Upcoming Events Calendar
Exploring the 'Grey Zones': Governance, Conflict and (In)Security in Eastern Europe
Aarhus, Denmark
1-2 November 2013
Within the last two decades, countries
in Eastern Europe have undergone a wide range of changes in the areas of
geo-political relocations and relations. We have witnessed attempts to
establish liberal democracies, re-orientations from planned to market
economies, and a political desire to create 'new states' and internationally
minded 'new citizens'. While parts of the populations have benefitted from
these developments, other parts have instead experienced increasing poverty,
unemployment and social insecurity. Today we see that people in such vulnerable
positions are increasingly relying on normative coping and semi-autonomous
strategies, sometimes even crime and violence, in order to obtain the security
and social guarantees they feel deprived of in their present day societies.
Such processes testify to a paradoxical situation between, one the one hand,
the political attempts to create well-functioning, modern civil societies and,
on the other hand, reliance on normative laws on the margins of society.
In this conference we wish to
explore the aspects of everyday uncertainty,
which we define as 'grey zones'. This term refers to the ambiguities,
insecurities and contradictions which lead to responses and strategies
challenging perceptions of legality and illegality. Within anthropology, 'grey
zones' have been conceived of in relation to political corruption (Robertson
2006) and zones of ambiguity related to violence (Roy 2008). Yet, we propose to
expand the term to include situations where uncertainty and ambiguity have
become part and parcel of everyday life and where the indefinable becomes that
which defines the situation. We view these various grey zones not merely
as legacies of socialism but as something in and of themselves. We thus deploy
the notion of grey zones in order to find new ways of approaching and
conceptualizing current situations in Eastern Europe, ways that are not
preconfigured in terms of 'post-socialism'
or 'transition'.
We invite papers which ethnographically explore (but are not necessarily restricted to) one or more of the following questions:
- What are the relations between governance, corruption and informality in contemporary Eastern Europe?
- How do new emerging class systems in Eastern Europe affect people's perceptions of self and other?
- In which ways do changing relations between individuals, institutions and state manifest themselves in everyday life?
- Which roles do the mafia and organized crime play in contemporary Eastern Europe?
- How do increased illegal work and labour migration to Western Europe relate to insecure situations on the home front?
- How to citizens in Eastern Europe relate to the influx of migrants from Africa and the Middle East in relation to their own situation and their perceptions of the borders of Europe (or the EU)?
- How are we to perceive the seemingly increasing presence of antagonism, violence and openly expressed racism and homophobia in present-day Eastern Europe?