Platform ’24: Restoring a Common Scholarly Field of Postnational and Postimperial Studies
In 2024, Ab Imperio quarterly turns twenty-five. From the very beginning, its editors have pursued the goal of integrating the international field studying post-Soviet societies. The journal itself has functioned as a collective research project focusing on diversity and difference and, as it became clear over time, developing and testing a working model of postimperial and postnational history. Ab Imperio soon entered into dialogue with scholars of imperial formations, nationalism, and diversity in other historical regions or studying them from a global perspective.
I.
Over the past twenty-four years, Ab Imperio has developed new imperial history research paradigm, which conceptualizes society as a complex open system in unstable equilibrium. Unlike the prevailing national historiography, this type of history is incongruent with any single narrative. The paradigm of new imperial history is postnational, postimperial, and hybridizing, and therefore distances itself from any grand narratives, which, according to Hayden White, predetermine the content of national histories. The main provisions of new imperial history can be summarized as follows:
The historian’s positionality – first of all, the choice of research problem – directly informs the selection of the historical context deemed relevant for the story, thereby predetermining the character of that story. Both the researcher’s personal attitudes and the problem identified as central for the story are part and parcel of the resulting study and therefore need to be articulated in the text.
Interacting with postcolonial studies, new imperial history draws attention to the phenomenon of hybridity, interpreting it as a form of full-fledged subjectivity, rather than a derivative of some “authentic self” or mimicking it. This approach is essential for overcoming the ahistorical perception of “Europe” as a real object – the locus of concurrent political and epistemological power – as well as the danger of a new essentialism, the product of the search for non-Eurocentric “authenticity.”
In dialogue with global history, new imperial history underscores the danger of reducing world history to a mechanical sum of internally homogeneous objects – empires or nation-states. Globality is just another way of describing society as an open system. Any seemingly autonomous or even isolated entity can adequately be described only as part of various global contexts.
Nation-centered history is incompatible with any of the abovementioned approaches to understanding society as an open system, beyond the Procrustean bed of a teleological narrative. Abandoning national history does not mean ignoring “nation” as a crucial analytical category. It is just that modern social scientists do not consider “nation” as a given. The term is used today to describe an imagined community, a constructed groupness, an affective community. In any case, as a category of analysis, “nation” differs from how contemporaries perceived a nation as a category of practice.
In the same way, “empire” requires analytical defamiliarization. The self-referential description of any extensive, composite, expansionist, hierarchical, and multicultural polity as an “empire” produces no added value, since it only leads to the characterization of this “empire” as extensive, composite, expansionist, and so on. Historical empires most explicitly demonstrated the nature of any society as an open system that does not have clear boundaries – the same for any type of societal interaction. However, there is nothing self-evident in the “imperial” historical material or characteristic of it alone.
New imperial history moves away from the binary opposition of empire and nation, both empirically and in the sense of Weberian “ideal types.” As empirical studies have shown, national projects were formed in the Modern Era within imperial societies and were often encouraged by imperial authorities who pursued nationalist policies. The symbiosis of imperial domination and nationalism since the mid-nineteenth century led to the proliferation of nationalizing empires – the most repressive and consistently colonialist.
Empire’s defamiliarization makes the concept of “imperial situation” the main category of analysis. This concept does not refer to a specific empire and implies a rejection of any monological narrative of the past. Such a narrative is unable to reflect the asymmetry of social relations that is not reducible to a single hierarchy and is not neatly embodied by essentialized groups. In an imperial situation, many principles of hierarchy and subjectivity coexist and interact, predetermining the multidimensionality of diversity and inequality.
In an imperial situation, belonging to a group can be empowering in some cases and stigmatizing in others – it is the specific historical context that ascribes definite meaning to a formal characteristic. In other words, one’s social role is not predetermined by a single principle of groupness, such as class, religion, gender, age, class, party affiliation, education, nationality, or race. In real life, a person simultaneously belongs to several forms of groupness and prioritizes them differently in different circumstances.
On the one hand, this perspective highlights autonomous historical subjectivity even within subaltern groups, who succeed in constructing a social persona from elements of groupness available to them in different social contexts. On the other hand, this perspective further complicates the researcher’s task of reconstructing the source of domination and oppression, because this source can no longer be squarely identified with any particular group. Moreover, domination can simultaneously assume modern and premodern forms – through discursive practices and physical violence – while the centers of political power and the production of knowledge and discourses may not coincide.
Thus understood, the imperial situation is observable in any society. Imperial formations are distinguished only by their attempts, not always rationalized, to adapt the sociopolitical system to the fundamental imperial situation. They tend to maintain power through the management of differences, making extensive use of direct or symbolic violence.
Describing such a complex and dynamic reality necessitates additional reflection on the historical narrative: How do we reconcile the inherently sequential and logical storytelling with its multidimensional and asynchronous object? Equally important is a critical engagement with the narratives of historical sources, often structured by colonial binary oppositions. The rejection of monologism and binary oppositions in favor of contextual complex models does not mean a relativization of the experience of inequality in the imperial situation. On the contrary, only in this way does it become possible to reconstruct multiple subjectivities – expressed in a variety of forms in different circumstances – without censoring some of them.
Therefore, the reconstruction of the languages of self-description of various historical subjects in the imperial situation becomes an important element of new imperial history. Both discourses and social practices can play the role of such languages, restoring the multilingualism of historical reality, which is only partially reflected in written sources. While not necessarily more authentic than official documents, reconstructed languages of self-description make it possible to “provincialize” their hegemonic and usually Russian-language narrative. In any case, languages of self-description allow modern researchers to understand exactly which historical and semantic contexts were relevant for the subjects of these languages.
II.
In 2000, Ab Imperio proposed a new format for an academic quarterly. It synthesized the traditions of the Russian “thick journals” and the professional American peer-reviewed journals. Since 2002, the system of permanent sections and thematic issues has been supplemented by the principle of thematic annual programs, implemented in four stages, through quarterly thematic issues. This policy made it possible to sustain the collective discussion of various aspects of the large annual theme. Thus, the thematic principle allowed Ab Imperio to function as a long-term collective research project in the format of a workshop “by correspondence.” About 1,500 of the most dynamic scholars from nearly 40 countries have taken part in its work.
Approaching the journal’s twenty-fifth anniversary, we decided to rethink the format and objectives of the journal:
A thematic issue takes shape when all its materials “click” with each other at a meta level and form a single intertextual space. Reading one article through the prism of another allows readers to register new meanings that were not initially intended by the authors, and the issue as a whole produces a real advancement of knowledge – this effect is usually explicated in the editorial introduction to the issue. The practice of reading scholarly journals has changed in the 2020s. Most of us download individual articles from electronic databases, finding them through topical search. The heuristic effect of the theme issue is wasted in this type of reading.
The annual programs, as an element of the collective research project, have fulfilled their task of forming and testing the methodology of new imperial history. However, this methodology does not claim a monopoly in postnational studies. Today, the editors see an urgent task in attracting to the journal practitioners of other postnational methodologies and testing their approaches. This makes the publishing process unpredictable, at least at the level of contemplating annual thematic programs.
Responding to the new reality, Ab Imperio will change its format while maintaining the original conceptual focus and consistency of analytical work. Each research article will be accompanied by a short afterword: the editors will ask authors to answer several questions regarding their approach to the topic. In this way, the editors hope to register, at the level of individual articles, their authors’ participation in a joint project aimed at increasing knowledge – about the region and the methods for studying it, as well as the subjectivity of its researchers. Editorial questions will pursue not methodological unification but the maintenance of methodological awareness of the journal’s contributors and readers.
Authors of articles submitted to the journal can embrace any methodology, including nation-centric approaches, but they are expected to overcome a mono-national focus in their research in one way or another. At a minimum, the editors propose the formula “n + 1.” This means that any monological narrative is encouraged to demonstrate equal attention to at least one additional form of groupness besides the one that is central for the author. So, if the article’s main focus is a general framework – such as the Russian Empire, Soviet economy, or foreign policy – it needs to be offset by a systematic discussion of at least one specific group in this general context, for example, an ethnoconfessional community. Likewise, a focus on any national group invites a comprehensive analysis of its interaction with a common institutional framework or with another nationality or any other form of groupness – for example, gender or religion as collective entities in their own right.
Without insisting on the previous mandatory thematic structure, the journal will retain in principle the format of thematic forums and issues. However, the main initiative in their organization will come from authors in the role of guest editors. Priority will be given to thematic blocs that reflect the current state of individual research fields and regional specializations. The once common professional field has arrived on the verge of split and final differentiation; Ab Imperio continues to see its mission as integrating our international academic sphere.
III.
Modeling a unified academic field in a situation of growing centrifugal forces, Ab Imperio will continue serving as a common platform for the interaction and scholarly cross-fertilization of different segments and strata of the international community that unites researchers of Northern Eurasia.
Ab Imperio is fundamentally a multidisciplinary journal that supports dialogue between different disciplines of the humanities and social sciences as well as researchers studying different regions and continents. This key element of the journal’s format will be preserved both at the level of permanent sections and the selection of materials.
Over the quarter century of Ab Imperio’s existence, scholars who are younger than the journal have become graduate students. An entire generational cycle has been completed, while in the academic context several generations have changed. A new generation of historians always brings with them new interests, new themes, and conceptual preferences that deserve attention. Therefore, Ab Imperio invites emerging scholars to try themselves as guest editors of a thematic forum or even an entire issue – within Ab Imperio’s general format.
● This means that the mechanical publication of conference or seminar materials is unlikely. All research articles must undergo double-blind peer review according to AI standards.
● The journal issue must contain a variety of academic formats distributed across at least four of the journal’s regular seven sections.
● Contributors are expected to come from different national/regional academic traditions.