Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung

We are delighted to welcome a new research group: Convened by Anna Amelina (Chemnitz), Karolina Barglowski (Luxembourg), Helma Lutz (Frankfurt a.M.) and Andreas Vasilache (Bielefeld) the group “Postcolonial and Postsocialist Interdependencies Across Borders” will be working at ZiF from April to July. The group brings together researchers from various disciplinary fields to study long-term complex interdependencies between postsocialist and postcolonial relations. They will focus on the cross-border interactions and entanglements within and between former socialist countries and regions. We asked convener Anna Amelina, a professor of intercultural communication, to tell us more about the research project.

What do you mean by 'post-socialism'?

Broadly speaking, post-socialism refers to the set of social, political, and economic conditions that emerged after the collapse of socialist regimes, primarily in Central and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and parts of Central Asia and Africa, following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the USSR in 1991.

More precisely, the research group defines post-socialist societies as those shaped by the collective experience of three major ruptures: the collapse of a centrally planned (command) economy, the end of one-party authoritarian rule, and the abandonment of official Marxist-Leninist ideology.

But the key insight of our project is that post-socialism is not just a transition story: it is not simply the journey “from communism to democracy”. Rather, post-socialist societies carry legacies that continue to shape contemporary power relations, identities, and inequalities. Maybe the most important legacy in this regard is the notion of socialist “civilizing mission”: the idea that socialism was spreading progress and equality to “backward” populations. Therefore, our group studies how these missionary claims around socialist modernity have contributed and still contribute to hierarchies of race, gender, and belonging across former socialist geographies. Worthy mentioning is that the socialist “civilizing mission” has been tight to imperial ambitions of the Soviet Union over smaller nations.

Let me give a concrete historical example: The Soviet Union presented itself as the liberator of colonized peoples in Africa and Asia, supporting independence movements ideologically and materially. Yet internally, it exercised colonial-like domination over nations such as Ukraine, Georgia, Kazakhstan and other Central Asian republics, or the Baltic states, suppressing their languages, deporting entire populations (e.g., the Crimean Tatars in 1944), and imposing Russian cultural and political supremacy – despite the official ideology of equality and “friendship across nations”. These accounts are also helpful to understand current geopolitical tensions as well as Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

How do you plan to address your central question?

The central question of the project – “can postsocialism be colonial?” – is addressed by a combination of conceptual innovation and empirical investigation across five thematic areas: citizenship, violence, migration and mobility, collective memories, and gender relations. These themes are not arbitrary: they are the domains where the post-socialist as ‘postcolonial’ relations are empirically most visible.

Analytically, the group draws on three conceptual moves:

First, we use the strategy of pluralization while studying (quasi-)colonial legacies and logics of (post-)socialist societies. Rather than applying a single, fixed model of colonial rule for heterogeneous (post-)socialist contexts, the group aims to give a differentiated account across temporal and spatial geographies of postsocialism. It argues that (quasi-)colonial legacies took (and take) multiple forms.

Second, we employ the strategy of spatial contextualization of (quasi-)colonial heritage of (post-)socialism: our analysis traces how (post-)socialist power relations crossed national spaces (e.g. formation and dissolution of the “Eastern bloc”) and shaped transnational and global dynamics – but also how these power relations have themselves been shaped by these dynamics.

Third, we rely on the strategy of historicization of the (quasi-)colonial moment in (post-)socialism. Our group is interested in tracing both long-term continuities and ruptures, rather than treating postsocialism as a clear break with the past. This allows us to ask: which colonial logics survived 1989, and in what new forms do they appear today?

To give a concrete historical example: After 1989, many Eastern European states adopted “developmentalist” agendas, presenting themselves as “backward regions” that needed to “catch up” with Western Europe. This recycled the old colonial rhetoric of civilization and modernization, now applied to themselves. Poland, Hungary, or Romania were repositioned as semi-peripheral societies striving to reach a Western norm, reproducing a similar hierarchical logic that colonial powers once used to justify their rule over Africa or Asia.

What role does interdisciplinary collaboration play in this project?

Interdisciplinary collaboration is not merely a methodological preference here: it is an epistemological necessity. The central question of the project (can post-socialism be colonial?) cannot be answered by any single discipline alone, because the (quasi-)colonial logics in post-socialism are simultaneously historical, political, economic, spatial, cultural, and gendered phenomena.

The group brings together scholars from sociology, political science and international relations, history, geography, education, ethnology, and gender studies. Each discipline contributes a different analytical lens: historians trace long-term continuities; geographers map spatial inequalities; gender studies scholars reveal how colonial hierarchies are reproduced through the body and sexuality; sociologists examine societal conditions and changes; political scientist and IR scholars focus on institutional as well as international settings and dynamics.

To give one more concrete example: when we study contemporary gender politics in post-socialist states, we have to ask why after 1989, many countries like Poland, Hungary, or Russia witnessed a sharp reversal of women’s public roles from a “working class femininity” to a “traditional” one? Understanding this requires history (to trace Soviet-era gender politics and policies), political science (to analyze how conservative movements instrumentalize gender), sociology (to examine structural inequalities), and gender studies (to theorize the colonial and racialized dimensions of these politics and policies). No single discipline can capture the full picture: hence the interdisciplinary collaboration is indispensable.

Visit this website to learn more about the group.