden Theorien zustimmte. Dies hat in der Forschung dazu geführt, dass Schlözers Wirtschaftstheorie sowohl vom Liberalismus, der Physiokratie oder dem Merkantilismus beeinflusst dargestellt wurde. Der vorliegende Artikel zeigtauf, dass Schlözer dagegen viel mehr von empiristisch argumentierenden und praxisnahen Autoren beeinfluss war und theorieimmanente, vom historischen und sozio-ökonomischen Kontext abstrahierende Argumentationen explizit verwarf. Sein ökonomisches Denken und insbesondere seine Auffassung vom Handel und dessen Verhältnis zum Staat werden im Kontext seiner Geschicht-und Staatstheorie verständlich.

An indicator of the strengthening veneration St. John the New enjoyed in sixteenth century Moldavia was the inclusion of extensive iconographical cycles illustrating his martyrdom in the pictorial decoration of several churches patronized either by the local dynasty or the high clergy. One of them was the Episcopal Church in Roman, which received its fresco decoration shortly after the middle of the sixteenth century, presumably under the direct supervision of bishop Macarie – an outstanding learned cleric and most intriguing figure of his time. The present study focuses on the comparative analysis of the iconographical cycle dedicated to St. John the New there, in relation to other textual and visual narratives created in his honor, with the purpose to investigate the reception of his cult, two centuries after its adoption in Moldavia. The selection of the scenes from Roman, the particular details of their illustration, as well as the ideological implications they were invested with are discussed mostly in comparison with St. John’s fifteenth century hagiographical construct of sanctity, transmitted through the text of the Passio and the decoration of the silver reliquary which hosts his relics in Suceava. The study starts from the assumption that a comparative analysis of these hagiographical narratives, in their chronological
succession and within the specific context of their production, may be able to highlight, almost like archeological layers, the subsequent phases in the promotion and reception of the cult of St. John the New. The preliminary outcomes of such an investigation suggest that, alike its textual and visual prototypes, the discussed pictorial cycle share the same primary concern for revealing and promoting St. John’s status as a martyr for the Orthodox faith. Strongly outlining his unambiguous affiliation to this typology of sanctity conferred the best confirmation of St. John’s saintliness and implicitly of the holiness of his relics preserved in Suceava. However, while the fifteenth century hagiographical narratives, both textual and pictorial, focus rather on constructing an authenticated profile of sanctity, the sixteenth century illustrated cycle seems much more receptive for conveying local implications and additional messages when accounting the same story, which are suggestive for the evolution of St. John’s cult. Enlarged selections of scenes and specific iconographical details or variations in displaying them were the main visual strategies employed in order to attach new meanings to the promotion and reception of the cult. Such innovations distinguish the narrative cycle from Roman from other elaborations of the theme, at least from two points of view. The first one refers to an obvious clerical touch in reinterpreting the written Passio, by emphasizing the prominent role of the Church in the institutionalization and administration of the cult. Explainable in part through
the episcopal commission and audience of these frescoes, this feature could also point out to an increased ecclesiastical appropriation of the cult towards the middle of the sixteenth century. The second specific characteristic of the same pictorial cycle concerns a pronounced polemical tone in referring to other religious denomination and especially to the Catholic one. In visual terms, St. John’s martyrdom is obviously constructed in explicit opposition not only to paganism, but also to Catholicism, thus alluding to contemporary realities of the time and showing Macarie’s intransigent attitude toward confessional others. Invested with such polemic overtones, the saint’s ultimate triumphal sacrifice symbolically corresponds to the victory of the Orthodox faith against its oppressors and internal competitors. In the complicated context of mid sixteenth century, St. John the New was thus promoted not only as an Orthodox neo-martyr, but also as a saint of the Moldavian Church, while the story of his martyrdom was loaded with local implications reflecting the specific confessional challenges this Church was facing at the time.

This paper explores the social integration processes of the second-generation Turkish ‘migrants’ from Germany who were deported to Turkey on account of criminal activities. Based on the life-story narratives of 14 male respondents (collected in 2014-2015) who work and live in Antalya – the Mediterranean tourism hub of Turkey – the paper aims to analyse the ways in which tourist places offer spaces for self-healing, as well as enable social/economic integration. The paper aims to contribute to the academic knowledge regarding deportation as a forced-return migration phenomenon which has been overlooked in ‘the second generation return migration’ literature. The premise of the research is that for the second-generation Turkish-Germans, deportation evoked a “double trauma”: on the one hand, they had to adapt to their new lives in Turkey without having parents and social networks, and on the other, they had to integrate to the civil society as ex-criminals

This working paper aims to scrutinize the 1991 Constitution from the perspective of gender and sexuality. To contextualize the analysis, the paper first discusses the status of gender and sexuality in the previous constitutions of Romania. Then, the paper moves on to questions of gender and sexuality under Romania’s current Constitution since its drafting in 1990 until July 2021, the time of writing. In particular, the paper looks at gender‑ and sexuality‑related matters of constitution‑making, constitution‑drafting and constitutional adjudication in post‑communist Romania. Overall, the paper argues that gender and sexuality have progressed from being marginal issues under Romania’s Constitution to being the subject of serious contestation on the constitutional front, attracting important public attention and participation.

The Church Slavonic notes inscribed in the margins of religious manuscripts during the Ottoman period often have been celebrated by Macedonian literary critics and some historians for the evidence they offer about the ‘suffering’ of the subject population under the Turkish ‘yoke’. As it will be demonstrated here, the truth value of these accounts cannot be taken for granted. This paper is divided
into three sections. First, I will provide an overview of the views on the Ottoman rule in Macedonian historiography, moving towards an analysis of the role Church Slavonic marginal notes have played in the construction of the historical myth about the Turkish ‘yoke’. In the last part, the paper aims to suggest possible approaches to the study of the large paratextual historiographical corpus.

This working paper discusses the issues with translating the research methodology and theoretical underpinnings from one inter-marriage situation in Estonia and to another in Ukraine. In my previous work, I researched “Estonian-Russian” intermarriages; my ongoing postdoctoral research focuses on the marriages between the people from different regions in Ukraine. In this paper I first offer an overview of my research methodology and theoretical framework. Second, I present an empirical illustration of some findings from Ukraine. In the end, I develop new reflections about my theoretical approach, directed towards rethinking the concept of “cultural world” and the meaning of “inter-marriage” in the diverse identification situation of Ukraine

This working paper discusses the issues with translating the research methodology and theoretical underpinnings from one inter-marriage situation in Estonia and to another in Ukraine. In my previous work, I researched “Estonian-Russian” intermarriages; my ongoing postdoctoral research focuses on the marriages between the people from different regions in Ukraine. In this paper I first offer
an overview of my research methodology and theoretical framework. Second, I present an empirical illustration of some findings from Ukraine. In the end, I develop new reflections about my theoretical approach, directed towards rethinking the concept of “cultural world” and the meaning of “inter-marriage” in the diverse identification situation of Ukraine.

The paper explores the emergence of class boundaries in postsocialism in the realm of sociability. The goal was to observe class dynamics through qualitative, experience-near approach, providing a dynamic account of the ways Croatian upper middle class draw symbolic boundaries toward people of different social status. Two main patterns of symbolic boundary maintenance are described and observed in their historical trajectories. The issue of symbolic boundaries is then explored in case of private schooling, in order to follow the process of institutionalization of class inequalities. Finally, an opposite trend of boundary transgression is demonstrated on the case of cross-class friendships

In 1956, the Socialist faction in the Common Assembly of the European Coal and Steel Community put forth a wide‑ranging and unprecedented critique of the High Authority, the Community’s executive body. The faction’s move elicited harsh rebukes from the assembly’s Christian‑Democratic and Liberal factions and was the first instance of overt and coordinated transnational partisanship. This article argues that this bitter exchange would have been unthinkable under the High Authority’s previous president, Jean Monnet, who was widely admired by all factions. The Socialist critique encompassed a range of Community policies. Yet the personality of the new High Authority President, René Mayer, proved an important factor in this first exercise in transnational partisanship in the early history of European integration.

The paper discusses the issue of interpersonal understanding by comparing ordinary and cinematographic experience. Recent theories of interpersonal understanding turn out to be either inconclusive or insufficient to account for the heterogeneous ways in which we get mental and emotional states of other persons. The paper advances a view of the film medium by drawing on Stanley Cavell, which is reinforced by Wittgenstein’s and Merleau-Ponty’s convergent accounts of cinematographic perception. Against this background, interpersonal understanding turns out to be permeated by the expressivity of human appearance – something easily overlooked by the mentioned theories, which is yet brought forward most perspicuously by cinema.

We believe that no document is more revealing to find out the stories past lives than by casting an eye on the diata, documents by which,
broader or poorer, human life, with good and bad, with regrets and accomplishments, with unknown undertones, and unsuspected in most cases, it is revealed to us at the very moment of death. Starting from the coating of these types of acts and from the context in which they begin to be drafted, and going more far away from a thorough radiography of the interior and, very importantly, to the consequences on the socio-cultural framework, we intend to sketch the picture in motion of “the world we have lost.”

Étudier la littérature française en Roumanie du point de vue de l’histoire des disciplines suppose d’abord de faire la distinction entre la recherche et enseignement. Cet article propose quelques orientations méthodologiques qui pourraient guider une telle approche : l’histoire des idées sur la littérature française, l’histoire des trajectoires professionnelles et intellectuelles des représentants de la
discipline, l’analyse des pratiques de recherche et d’enseignement qui caractérisent l’évolution de la discipline dans le cadre plus large des sciences humaines, l’analyse des controverses intellectuelles et la restitution des dimensions politiques de la littérature française dans la Roumanie moderne.

By comparing the jurisprudence of the two European Courts this article seeks to find an acceptable level of trade union rights in Europe. The focus is on the proportionality test introduced by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in the process of finding a balance between fundamental rights and fundamental freedoms and also on the extension of the content of article 11 of the European Convention by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

The pilot urban renewal project in Tarlabaşı has amounted to the displacement and dispossession of communities. While the demolition in the area opened the space to curious visitors, researchers, activists and artists triggering an enthusiasm for the case, its impact already transforms the everyday life of the inhabitants in the surrounding of the construction site. How do these interventions affect the everyday relations of the production of space? In this article, I investigate the connotations of this question to open up a discussion about the modes of resistance with regards to the political significance of ‘affects’.

La présente étude aborde la problématique des échanges interculturels entre Français et Orientaux tels qu’ils sont reflétés par un échantillon représentatif de récits de voyage de la seconde moitié du XVIIe siècle. En retraçant le contexte spécifique de l’ouverture de la France envers l’Orient, où les voyages occupent une place de choix, on en est venu à identifier quelques caractéristiques d’une
démarche cohérente des voyageurs. L’exemple de Barthélemy Carré nous a servi d’illustration de certaines tendances communes, telles que le dépassement de préjugés ethnocentriques préexistants allant vers une réhabilitation de certains ethnotypes grâce à des interactions interculturelles prolongées.

The postwar famine in the USSR has received scarce attention in both post-Soviet and Western historiography. Based on newly disclosed archival materials from the former civil police and party in Chişinău and Moscow, this article focuses on the food riots in Soviet Moldavia on the eve of the 1946-1947 famine. Out of 30 food riots in the Spring 1946 registered in the Moldavian SSR, 18 were dominated by women (called bab’y bunty by Lynne Viola, 1996). The author tries to understand the agency and contingency in the outbreak of the food riots as well as the public and hidden transcript related to the way the Soviet regime tried to deal with earlier signals of the famine. The larger question to be raised is why people resist to food policies at certain moments of food crises and not at all in some others.

This paper is an analysis of a recent series of criminal complaints by the Institute for the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism and the Memory of the Romanian Exile regarding preventable deaths in residential institutions for children with disabilities. I contrast the investigations with ethnographic and interview data surrounding one of the institutions included in the trial, as well as archival material. I argue that the criminal complaints have marked a turning point in the process of judicialization of the state socialist past through
democratizing victim and perpetrator statuses and set in motion dynamics of cultural memory recognizing the deaths of children in institutions on a local level. Nevertheless, they also obliterate continuities of necropolitical practices in relation to institutions.

Die vorliegende Studie untersucht die byzantinische Hymnographie der orthodoxen Liturgie mit dem Zweck, besonders die liturgische
Redeweise mit Bezug auf Israel zu besprechen. In einem ersten Teil wird die paulinische Israelogie kurz dargestellt, und dann macht sich der Autor im zweiten Teil dieses Beitrages auf die Suche nach der Rezeption und Auslegung dieser paulinischen Theologie in den Texten der Ostkirche mit byzantinischem Ritus. Besondere Aufmerksamkeit wird dem älteren und für das Thema relevantesten Teil des orthodoxen Kirchenjahres geschenkt, d. h. dass vor allem die Zeitspanne des Triodions in Frage kommt. Die Absicht dieses Beitrags besteht darin, die Diskussion über Anti-Judaismus in der orthodoxen Liturgie und das Verhältnis zwischen Kirche und Judentum aus der Perspektive der orthodoxen Theologie zu thematisieren.

The topic of food consumption in Socialist Romania and Eastern Europe commonly conjures up images of widespread deprivation: rationing of supplies, frequent queuing, ‘progressive’ public health policies that were actually intended to restrict intake and adulteration of food products. Less adequately discussed in the popular press and in the academic literature remains the dietary transition that began in the 1960s and which transformed the rural and urban diets from a traditional, ‘core’-‘fringe’ type to the modern type characteristic of industrial societies. My article addresses this gap in the literature by analyzing the main developments in rural diets from the 1960s and 1970s along with the rural consumers’ perceptions of these developments from a standard of living perspective. Over and above its contribution to the study of food consumption in 20th century Romania, my analysis contributes to a better understanding of consumers’ experiences under State Socialism given that food consumption, together with housing and clothing, was a key aspect in the rural residents’ conception of ‘the good life’.

This working paper scrutinizes the role of sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) in constructing a transnational matrix of deservingness through which migration authorities differentially and selectively allocate refugee status, refugee rights and resettlement spots. This working paper will also reveal two interconnected effects of the transnational matrix of deservingness; while the matrix gives those deemed deserving incentive to remain immobile in Turkey and construct ‘legal’ subjectivities recognized by transnational refugee governance, the matrix gives those deemed undeserving incentive to be mobile, searching ways out of Turkey since they could not construct their legal subjectivities.

Recent research has defended the surprising thesis that in many cases the search for truth is better off if the information exchanged between the members of an epistemic community is limited. This is what one may call the limited information thesis. There is, however, the possibility of an even more radical position than this: the thesis that any communication between peers has zero epistemic value and that the search for truth is better off if the truth-inquirer does not take into consideration the truth-claims of her peers. This can be called the solitude thesis. The paper defends the claim that Descartes is a supporter of the solitude thesis with respect to metaphysical inquiry. The defense is facilitated by means of interpreting textual evidence found in Descartes’ essays Discourse on the Method, The Search for Truth and the Meditations on First Philosophy.

This paper refers to a contingent, but nonetheless important, aspect of a research that begun in 2005 and is now close to an end.1 The main project focuses on the unfolding of social relations of debt and duty in commercial and other rural social settings in Oltenia, Southern Romania. Since the privatization of retail commerce in 1989, large numbers of people have started buying consumer goods without paying on the spot; this occurs in the absence of any legal provisions. They refer to this practice using the vocabulary of “debt” (datorie): “selling on debt” and “buying on debt.” Debt relations are marked by the absence of interest, security, witnesses, formal agreements, evident means of sanctioning defaulters, as well as an elastic duration of repayment. The contrast to formal bank transactions – credit and debit relations – is striking.

This paper explores why dead-letter regimes, sets of norms and institutions with low efficiency and few expectations of tangible output, have become an enduring feature of international politics in the post-Soviet space. It focuses on the Collective Security Treaty Organization and the Eurasian Economic Union, the two regional regimes endorsed by Russia. The paper analyzes their emergence and evolvement, normative frameworks, performance and member states’ expectations. It argues that, while mostly failing as instruments of strategic action, these regimes have become important conduits of communicative action and arenas enabling member states to enact specific international roles.

My study is based on a corpus made of three books about the Oriental empires written by the French libertine François Bernier, the Polish Jesuit Judas Thaddeus Krusinski and the Moldavian Prince Dimitrie Cantemir. In analyzing these three works, my research is, on the one hand, interested in their approach to uncertainty in history and, on the other hand, on their emphasis on the importance of arbitrary events, which seem apparently insignificant. In so doing, my article argues that the works belonging to Bernier, Krusinski and Cantemir are not histories with a linear development, exclusively based on heroic figures that perform extraordinary actions.

Starting in the ninth century, Latin-Greek debates on orthodoxy led to the flourishing of the heresiological genre of the so-called “lists of errors”. This article discusses the case of the “Greek errors” listed by Latin authors living in the Holy Land, especially those produced by Franciscan friars, who settled in Jerusalem as the exclusive representatives of the Roman Church in the fourteenth century. The article explores in detail one of the errors included in the Latin lists, namely the descent of the Holy Fire on Holy Saturday at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

This article concerns the construction of female authority and female power in the Byzantine Empire and Medieval Georgia. In comparative framework, I analyze various communicative mediums by means of which the image and authority of female rulers were constructed and communicated to the audience in Byzantium and Medieval Georgia. After discussing the evolution of female rulership in the Byzantium from eight up to the end of the eleventh century, I move to explore the ideology of queenship in medieval Georgia under Tamar. I try to argue that idealized image of Tamar was constructed as a result of successful court propaganda which utilized to a large extent adopted and adapted Byzantine imperial ideal and rhetorical traditions.

The aim of this paper is to show how the North Korean Juche ideology acquired a religious dimension through the manipulation of traditional concepts from the sixteenth century Neo‑Confucianism of Yi Hwang. The study will bring together two of the most influential thought forms in the Korean Peninsula in a new approach from the perspective of religious and political studies, that will lead to their re‑evaluation and re‑contextualization.

In this paper we try to rescue from oblivion a man and his work. At the same time we try to uncover traces of genuine classical liberal thought on Romanian soil. Emanuel Neuman – “Manole” from Nicolae Steinhardt’s Journal of Happiness – wrote a PhD thesis in constitutional law entitled The Limits of State Power which he defended (but did not properly publish) in 1937. We will try to shed light on the importance of this work and the ideas contained therein and also present some biographical details of this very discreet man who immigrated to Brussels in 1960 and lived there until his death in 1995.

The central question asked in the paper is that; what are the motivations behind the United States and Russia’s clash with each other in the South Caucasus and Central Asian regions? Why as external great power the U.S. intervene into regions where Russia sees its sphere of influence. I try to give an answer to the question what the major determinants of the great power behavior in the SC and CA regions are. It is argued that weakened Russia has used mostly indirect measures in the post‑Cold war period to balance the American unilateralist hegemony, first in its neighborhood and then in the international affairs. I explain the causal determinants of the great powers clash‑in this case Russia and the U.S. – in the post‑Soviet space.

The paper examines the interplay between notions of citizenship and otherness in the context of Balkan states and how it reflects on their constitutional identity. The paper starts with the normative examination of citizenship, its elements and salience in the contemporary context. Then, it goes through a historical sketch of othering in the Balkans – and how the notion of citizenship has been changed in the course of time. There is a clear connection between othering and constitutional identity to be identified in the Balkans. The constitutional concepts of our national and political selves, individual rights and national sovereignty, liberal and national values are often in deep collision. Various empirical constitutional histories in the Balkans can be defined through four ideal type models of constitutional identities (national, multinational, republican and constitutional patriotism). The last model is a normative perspective for the constitutionalisation of Balkan states that evades sorts of othering present in other forms of constitutional identities.

Since the establishment of communist power in the countries of the Soviet bloc, the newly‑founded institutions of censorship were aimed at creating or training the “new man” and developing self‑censorship among artists. Their aims were also to consolidate and then to maintain communist power. The censors had to approve all artistic or scientific publications, radio or television broadcasts, theater and film scenarios as well as exhibitions, they could supervise even the work from ministries, including decisions on the state secrets. Knowledge of the operating mechanism of communist censorship contributes to the profound understanding of social and cultural life from that period.

In the Byzantine society, profoundly religious as it was, one could hardly imagine that the emperor or a member of the imperial family could become subject to excommunication. Firstly, the status of God’s chosen, promoted by the Byzantine imperial ideology, was totally incompatible with the severe transgressions one had to commit in order to be liable for ecclesiastical censure, even only for a temporary one. Secondly, any bishop who would dare to forbid an emperor’s access to the Church would obviously risk opening a conflict with very little chance of success. The practice of excommunication was mentioned by the Church in several penitential canons and enforced, in some exceptional cases, even on the Byzantine emperors (Theodosius I, Leo VI, Nikephoros II Phokas, and John I Tzimiskes). Thus, the conflict between Arsenios and Michael VIII should not be construed solely as a Western influence, but rather merely as one of the recurring disputes between the representatives of the State and the Church that took place throughout the Byzantine history.

In the last three decades, Romanian historiography privileged the intellectual, cultural and political reevaluations of Romanian modernity. However, there is still little interest regarding the rise and formation of liberal and/or intellectual professions in modern Romania and the role these professions played in (re) shaping the social, economic and politic visions for a modern(izing) state. The
aim of this study is to sketch the provisions for such a broader demarche, while taking engineers as a study case. From a theoretical point of view, the study relies on the “system of professions” theory of Andrew Abbott.

The post-war ethnically divided cities are often subjects of highly political attempts to glorify their pre-division and pre-war pasts, both in the scholarship and in the common thinking. In this paper I write that this “idealisation” of the past of an ethnically divided city is problematic as it does not include the understanding that the ethnically divided cities are – like all the other cities – to some extent
“normal” places where people work, shop and pray. They are not loci of “ideal” versions of ethnic cohabitation or ethnic divisions, but they are places where ethnic cohabitation is, like elsewhere, happening somewhere between the extreme ends of the scale. I base my study on a research conducted in the ethnically
divided city of Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina.

La biologie et l’agronomie intègrent une véritable Guerre froide scientifique menée par l’agronome soviétique T. D. Lyssenko à l’encontre de la génétique. Cet article propose une méthodologie pour étudier l’histoire du lyssenkisme en Roumanie entre 1945 et 1965. L’exposé synthétique du lyssenkisme, de l’historiographie et des grandes étapes du lyssenkisme en Roumanie sert de cadre général pour formuler une approche centrée sur les sciences du végétal et pour analyser l’apport des sources imprimées et des fonds d’archives mobilisés pour appréhender lyssenkisme roumain dans toute sa complexité.

La biologie et l’agronomie intègrent une véritable Guerre froide scientifique menée par l’agronome soviétique T. D. Lyssenko à l’encontre de la génétique. Cet article propose une méthodologie pour étudier l’histoire du lyssenkisme en Roumanie entre 1945 et 1965. L’exposé synthétique du lyssenkisme, de l’historiographie et des grandes étapes du lyssenkisme en Roumanie sert de cadre général pour formuler une approche centrée sur les sciences du végétal et pour analyser l’apport des sources imprimées et des fonds d’archives mobilisés pour appréhender lyssenkisme roumain dans toute sa complexité.

La biologie et l’agronomie intègrent une véritable Guerre froide scientifique menée par l’agronome soviétique T. D. Lyssenko à l’encontre de la génétique. Cet article propose une méthodologie pour étudier l’histoire du lyssenkisme en Roumanie entre 1945 et 1965. L’exposé synthétique du lyssenkisme, de l’historiographie et des grandes étapes du lyssenkisme en Roumanie sert de cadre général pour formuler une approche centrée sur les sciences du végétal et pour analyser l’apport des sources imprimées et des fonds d’archives mobilisés pour appréhender lyssenkisme roumain dans toute sa complexité.

This paper offers an overview of the way in which Mircea Eliade used psychological language in his early work on religion, and places this early contribution in the context of the history of the psychology of religion. The first two sections comment on Eliade’s earliest mentions of psychological concepts, while the following two go into a more in-depth analysis of the history of the concept of higher consciousness in psychology and into the history of the psychology of yoga in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Building on these two
sections, I analyse the uses of psychology in an unpublished manuscript from 1929 and in Eliade’s Ph.D. thesis.

Unlike modern societies, Byzantine scholars did not have the institutional support that is now provided by the systems organized institutions of education. Instead, usually, in occasional pedagogical activities Byzantine scholars often attracted support from more or less generous patrons. If the patronage has represented a constant social and cultural phenomenon throughout the Byzantine  history, after 1261, the year Constantinople was recovered from the Latins, support for scientific activities fluctuated significantly due to
transformations in the regional economy and society. This article has two main objectives: to detect changes in the nature of the
imperial generosity towards researchers during the last century of Byzantine history and to identify the uses of intellectual networks in the imperial milieu. These elements will therefore be analysed over three distinct periods. corresponding to the reigns of emperors John V Palaiologos (1347-1391), Manuel II Palaiologos (1391-1425) and John VIII Palaiologos (1425-1448). Finally, it will be argued that the literary mecenat of Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos was unique for the period of the Palaiologos and that it had many implications for his ideological program. As proof of my survey I will use written sources mainly letters and rhetorical texts by authors active in this period.

Drawing upon ethnographic research conducted intermittently in the capital city of Romania between 2015 and 2021, this paper demonstrates that to be middle class in Bucharest means to engage in ‘grounding work’. This type of work enables class subjectification in a similar way to ‘boundary work’. Yet, ‘grounding work’ is less about drawing boundaries between the middle class and their class others, and more about highlighting the foundations that support what lies within and without these boundaries. The middle class becomes the moral middle of the society. This is a work through which middle‑class people speak and act themselves into existence, individually and jointly.

This paper explores the epistemological vantage points used by ethno-anthropologists at the semiperiphery, by focusing on the discussion of zadruga (a large cooperative household in the mountainous regions of the Balkan, which existed during the 19th and early 20th centuries). Starting from Strathern’s (1987) distinction between “anthropologists abroad” and “anthropologists at home”, which
is based on different ways of learning from socio-cultural differences, the paper demonstrates that ethno-anthropologists from the Balkan could occupy either of these two positions, as well as those of a nationalist intellectual, or a combination and reversal of these positions. Such multiplicity of epistemological choices for the scholars in the Balkan is probably the result of working in the semiperiphery (Blagojević 2009; Blagojević and Yair 2010). While it is potentially enriching, it also means that ethno-anthropology in the Balkan is difficult to capture as a distinct epistemological standpoint.

The nineteenth century has long been considered as the age of nationalism during which different societies across Europe and beyond gave up their regional and social class identities in favor of the national ones or adjusted the former to the latter. However, increasingly more historians call this view into question, drawing attention to individual and collective historical actors who did not think of themselves in ethnic or national terms. This article builds upon the recent scholarship on national indifference in search for a new approach to studying the collective identifications of people, whose sense of belonging has always been a subject of discussions—the Cossacks.

Focusing on Hungarian film director Miklós Jancsó (1921-2014) and tracing the development of his thinking, as evidenced by the formally
distinctive and politically charged body of work that he built over 50 years, the essay investigates issues related to international cinematic modernism, its various national versions, its late-1960s political vanguard and the particularities of Jancsó’s contribution to this vanguard from his position as a filmmaker in an officially Socialist country

Cet article traite des investissements domestiques et immobiliers de migrants roms roumains dans leur village d’origine. Depuis les années 2000 et l’augmentation des circulations migratoires roumaines, une forte compétition immobilière a vu le jour dans de nombreux villages de migrants. Le groupe rom dont il est question ici n’y a pas échappé. A travers une analyse des relations entre parenté et espace domestique, il s’agit de comprendre d’une part les origines spécifiques de l’obsession immobilière au sein de ce groupe, d’autre part comment l’amélioration de la maison villageoise, qui incarne la trajectoire sociale de ses habitants, doit nécessairement être interminable.

My study aims to analyze the anatomy and the mechanisms of constructing and showcasing the erotic power in so called “Artistic documentaries” produced in the 1930s and 1940s. In my research I will focus on the cinematic representations of the Party leaders (and the Party power in general) and their erotic dimension. I shall argue that that from 1930s to 1940s Stalin not only steps out from Lenin’s
shadow as a genuine leader of working class and, subsequently, of the Soviet Union, as it has been noted by Slavic Studies, but he also outshines the eroticism of Lenin’s character in these films. My argument is that if Stalin appears as a locus of heterosexual desire, Lenin first of all evokes a homosexual one. I shall try to contextualize this rechanneling of desire in the light of 1930s homophobic stands and policies of the Party.

This article introduces the comparison of the relationship between art and politics in ten dictatorships in Central and Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania), and South America (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay). The specific analysis concentrates on the 1970s and the 1980s when the two regions were ruled by dictatorships, either inspired by communism or anti-communism (Doctrine of National Security). The article provides an overview of the main theoretical issues in studying such diverse regimes by focusing on their institutional frameworks. The tentative conclusion is that these regimes are not only comparable, but also similar in several respects.

In our paper, we tried to present the life, activity and artistic heritage of one of the individuals of the medieval Armenian art – Avag Tsaghkogh (14th century), whose life was full of wanderings. In future it is quite possible that new books will be found, which will shed a light on the topic and complete our knowledge on the artist.

This paper is concerned with the study of gender as political metaphor. It argues that in ancient Athens, or indeed in other pre-industrial societies, the aristocracy had symbolic feminine attributes, and that „political gender” was performed by the people of the time in order to allegorically signify the political relationships between different social classes; essentially this means that gender and love were perceived as mediums of political expression. His-story, the contemporary production of the past through the lens of “big men”, ignores the role of symbolic women, projecting instead today’s hyper masculine worldview of what it means to be part of the elite. Mostly based on capital strength and the idea that the nobility was synonymous with warlords and brute force, this view has the direct result of excluding Eros from the political conversation that residually survives in ancient texts. Eros, thus exiled to an exclusively private sphere, such as the private life of individuals, has lost nowadays its multifaceted ancient meanings, and this paper is a step towards recovering them.

Present article deals with the problems of Byzantine monastic archives and its readers. Namely, trough regarding methods of keeping, storing techniques, ways of copying and persons responsible for the archives, I find out the possible readers inside of monasteries, and examine their attitude toward the content of the records. While through analyzing the situations when the monastic documents were used outside of the foundations (during tribunals, border-delineations etc.), I discover which laic authorities and individuals had access to records, and what was their ways of reading these texts.

Chinese political discourse has changed dramatically, in the last decade, as a result of China’s story of economic success and continuous
growth. At the same time, the Chinese leadership has become more and more aware that economic success alone can no longer be used as single means of legitimation. Successful economic policies did not translate into benefits for people from all social strata and increased the feeling of discontent. The paper analyzes attempts to recover and reinterpret Confucian moral values to the present political realities; it discusses the appropriation of Confucian values in the new political discourse of the Chinese elite to legitimize the continuation of the CCP’s stay in power, focusing mainly on the ten-year period of Hu Jintao’s government, between 2002 and 2012.

The paper explores anti-corruption (AC) institutional framework in Serbia from 2000 to 2012 in the following way. Firstly, the AC laws, agencies and state institutions are mapped. Then, the main driver of the institutional change was identified. Lastly, the AC institutional organization as a whole is analyzed. The research findings suggest that the anti-corruption institutions in Serbia developed through the process of institutional layering; they were externally driven in most cases (by the EU and international AC initiatives); and, the overall organization of the AC institutions is a hybrid structure of the three models existing worldwide.

This article examines the problems that existed for British policy makers in their attempts to build a consistent and coherent long term policy towards the Soviet Union while balancing competing objectives such as maintaining an anti-revisionist stance against aggressor states. It argues, first, that the 1939 guarantee to Romania was an instrument of declaratory politics for Britain that represented a statement against changes by force, but not revision writ large and, second, that it undermined British efforts to provoke Romanian resistance in 1940. In both cases, this was largely because Germany and Romania correctly perceived that there was no genuine Anglo-Soviet understanding to underpin it.

In his early philosophical work, Ludwig Wittgenstein developed a full range of ideas in metaphysics, philosophy of language and value, but also in the philosophy of logic, mathematics and natural science. The aim of the present paper is to discuss these ideas in relation to Wittgenstein’s central metaphysical project, the “picture theory”. My first claim is that “picture theory” grounded a semantic research in logic, mathematics and science that was maintained by Wittgenstein until the early 1930s. Secondly, I claim that Wittgenstein’s solutions in semantics, especially after 1928, still make a pertinent philosophical project when evaluated from a contemporary perspective.

This paper tells the empirical story of how the mutual‑aid game (or pyramid or Ponzi scheme) Caritas, went bankrupt, after having acquired nationwide success. I reassemble this story through participants’ testimonies and mass media accounts, focusing on the role of the written press in fabricating, that is, representing, predicting, and announcing its demise. Curiously enough, the written press announces the failure of the game at a point where it is most successful ‑ that is, after Caritas relocates from Braşov to Cluj‑Napoca, operates multiple branches, and animates millions of Romanians into pilgrimage to a city frequently compared to a financial Mecca, Maglavit or El Dorado. I explore the rhetoric strategies used in shaping mutual‑aid bankruptcy, examining how something that has not (yet) happened is organized so as to appear impending. Bankruptcy is assembled by portraying Caritas as “matter out of place” (Douglas
1966), an alien element that disturbs the peace and serenity of a city formerly known for its university campus and intellectual life. Furthermore, illegality is forged out of ambiguity. Since there are no provisions specifically outlawing mutual‑aid games in general, journalists try to undermine them as particular cases. Lastly, the use of numbers completes the rhetoric of bankruptcy. Most accounts include numerical and non‑numerical formulations of the size of the mutual‑aid phenomenon, presenting very precise numbers of depositors, deposits, victims, or financial damage. I highlight the paradox of precision as being more rhetorical than informative.

Cet article se propose d’interroger l’influence de la pensée de Ch. A. Crusius sur la philosophie pratique de Kant. En partant du concept de raison commune et partageant la conviction que la vertu peut et doit être enseignée, les deux auteurs élaborent une doctrine éthique où la raison pratique prime explicitement sur la raison théorique et l’acquisition de la vertu est considérée comme le but la vie de l’homme. Kant se familiarise assez tôt avec la morale crusienne, détaillée surtout dans l’ouvrage Instruction pour une vie raisonnable, et elle jouera un rôle déterminant dans l’articulation de sa propre conception, tant dans la période précritique, qu’après 1781. Afin de situer plus précisément cette parenté, nous avons choisi comme fil conducteur la question de la formation à la vertu qui permet de mettre en lumière les points communs, les affinités, mais également les différences irréductibles entre les deux penseurs.

Notre étude se propose de discuter quelques points des doctrines politiques de deux des plus grands penseurs du Moyen Âge, Farabi et Maïmonide. La discussion de ces doctrines sera menée en suivant un problème précis, celui du lien qui existe entre politique et cosmologie. Pour ce faire, nous avons édifié notre démarche en suivant trois questions majeures, à savoir 1) les traditions intellectuelles dont les deux philosophes se considèrent les héritiers 2) l’importance décisive de la pensée politique dans l’ensemble des deux pensées, relevant de l’héritage platonicien de la philosophie politique dans l’Islam médiéval, ainsi que 3) l’importance de la cosmologie dans la conception de la communauté idéale. Sans prétendre d’épuiser la discussion des pensées politiques dans les deux cas, notre enquête se veut un point de départ d’une étude plus substantielle de philosophie comparée, ayant comme objet deux des repères les plus importants de la tradition philosophique méditerranéenne.

Rural systematization is considered representative of the brutality of the Communist regime in Romania. The article claims that such a policy was not unique and that Romania was in the deed of one of the last communist states to implement it. This delay refers to the role that the village had and has had in the interpretation of Romanian national identity and compliance, in the name of the national independence, the principles of the original Stalinism of Ceausescu’s regime. Finally, the stagnation of the Urbanization rate and the backwardness of agriculture during the implementation of the systematization in the 80s.

The paper focuses on the struggle between different understandings of nationality policies and the international revolutionary role of the Moldovan ASSR in 1924, in the process of the establishment of the republic and the struggle for power in the region. The paper will trace how a group with a more modest vision of the revolutionary role of the Moldovan ASSR turned out to be successful. It will argue that the role of the Soviet Ukrainian leadership was crucial in the choice of the leading group and the direction of the nationality policies and its international dimension in the Moldovan ASSR.

This article examines the Hocapaşa fire of 1865 and consequent planning activities in Istanbul within the frame of disaster law, demonstrating the impact of fires on law and property relations with a focus on the development of legally controversial practices, such as the icarateyn system. It reveals the change that the Hocapaşa fire brought about in disaster law and the notions of waqf property and argues that the Hocapaşa fire created an actual setting in which the waqf property was made into state property with reference to ‘public interest.’

This paper draws upon a variety of empirical sources to reconstruct the 2015 Belgrade Lesbian March, and contextualise this public gathering both in the history of gay and lesbian organising in the (post-Yugoslav space as well as in the broader sphere of European and especially Anglo-American lesbian mobilisation. I argue that this lesbian separatist event, on the one hand, increased lesbian visibility both nationally and regionally, but it also created divisions within activist circles that do not seem to advance the overarching goal of non-heterosexual liberation. While pointing to the importance of gender-sensitive understandings of homophobia and the necessity for producing lesbian-centred scholarship, I claim that public space and emancipatory political contestations that take place within it should remain open and inclusive.

Dans mon étude, j’essayerai d’analyser l’horizon existentiel de la lecture fondanienne de l’œuvre baudelairienne. En outre, mon
analyse se penchera sur le dialogue de Fondane avec sa judéité et avec l’existentialisme de Chestov. En plus, j’essayerai de détecter les traces de la crise de la modernité retrouvables dans le texte de Fondane. Mes concepts‑clés pour approcher l’auteur roumain, sont justement : 1. sa judéité – réalisée et comprise différemment dans les périodes roumaine et française de la création; 2. la manière dont son œuvre répond à la crise de la modernité – 3. la manière dont il introduit et interprète les principaux problèmes de l’existentialisme de l’inspiration chestovienne dans ses ouvrages. Ainsi, je voudrais créer un portrait intellectuel d’un Juif roumain immigré en France en 1923 dont la carrière coïncidait tellement avec « l’esprit de son temps » (Zeitgeist), tout en restant dans le même temps indépendante et extrêmement individuelle.

Malgré certains désagréments et difficultés pratiques, les rencontres entre les écrivains roumains et bulgares dans la première décennie communiste donnent l’impression de se dérouler mieux que les échanges des Roumains avec les autres confrères de l’Est. Mais si les rapports des écrivains invités sont en général pleins de superlatifs à l’égard de l’accueil dans l’autre pays, il semble toutefois que
l’investissement des autorités communistes dans les visites « de popularisation », censées mener à une véritable connaissance réciproque entre les deux pays et leurs littératures, n’a pas eu les résultats escomptés.

During the last two decades, we can observe a large and growing body of writing on different aspects of Russian nationalism and national identity. Now we find ourselves in a need to systematize different approaches in historiography to the problem of Russian nationhood, and this is the main concern of this article. It will proceed along two tracks. Firstly, it will try to depict the entire range of views presented in a historiography on Russian nationalism and national identity in the imperial period. We admit that this is a quite ambitious task, not to say utopian, that is why it will dwell specifically on those works, which most distinctly represent the main paradigms that have largely shaped historical discussions on our question over the last decades. Secondly, it will offer a general examination of the critical factors, which influenced theoretical and methodological development of these paradigms.

The article explores the history of the legal profession in Ukraine focusing on a border region of Sloboda Ukraine (Slobozhanshchyna) throughout the eighteenth century as a case study. For the first time in historiography, the topic is analyzed on the basis of sixty-three court cases from the 1720s–1790s held in the Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine in Kyiv. In all of these cases, either one or
both litigants were substituted for by an advocate known as poverennyi (lit., “trustworthy person”). The sources reveal that the agents who acted on behalf of their principals were also widely engaged in economic activity (e.g., contracting, bargaining and transferring property). The statistics compiled on the basis of the archival data demonstrate that the majority of the clients belonged to the nobility,
that is Ukrainian Cossack officers (starshyna) and Russian noble families. The advocates came from various social strata with the leading positions occupied by Cossacks and the related subgroups of state peasantry, then the bailiffs of estates authorized by their landlords and finally, employees of local chanceries. From the perspective of appropriate experience and knowledge, the members of the latter group presented the closest equivalent to professional lawyers in the region prior to the official establishment of a professional bar in the Russian Empire in 1864.

This paper considers the potato as an agent in social history, its role within an underdeveloped civil society dominated by the state. It uses guidance from previous studies, extending its research edge and focus to Belarus. Using qualitative methods, it shows that authoritarianism encourages work on subsidiary allotments to make workers economically and socially inactive. The paper investigates manifestations of “potato-induced” weaknesses of civil society, workings of governmental policies, and prospects for public resistance.
It finally hypothesizes on the re-feudalizing perils for people subsisting on the potato but calling it “second bread.”

The 2008 Georgia war represented a turning point in Russian foreign policy. It was for the first time since the dissolution of the Soviet Union when Moscow invaded an independent country and for the first time when two members of the Council of Europe fought against each other. A premiere for post‑Soviet Russian foreign policy was also registered in 2014. The annexation of Crimea represented the first incorporation of foreign territories by Moscow since the WWII. These two events determined the West to protest and blatantly contradict Russia’s foreign policy discourse centered around the respect for states’ sovereignty and equality of actors in the international system. Starting from the assertion that the formulation of Russia’s foreign policy is determined by the West’s international behavior – Moscow looking whether to emulate or to find alternatives to it, the present paper will compare Russia’s legitimization arguments for the 2008 war and the 2014 annexation of Crimea trying to assess how Moscow positions itself towards the criticism of the West and whether there is a continuity in Russian official legimization narratives.

In this paper I am dealing with the issue of ‘double identity’ of Gypsy musicians – their concurrent identification as Gypsies and as musicians.  I claim that this ‘double identity’ enables them playing music of specific traits, music that is referred to as ‘Gypsy music’ or alternatively as music performed in a Gypsy style. It can be claimed that music not only serves as a means of expressing this ’double identity’ of Gypsy musicians but is – in fact – a reflection of this specific duality.