The University of Heidelberg invites paper proposals for the Workshop “Eurasian Parliamentary Practices and Political Mythologies: Duma, Rada, Khural, Legislative Yuan, and Beyond” to take place on June 17–18, 2019.
The Workshop “Eurasian Parliamentary Practices and Political Mythologies” will focus on the historical and “reestablished” institutions of collective decision making on the territories of the former Russian and Qing Empires, as well as adjacent regions of Eastern Europe, Inner and East Asia, and explore parliamentary practices and political mythologies in these parts of Eurasia. The organizers seek to stimulate the dialogue between historians, anthropologists, political scientists, and other scholars working on the named contexts, as well as to breach the divide between Eastern European and East Asian Studies. This is a book workshop, and its goal is submission of a coherent selection of papers to Heidelberg University Publishing, an open-access peer-reviewed publication platform, for eventual publication as a book. Christopher Atwood (University of Pennsylvania) and Caroline Humphrey (University of Cambridge) have kindly agreed to deliver keynote lectures.
The goal of the workshop and the volume is to present well-researched historical studies of institutions of collective and deliberative decision making in indigenous, imperial, and post-imperial contexts (see the list of suggested institutions below) and outline the use of the concepts, stemming from the practices of these institutions, and the appeals to historical practices in modern and contemporary political mythologies in Russia, China (including Taiwan), Ukraine, and Mongolia. The workshop will contribute to the history of concepts and the study of contemporary political mythologies in both theoretical and empirical terms by bringing the material in a variety of non-European languages into the international academic discussion and tracing the exchange in practices and ideas across Eurasia.
The institutions and concepts in question include but are not limited to:
- Deliberative Council of Princes and Ministers (Yizheng wang dachen huiyi 議政王大臣會議)
- Duma (Boyar, Municipal, and State)
- Grand Council (Junjichu 軍機處)
- Khural
- Krug
- Kurultay
- Legislative Yuan (Lifa yuan 立法院)
- Mejlis
- Political Consultative Council (Zizhengyuan 資政院)
- Provincial Assembly (Ziyiju 咨議局)
- Rada
- Skhod
- Sobor
- Sovet
- Suglan
- Veche
- Village assembly (Cunmin dahui 村民大會)
- Zemstvo
As this is a book workshop, the selection of papers will be based on their coherence. Each paper/chapter should discuss a particular institution (or multiple institutions) in a historical or contemporary context, but the geographical and temporal focus, as well as theoretical and methodological approaches remain up to the authors.
The workshop is part of the project “Entangled Parliamentarisms: Constitutional Practices in Russia, Ukraine, China, and Mongolia, 1905–2005” (ENTPAR) which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. 755504).
UPDATE: The organizers will be able to provide accommodation to the participants and cover travel costs within geograpghic Europe.
Please submit a 300-word abstract along with a paragraph containing biographical information to ENTPAR.Heidelberg@gmail.com before January 31, 2019. Invited participants will be expected to submit their drafts of 7,000–10,000 words by June 1, 2019.