Call for papers
Laboratorium. Russian Review of Social Research
Thematic issue: "Russia/CIS/Latin America: Comparative Studies in Post-Authoritarian Transformation"
Deadline for submissions (in English or Russian): 10 December 2008.
Issue Editors: Olessia Kirtchik and Mariana Heredia (Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, Paris).
Latin America and the post-Soviet countries are thousands of miles apart, yet there are striking similarities in the social and political transformations they have been going through. Both regions seem unable to define themselves other than through their relationship with the West, forever oscillating between more or less successful attempts to "catch up" and claims of fundamental otherness expressed through notions of a "third way." The past fifteen years have seen a sharp surge in comparative studies of post-Soviet and Latin American countries. Most of them were based on the idea of a "transition" to democracy and a market economy, a concept that was first developed in case studies of Latin American countries and applied to Central Europe and the former Soviet Union after 1989. However, these comparative studies usually concentrate on political and macro-economic transformation, bracketing out social change; in-depth empirical case studies taking a comparative perspective, especially those based on fieldwork, are few and far between. Moreover, most comparative research is virtually unknown in the countries studied due to the weakness of Latin American studies in the post-Soviet countries and vice-versa.
This issue will feature comparative studies that go beyond the macro-level of political and economic change and focus on differences and similarities in the fabric of society. Our aim is to test the validity of transition/transformation paradigms and flesh out the idea that Latin America and the post-Communist world have much in common. We propose to do so through comparative research informed by the whole range of the social sciences, specifically including sociology, anthropology, and history.
Laboratorium invites authors from all over the world to submit articles to this thematic issue. Collaborative work by specialists in post-Soviet and Latin American studies is especially welcome, whether in the form of jointly written articles or "twin" papers focusing on comparable cases in the two regions. The editors will be happy to help scholars from either region looking for colleagues with similar interests in the other region in order to exchange ideas with a view to submitting a joint paper to this issue.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- regime change and the sociology of political elites;
- the politics of memory;
- new vs. old forms of poverty;
- gender and family in post-authoritarian societies;
- new forms of violence (due to urban growth/migration/pauperization etc.);
- the emergence of new economic actors and new types of economic practice;
- the status of the recent transformations in the context of long-term historical change.
The deadline for submissions to this issue is 10 December 2008. All papers will be subjected to double-blind peer review, and acceptance of any paper may be conditional upon revising it in accordance with suggestions by reviewers and/or the editorial board. Papers should be submitted to Nastya Tsygankova, managing editor (tsygankova (at) indepsocres.spb.ru). Enquiries concerning this thematic issue should be directed to Olessia Kirtchik (olessia.kirtchik (at) gmail.com), while general questions on Laboratorium may be addressed either to Nastya Tsygankova or to the editor-in-chief, Mischa Gabowitsch (mgabowi (at) princeton.edu).
FORMATTING GUIDELINES:
Papers are accepted in either Russian or English, in MS Word or RTF format. They should not normally exceed 55,000 characters (ca. 8,000 words) excluding notes. You are free to write in either British or American English, but please be consistent in your usage.
Please provide information about yourself (full first and last name, institutional affiliation, departmental address, e-mail and telephone number) on a separate page.
Please also include a detailed abstract (ca. 3,000 characters, or 400 words). Ideally, though by no means necessarily, this should be in English if the article submitted is in Russian, and vice-versa.
Use a 12-point font and 1.5 spacing. Notes should be formatted as endnotes rather than footnotes or alphabetical bibliographies.