Liberation in Eurasia and Beyond: Past Precedents and Future Potentials

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s full-scale invasion has put the question of liberation at the top of scholarly agendas. At the same time, profound questions remain about what emancipation in the contemporary world entails in practice. Can true liberation occur in the neoliberal societies in which we live and work? Can nation-states be vehicles for collective liberation, or do they reify the power dynamics that created injustice in the first place? Fortunately, our region of study has a wealth of experience with liberation movements that aspire to overturn power structures and revolutionize human nature. Examining past movements to transcend national divisions, to transform the gender order, to emancipate oppressed minorities, to form a proletarian international, and to reimagine economic life in Eurasia and beyond, the panelists will ask what these experiments can teach us about our present and future. Do historical precedents offer useful lessons for our own times? Do they provide warnings about pitfalls to avoid? To what extent do they speak to the feasibility of a politics of solidarity that does not naturalize class, gender, or ethnic difference?

Sub Unit

• History: 1900-1945

Chair

• Nikolay Raykov Karkov, SUNY Cortland

Roundtable Members

• Kristen R. Ghodsee, U of Pennsylvania

• Faith C. Hillis, U of Chicago

• Brendan McGeever, Birkbeck, U of London (UK)

• Mark D. Steinberg, U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign