This article investigates the capacity and quality of governance through the prism of forest use regulation in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the inter-imperial transition between Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian rule. It does so by bringing the question of access to natural resources into the frame of imperial governance formation, which is analyzed from the perspective of legal regulation of ownership and usage rights of forests. The analytical focus is set on the early phase of Austro-Hungarian occupation in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which was marked by political uncertainties and a legal arena where multiple and often conflicting norms coexisted. It shows how the consolidation process of legal arrangements and administration apparatuses did not follow any linear, teleological development towards a strong imperial state or homogenous Rechtsstaat that simply arrived and set up its governing institutions. Instead, governing bodies soon found their interests clashing with those of other local parties. Bureaucracy developed through time- and place-bound practices, which often had to adjust to complex social and environmental realities. During this process multiple attempts failed, while certain practices were implemented unevenly. In the process of asserting its own interests, the imperial administration relied on Ottoman legislation, which gradually became modified, resulting in legal pluralism and entangled imperial legacies.
This article examines the use of the “Vanishing Indian” and “Doomed Race” extinction narratives in the writings of Henryk Sienkiewicz, Paul Edmund Strzelecki, and Sygurd Wiśniowski with respect to the Indigenous peoples of North America, Australia, and New Zealand. It locates these writers in the context of mid-late nineteenth century Poland, at the periphery of Europe and of empire, arguing that they demonstrated an ability to detect and critique the injustices of colonialism and sought out a rhetorical “middle ground” between Poles and non-European victims of empire in their work. However, their sympathy was in tension with Poland's historic role as a regional metropole, the need to assert their status as White Europeans, and the lure of settler colonialism. The “middle ground” they sought to create ultimately gave way to a “logic of elimination” that neutralized this tension, justifying colonialism to themselves and to other agents of empire.
The article demonstrates the presence of (homo)sexual subjectivity in rural Poland in the early 1920s using remarkable correspondence between two men who stood trial for committing homosexual acts in 1925. It argues that their relationship should be understood as the first documented same-sex secret marriage in Poland. By investigating relations between urban and rural spaces in the spread of sexual knowledge in the Second Republic, the article also analyzes how changing notions of male friendship and masculinity at the time could be used by men loving men to develop and pursue their own distinctive visions of love and pleasure.
This article explores the myriad ways that Polish and Ukrainian residents engaged in violent and cruel behavior during World War II through a case study of the Chełm region. Under Nazi occupation, this formerly peaceful community exploded into a horrific scene of nationalist and popular violence. Jews were widely assaulted by their Polish and Ukrainian countrymen; Poles and Ukrainians engaged in mutual killings and ethnic cleansing; rural villagers were subjected to countless raids from area partisans; and escaped Soviet POWs were often denounced or otherwise attacked by area residents. Treating this outbreak as a whole, I argue that anti-Jewish violence was embedded in a vicious social transformation that engendered an array of crimes against multiple groups. By interweaving the fates of different ethnicities into a single study, my paper contextualizes Polish complicity during the Holocaust and highlights the sordid interactions between the German invaders, Jewish citizens, and local Christian society.
This article analyzes the East German and Soviet campaign against the West German federal minister Theodor Oberländer in 1959–60 as an exemplary case of how the Cold War and east-west entanglements influenced the memory of the Holocaust and Stalinist crimes. These entanglements were complex and went beyond the relations between the two German states. The article examines also the interrelations with the Soviet Union's propagandistic struggle against Ukrainian nationalism. It addresses the diverse impact that the campaign had in the two German states, the Ukrainian diaspora, and the Soviet Union. It argues that in the German context the campaign contributed to critical reckonings and remembrance of the Holocaust, which it did not do in the Soviet Union and among the Ukrainian diaspora. Moreover, in the Soviet Union it amplified an enemy image of Ukrainian nationalism that still exists today and serves Russia to justify its current war against Ukraine with the accusation that Ukraine is ruled by a “Nazi” regime.
The use of silence to characterize the dominant response of occupied populations during the Second World War recurs throughout post-war European literature and is especially prominent in Czech writing. Interpreting the meaning of this silence therefore became central to Czech efforts to establish a preferred narrative about the German occupation in the immediate post-war period. Through analysis of the motif in more and less well-known works published between 1940 and 1946, I shall map the narrowing understanding of the silence of the occupied from its varied, ambiguous portrayal in the now forgotten first Czech novel about the Occupation, Silences by Josef Horal, to its unequivocal interpretation as resistance in Jan Drda's canonical The Mute Barricade. While this narrowing reflects Tony Judt's notion of a “collective amnesia” necessary for national unity and recovery, the marginalization of certain perspectives also presages the broader move in Czech post-war society away from pluralism to nationalist authoritarianism.
The Moscow Tribune was the most prestigious and influential political discussion club in recent Russian history. In the last years of the Soviet Union, the club regularly gathered Moscow's who's who of the Soviet liberal intelligentsia and played a prominent role in the rise of movements that challenged Gorbachev's leadership over reforms. This article tells the forgotten story of the Moscow Tribune to historicize the notion of opposition in the context of perestroika, drawing on comparative studies of dissent in late communist regimes. A close analysis of the debates taking place at the club between 1988 and 1991 shows that Soviet liberals’ dramatic shift towards opposition was reluctant, reactive, and constantly disputed, thus revealing a lasting yet implicit dilemma regarding the need for opposition in democracy.
