Special Issue of the Journal of East Central European Studies (JECES)

Journal of East Central European Studies / Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung (JECES) is a leading journal on Central and Eastern European historical studies. The journal appears in print and in open access (https://www.zfo-online.de). Two out of the four editions a year are usually Special Issues edited by guest editors.

The planned special issue is devoted to religiously motivated dissent in Eastern Europe in the “long” 19th century, framed by the partition period of Poland-Lithuania (ca. 1772/1795–1918). The Eastern European cultural area – the border region between the Latin and the Eastern Orthodox Christianity – was shaped by Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and Jewish beliefs. Within this cultural contact zone, religious encounters took place over many centuries, and resulted in ambiguous, dissenting, multiple religious belonging.

The sociopolitical importance of religious nonconformists for the emergence of civil society and the modern rule of law is recognized in contemporary research, but most studies concern exclusively religious dissidence in the Western Latin Church. In contrast, far too little attention has been paid to the Eastern European cultural area.

However, there are good reasons to suppose that religious nonconformism, dissent, and deviance were for many centuries part of everyday life in Eastern Europe. Our assumption is that religious dissent was a form of societal protest against the political attempts to homogenize Eastern European societies. It is therefore necessary to examine the possible reasons and motivations for religious dissent, like social disorder, alleged or real grievance, suffering, hopelessness, desolation.

Recognizing the multiple causes of dissent, we also attempt to analyse many conceptual terms which are used to classify it. Not least because of the latest debate on non-discriminatory language, research on various types of deviance faces a serious dilemma about how to deal nowadays with what we see as defamatory descriptions of people’s “otherness”. For example, objections arose to the use of the term “sect” as a research category.

The existent disciplinary (for example between Eastern European and Jewish Studies, or between historical and literary studies) and national divisions have hindered comparisons of dissent in Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and Jewish tradition. The Special Issue seeks to bring together the geographically and disciplinary scattered research on religious nonconformism in Eastern Europe. It is our goal to offer some important insights into religious dissent as a cultural practice, and a conceptual problem. Likewise, we want to invite to further academic discussion on the respective topics.

We invite submissions from scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and beyond that engage with:

- microstudies, case studies looking at self-perception and external perception of dissent; social composition of dissenting communities; norms and practices lived in the communities; forms of social control; interactions within local communities and/or with state and church authorities.
- interreligious encounters and comparisons dealing with similarities and differences between various dissenting groups; mobility of dissenters; intercultural contacts and their effects; syncretic forms of belief.
- theoretical and conceptual approaches. Many different terms are usually used to define religious dissent: heresy, deviance, sect, nonconformity, dissent, heterodoxy, ambiguity, variety, hybridity, syncretism, multireligiosity, new religious movements. These definitions put different emphasis on dissent. Some of them are anachronistic, politicized. Many of them have positive or negative connotations. How to conceptualize dissent in Eastern Europe?
- innovative, underexplored sources. Which sources for the history of religious dissent in Eastern Europe are available? Which kind of sources should be rediscovered? Are there some unconsidered or underestimated sources of dissent?

We are especially interested in contributions that deal geographically with religious dissent in Poland, the Baltic states, Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia.

Please send an abstract in German or English (up to 500 words) and a short CV to Agnieszka Zagańczyk-Neufeld (agnieszka.zaganczyk-neufeld@rub.de) or Agnieszka Pufelska (a.pufelska@ikgn.de) by March 31, 2022. The full articles invited (no more than 65.000 characters) are to be submitted by October 31, 2022. All submissions are subjected to a double-blind peer review process.