Postwar and Violence

Director of the Research Center: Ota Konrád

The Research Center focuses on sudden, profound political and social changes in Europe and the Western world, particularly in the 20th and 21st centuries. History and the social sciences in general typically focus on the long-term structural preconditions of these far-reaching changes. However, the Research Center also deliberately examines the internal, hard-to-predict dynamics of these changes. The creative acceptance and interpretation of these turning points by both elite and non-elite segments of society played a significant role. The Center focuses on analyzing the apparent stability of the “old regime,” the causes of its often sudden implosion, and how politics (local, national, and international) and society coped with these changes. The military conflicts of the 20th century and the immediate postwar period, the collapse of empires and states, and the end of ideological-political formations such as communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe constitute the specific thematic boundaries of the Center’s work. The research center draws primarily on the methods of historical comparativism and transnational history. Nevertheless, it does not limit itself to case studies, provided they are conceived more broadly than within a purely national framework. Although the research center is grounded in the methods of modern and contemporary history, it is also open to political science, international politics, and security studies.

Although the center’s work focuses on academic research, its subject matter has a contemporary dimension. According to many historians, political scientists, and sociologists, the past two decades have seen the collapse of both the neoliberal consensus formed after the end of the bipolar world in the 1990s and the “end of history” optimism of that same period. We are thus once again living in the midst of the flow of history, in a transitional period accompanied by profound changes in national and international politics and society, with consequences that are difficult to predict. People today thus share with their predecessors—who witnessed the collapse of the existing order in 1918, in the 1930s following the end of World War II, or in 1989—the experience of living in an unpredictable world. This contemporary, global world is characterized by the emergence of almost mammoth economic, political, media, and ideological forces that transcend the individual, as well as by unexpected fragility (see the Covid-19 pandemic). It is precisely this fragility and the feeling of powerlessness in the face of global forces that often lead individuals and societies to seek out all possible forms of continuity, tradition, and protection, even at the cost of populist politics.

2. března 2026 – Úvodní setkání výzkumného centra, GAČR projekty

23. března 2026 – Výzkumný seminář s Marion Röger (Universität Leipzig)

24. března 2026 - Workshop a reading seminar na téma sexuální násilí

20. dubna 2026 – Výzkumný seminář s Philippem Thometem (Universität Bern)

• Domácí násilí v poválečné rekonstrukci. České země 1945-1953
• Bosenská (prou)dění: Každodenní usouvztažňování války, postsocialismu a neoliberaliazce v daytonské Bosně a Hercegovině
• Násilí ve střední Evropě za první světové války a v poválečné době. Srovnání rakouských a českých zemí (completed)