Post(wars)

Leader: Ota Konrád

The research centre concentrates on the sudden profound political and social changes in Europe and the Western world, mainly in the 20th and 21st centuries. History and social science, in general, have typically focused on the long-term structural preconditions of these far-reaching changes. However, the research centre has also deliberately pursued the internal, hard-to-predict dynamics of these changes. The creative acceptance and interpretation of these ruptures by elite and non-elite sectors of society have played a significant role. The centre’s content 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 have coped with these changes. The wartime conflicts of the 20th century and the immediate post-war periods, the collapse of empires and states, and the end of ideological-political formations such as the communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe form the specific thematic boundaries of the centre’s work. The research centre draws primarily on the practices of historical comparatists and transnational history. Still, it is not closed to case studies when they are conceptualized more broadly than within a solely national framework. Although the research centre anchors in modern and contemporary history methods, it is also open to political science, international politics, or security studies.

Although the centre’s work focuses on academic research, its theme has a precise topical dimension. According to many historians, political scientists, and sociologists, the neoliberal consensus formed after the collapse of the bipolar world in the 1990s and the optimism of the “end of history” from the same period have both collapsed over the last two decades or so. We are thus once again living in the entire flow of history, in a period of transition, accompanied by profound changes in national and international politics and society, with consequences that are difficult to predict. Contemporary man thus shares with his predecessors, who witnessed the collapse of the existing order in 1918, in the 1930s, after the end of the Second World War, or in 1989, the experience of living in an unpredictable world. This contemporary, global world is characterized by the formation of almost mammoth, individual transcending economic, political, media, and ideological powers, as well as by an unexpected fragility (see the Covidus 19 pandemic). Precisely this fragility and feeling of powerlessness vis a vis global forces often lead individuals and societies to search for all possible continuities, traditions, and protection, even at the cost of populistic politics.

On March 15 2024 the Post(Wars) Research Centre of IMS became a co-founder of the research alliance "War and Society: Central and Eastern Europe" comprising, in addition to IMS FSV UK, CERCEC EHSS in Paris and the Center for Urban History in Lviv.

More on the War and Society Research Alliance

• Konrád, O. & Kučera, R. (2022) Paths out of the Apocalypse. Physical Violence in the Fall and Renewal of Central Europe, 1914-1922. Oxford University Press.
• Konrád, O., Barth, B. & Mrňka, J. (eds) (2022) Collective Identities and Post-War Violence in Europe, 1944–48. Reshaping the Nation. Palgrave Macmillan.
• Žíla, O. (2021). The Flight of Serbs from Sarajevo: Not the Dayton Agreement's First Failure, but its First Logical Consequence. Nationalities Papers, 49(5), 967-985.
• Böhler, J., Konrád, O. & Kučera, R. (2021) In the Shadow of the Great War: Physical Violence in East-Central Europe, 1917-1923. Berghahn.
• Emler, D. (2021). La politique, l'histoire, la mémoire : les usages politiques du passé en France dans les années 1990 et 2000. L'Harmattan.
• Konrád, O., Kunštát, M., Dimitrov, M., Joza, J., & Landa, M. (2020). Ztráta starých jistot: Rakousko 1986-2000. NLN.
• Matějka, O. (2020). Unique connections. Uses of the transnational social capital of Czech pastors in the Cold War 1940s-1960s. Cultural and Social History, 17(1), 113-130.
• Žíla, O. (2019). After Coming Home: Forms and Meanings of Return in Dayton's Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bulletin de l'Institut etnographique, 67(3), 523-543.
• Konrád, O. (2018). Two post-war paths: popular violence in the Bohemian lands and in Austria in the aftermath of World War I. Nationalities Papers, 46(5), 759-775.
• Klepal, J. (2018). 'The only thing I "earned" in the damned war was PTSD.' Reconsidering veteran sociality and politics in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Journal of Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, 18(4), 489-507.
• Šmidrkal, V. (2017). They shall-or shall not-pass?: Communist state borders in the Czech culture of remembrance after 1989. East European Politics and Societies, 31(2), 251-268.
• Balcar, J., & Kučera, J. (2013). Von der Rüstkammer des Reiches zum Maschinenwerk des Sozialismus: Wirtschaftslenkung in Böhmen und Mähren 1938 bis 1953. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.