By Hayley Anderson. Hayley is a fourth-year European Social and Political Studies student and one of the Student Ambassadors at the UCL Europe Institute for 2024/25. With her specialism in Hungarian and History, she has focussed her research on the experiences and identities of communities in Eastern Slovakia and the wider Central East Europe region. She is also a Student Associate for the UCL Platform for Linguistic and Epistemic Justice (PLEJ)

As a student of Hungarian and History, SSEES’s library collection is one which I find myself using regularly. However, it wasn’t until we had a language class dedicated to exploring the Hungarian section of the library that I realised just how sprawling this collection is. In the course of an hour, we tracked a timeline of translated fiction and historical sources, frequently finding overlap with the literatures and cultures of the surrounding countries. But there was one section which particularly piqued our curiosity, the Nyugat literary journal. Of course, the bold advertisements and illustrations which adorn the pages of the paper were eye-catching and refreshing amongst a sea of text. But there was also something exemplified within this hundred-year-old journal that reflected our own multilingual experiences at SSEES.

(more…)

By Dr Elodie Douarin, Associate Professor in Economics and Gerhard Schnyder, Professor of International Management & Political Economy, Institute for International Management, Loughborough University London. 

What do hurricane Katrina, a sovereign debt crisis in Greece, military coups, and credit crunches have in common? They all cause crises that may fundamentally challenge established institutional, economic and political orders. While the ‘permacrisis’ our world increasingly seems to be engulfed in is certainly no cause for joy, for social scientists interested in institutions, it offers an opportunity, because crises open up a window to observe the interplay between formal institutions (like laws and regulations) and informal institutions (like social norms and cultural values) and their joint response to stressing factors. It allows us therefore to better understand the relationship between two spheres of human activity that are too often presented as opposed or alternative orders.

An illustration of crises including a hurricane, financial crisis, coup d’etat, with global impact visuals.

(more…)

Written by Ksenia Sizonova, PhD candidate, UCL SSEES

Aitmatov’s lines are music. They must be heard.
Their resonating waves carry the mystery of love and divine anxiety…’
M. Gapyrov [1]

Discourses about the Kyrgyz author Chyngyz Aitmatov’s legacy are often centered around his coining of the term ‘mankurt’ — an enslaved person deprived of their memory through torture. Originally described in the 1980 novel The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years, the word ‘mankurt’ has acquired a life of its own, prominently featuring in national identity debates not only in Kyrgyzstan and other Central Asian states but in many societies of the former Soviet Union [2].

(more…)

By Jack Dean, PhD candidate

With the first round of the election having been explored on the SSEES Research Blog, the question that stood out to me was “Who is Calin Georgescu?”. Whilst most discussions in the media thus far center around the pro-Russia stances offered, it is worth exploring the Georgescu’s rhetoric relating to conspiracies and healthcare. I argue that Calin Georgescu is the latest Romanian political actor to utilize medical populism in the years since the onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic and suggest that Georgescu represents the latest iteration of a post-Pandemic, post-fact norm for the country.

(more…)

Written by Svetlana Ruseishvili[1], Oswaldo Truzzi[2] and scholars of the Sérgio Vieira de Mello Academic Chair for Refugees at the Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil. Svetlana Ruseishvili will be a Visiting Scholar at UCL SSEES for Term 2, 22-23. 

Putin’s attack on Ukraine resulted in casualties, destruction, and large-scale migration. In Ukraine, the main demographic consequences of the war were the massive loss of life and the vast number of refugees and internally displaced persons. Since the war began, thirteen million people have been displaced from Ukraine, both internally and abroad. According to UNHCR estimates, 7.4 million Ukrainian refugees have been registered in Europe. About 3 million people left or were taken to the Russian Federation.

The scale of emigration from Russia itself became unprecedented. Although emigration from Russia for political and economic reasons occurred before the war, it was Putin’s invasion of Ukraine that triggered a massive flee to nearby visa-free countries such as Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Turkey, Armenia, Estonia, and Latvia. According to rough estimates, between 500,000 and 1 million people left Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. Exact statistics are unavailable, as emigrants have left and continue to flee in an emergency, without de-registering in Russia, arriving in visa-free countries. This is a massive new exodus from Russia.

(more…)

Anna Stanisz-Lubowiecka and Carolin Heilig, current UCL SSEES PhD students

A PhD is a special but equally challenging period. For those in the midst of it connecting with others in a similar position can make you realise that your experiences are shared by others and for those just about to embark on the PhD journey, an exchange with more experienced PhD candidates can help to mitigate certain challenges from the get-go.

On 23–24 June 2022 during the Polish Studies Group Northern Workshop in Manchester we moderated a session dedicated to the needs of PhD students in Polish Studies. The aim of the session was to discuss challenges students have encountered at different stages of their PhD journey and share experience on how some of these challenges may be overcome. The discussion took place in a friendly and supportive atmosphere of a PhD student network and also invited PhD students at Manchester University researching other countries in the region. Students who attended our session were doing their PhDs at a number of British universities and represented different disciplines, but they had one thing in common: they were all doing research on some aspect of Poland. For many of us this was the first occasion to come together to discuss challenges of researching Poland from abroad. For this reason, we ended up focussing primarily on discussing the challenges themselves, rather than providing solutions.

(more…)

WRITTEN BY ALINA VRABIE, BA HISTORY, POLITICS AND ECONOMICS 2^ND YEAR STUDENT AT SSEES

Through his inaugural lecture entitled ‘Nationalism, Populism and Homophobia in Central and Eastern Europe’, Professor Richard Mole guided us through an insightful analysis on how LGBT identities have been politicised in the region and how they are intertwined with populism.

Following an address from the SSEES Director, Professor Diane P. Koenker, and from the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences, Professor Sasha Roseneil, Richard began his lecture with a short research timeline and explanation of his research interests. In particular, Richard’s research activity centres around understanding how and why states treat their sexual minorities in specific ways.

His lecture begins through operationalising homophobia. Particularly, he highlights a mismatch between the degree of legal rights granted to LGBT groups in specific European countries and the societal support for legal equality for these groups. These differences are particularly noticeable in the case of Poland and Hungary, which, perhaps not so coincidentally, have strong populist parties in power.

The question thus arises: why do populist parties weaponise homophobia?

Richard begins to answer this question by first defining populism. Through the definition he uses, developed by Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, populism is generally seen as a thin ideology that divides the society into “corrupt elites” and “pure people”. He then explains how East European populism overlaps with nationalism, resulting in a promise by populist parties to restore traditional values.

As such, populist discourse in these cases tends to limit the definition of “pure people”; in Poland, for example, it restricts the term to “catholic, ethnically Polish heterosexuals”. This limitation permits the delegitimization of opposing views, making way for narratives such as the anti-LGBT one. This logic is illustrated by the anti-LGBT zones legislation in Poland.

Richard’s lecture then shifts focus towards explaining the implications of this anti-LGBT discourse: namely why politicians say they initiate such legislation and why they actually do so.

When seeking to justify such legislation, politicians usually adhere to a series of reasons why queer individuals are seen as a threat to the nation: they fail to contribute to biological reproduction, they fail to contribute to cultural reproduction, they fail to adhere to traditional stereotypes of gender roles and they deviate from religious norms. In Poland’s case particularly, LGBT individuals are also seen as disloyal, often turning for help towards the West and not domestically. This also plays well into the populist rhetoric that homosexuality is a Western import.

When assessing why politicians actually choose anti-LGBT legislation, Richard highlights politicians’ need for a scapegoat, turning the LGBT community into a distraction from other state issues, such as economic problems. Moreover, this discourse strengthens their support among the conservative electorate and helps to generally deligitimise liberal politics.

Richard then delves into the research that he conducted together with Dr Agnieszka Golec de Zavala on nationalism and homophobia. Namely, he explains the distinction they made between nationalism as “national in-group satisfaction” and “national collective narcissism”. Their research finds a direct relationship between the latter and homophobia, identifying that individuals scoring highly on collective narcissism are more likely to also display homophobic attitudes. This research ties in perfectly with Richard’s thesis on the connection between populism and homophobia.

The lecture concludes through circling back to the LGBT-free zones case and its political aftermath, with mentions on the international and LGBT community response to the situation. As the general populist discourse tried to reframe queerness as an ideology championed by the West, the Polish LGBT community itself began reclaiming national symbols. Richard finishes his lecture by emphasising the importance of LGBT activism given that the instrumentalisation of homophobia by populists is unlikely to disappear any time soon.

The event ended with a heartfelt reflection from Professor Michael Worton, who pondered the hardships spotlighted through Richard’s lecture in regards to nationalism and populism across the region.

Overall, Richard’s lecture was an eye opening synopsis on the socio-political climate the LGBT communities in Central and Eastern Europe face. His research proves to be a vital means to reach causality between the anti-LGBT phenomenon and populism, explaining the factors underpinning the persistence of LGBT oppression in the region.

A recording of the Lecture is available to watch on UCL SSEES YouTube Channel.

Author: Pippa Crawford, MA Russian Studies

On 8 December 1991, six men met in a hunting lodge in the ancient forest between Poland and Belarus. There they signed the Belovezh Accords, triggering the collapse of the Soviet Union. The signatories were the Presidents of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, and their respective prime ministers, with the leaders of the other Soviet republics conspicuously excluded from the dialogue. Whether or not the Belovezh Accords were legal remains difficult to prove, as the original document was destroyed. There are persistent rumours that none of the leaders came to the dacha with a coherent plan for the future of the Union, and that whiskey and vodka were involved. One thing is certain – the events of 8 December sent shock waves across the Soviet region, the effects of which are still palpable today.

Viskuli Dacha

(more…)