Justice and Memory after Dictatorship: How Eastern Europe and Latin America Transformed International Law

3rd 2022 Session of CEFRES Seminar

When: Wednesday 16th March 2022, 4:30 pm
Where: At CEFRES and online (to register please contact claire(@)cefres.cz)
Language: English
Discussants: Raluca Grosescu (SNSPA, Bucarest), Eva-Clarita Pettai (Imre-Kertész Kolleg)
Moderation: Anemona Constantin (CEFRES)

Abstract:

This research investigates how national courts from Latin America and Central Eastern Europe (CEE) have challenged and transformed international criminal law (ICL) in trials held against former authoritarian officials after the “third wave” of democratization. In contrast to the UN-centric approaches that have dominated the scholarship on ICL, I explore the role of two so-called “semi-peripheries” of the international system in shaping global norms. I show how legal actors from the two regions created novel readings of ICL and contested an existing international law order which they considered unable to address their violent pasts. Continue reading Justice and Memory after Dictatorship →

Pan-Slavism or Romantic Nationalism? The case of the Pest-Buda Serbs in the first half of the nineteenth century

2nd 2022 Session of CEFRES Seminar

When: Wednesday 2 March 2022, 4:30 pm
Where: At CEFRES and online (to register please contact claire(@)cefres.cz)
Language: English
Host: Dušan Ljuboja (ELTE University, Budapest, associated at CEFRES)

Abstract:

The nationalism studies are a broad field, with several different schools of thought, usually divided between the modernists and primordialists. The phenomenon of nation building is generally viewed as a modern concept, characterized by the age of changing social orders, rise of industrial capitalism, new technologies, and information age. Whether the emerging nations had a right to claim that their existence reached far beyond this modern era, does not truly matter. The nationalist movements abide by a certain set of rules. Researchers devised methodological tools which would act as a lens through which we could determine the stage of development of a certain national movement. One of these tools is the framework by Joep Leerssen, a Dutch historian, who proposed the idea of “cultural nationalism.” This theory, among others, would be the basis of my attempt to determine whether a certain movement, regardless of its developmental stage, would qualify as a national one, and if not, what were the reasons for it? Continue reading Pan-Slavism or Romantic Nationalism? →

The Galactic Plane of Human History or the Hold of the Infinitely Large Scale in Our Lives

1st 2022 Session of CEFRES Seminar

When: Wednesday 16th February 2022, 4:30 pm
Where: At CEFRES and online (to register please contact claire(@)cefres.cz)
Language: English
Hosts:
Julien Wacquez, Post-doctoral researcher in the Labex « Les passés dans le présent », associate researcher at CEFRES

The field of environmental humanities, which has been developing rapidly over the last few decades, is led, by its very objects of investigations and research questions, to work with a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. But historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and literary scholars are not used to considering the coexistence of phenomena on such scales. The case of SARS-CoV-2 is a flagrant example: to understand the consequences of the emergence of such a virus, it is necessary to go from the scale of the genome, then of the molecule (for example, the SPIKE protein with which the virus can get into our bodies), to that of ecosystems, and even of the entire planet, while passing by that of the individual and that of populations. How can such varied scales meet? Such work requires the use of different disciplines and many types of knowledges. How can these disciplines interact? Continue reading The Galactic Plane of Human History or the Hold of the Infinitely Large Scale in Our Lives →

Space(s) and Politics of Memory:
Roma Holocaust in the Czech Republic

A Proteus Webinar

When: December 10th, 2021, at 10 am
Where: en ligne on zoom ID 450 714 1898 code 681515
https://upr-si.zoom.us/j/4507141898?pwd=MnVqYmZPTzZqbldYUEFHODRSbXlldz09
Language: English

Speaker

Yasar ABU GHOSH, lecturer, Charles University, Faculty of Humanities

Discussants

• Alenka JANKO SPREIZER, associate professor, University of Primorska, Faculty of Humanities
• Nikola LUDLOVÁ, PhD candidate at Central European University and CEFRES

A Proteus webinar organized by

• Petra KAVRECIC, assistant professor, University of Primorska, Faculty of Humanities
• Felipe Kaiser FERNANDES, PhD candidates at IIAV EHESS, associated at CEFRES & Charles University

 Abstract

In anthropology, the relation of Roma to the past has been a central concern in conceptualizing Romani forms of attachment and belonging. These being enacted in the present, the past is seen as a “foreign country”. However, since 1980’s we have been witnessing a rising engagement of various European Roma and pro-Roma agents with struggles over the recognition of the memory of Holocaust and Romani victimhood. Be it in artistic expressions, in memoirs writings or in political participation, the shift towards historical framing signals a rather different attitude towards the past. The apparent contradiction has been highlighted in several contributions that sought to explain it by reference to new politics of identity, to ethnic emancipation and Europeanization, or by discerning the formation of a Romani elite as the bearer of an emerging political subjectivity.
In my presentation I will build on a dissection of a commemorative practice identified as name-reading, a practice that is constituted at the nexus of inclusive politics of commemoration and what is called the archival mode in Holocaust commemoration. Dissecting the practice should allow to raise questions that would connect a practice of commemoration with some of the cultural frames of memory identified by anthropologists of different Roma communities. I will be asking does name-reading serve what commemoration is supposed to do, that is actualize the past for the needs of the present?

Yasar Abu Ghosh is lecturer in sociocultural anthropology at the Department of Social and Cutlural Anthropology, Charles University, Prague and faculty member of NYU Prague. He specializes in topics related to Central European Roma, economic and political anthropology and ethnographic methodology. His latest research focuses on survival strategies of poor Roma in the Czech Republic, on politics of marginalization and the enduring effects of racialized regimes of state minority policies, as well as on the formation and logic of Romani subjectivity in response to processes of cultural dispossession. In 2016 he was a Fulbright scholar at the Department of Anthropology, University of California in Berkeley, he was also a visiting professor at CEU in Budapest, LMU in Munich, and at EHESS in Paris.  Currently he is working on a monograph drawing on a history of participant observation of memory-becoming in relation to Roma and non-Roma struggle over the recognition of suffering and historic memory in Czechia.