State and Society

This programme area examines how social groups, movements, and networks create, represent, and challenge state and society in their respective regional contexts. In particular, it seeks to explore the factors that contribute to the transformation of social orders. The programme area emphasizes historical analysis, even if it is fundamentally interdisciplinary in nature.

Two research perspectives are at the centre of the discussion: one, a bottom-up perspective which pays attention to local practices and interpretations, and two, the role of memory and memory-culture in the constitution and contestation of social orders.  

The first perspective focuses on local ideas of the state, statehood, and other institutional forms of social and political order, some of which differed greatly from the ideas of centralized state or international actors. The focus is less on discourse analysis than on concrete practices that shape relationships between different groups and between these groups and the state. The translocal approach enables the programme area to understand processes of constitution and disruption of states, nations, and other social and political groups and orders.

Memory and the culture of remembrance enables to explore the wider forms of social engagement with the state, both at the time of constitution of and contestation over state practices as well as retrospectively. The memory of successful, or retrospectively idealized or failed communities or states will play just as important a role as the memory of experienced or perceived (in)justice. Researchers explore how memory is activated to achieve political or civil society mobilization, which in turn is linked to questions that are central to local practices of state functioning and legitimation of a particular social order.

The twin approach helps connect larger group projects with individual ones to develop a productive dialogue within the programme area.

Modern India in German Archives, 1706–1989 (MIDA)

Long-term project supported by the German Research Council (DFG) with the participation of Prof. Dr. Ravi Ahuja, Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS), Universität Göttingen, Dr. Heike Liebau, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) Berlin, and Prof. Dr. Michael Mann, Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften (IAAW), HU Berlin.

Crafting Entanglements: Afro-Asian Pasts of the Global Cold War (CRAFTE)

In the history of the Cold War, the global South often appears only as a theater of bloc politics between the East and West. Recent research has taken note of voices from Africa and Asia, yet little is known about their interconnections. To shed light on these, this project, conducted by Dr. Anandita Bajpai, engages with students’ and women's networks, media entanglements enabled by radio stations and film festivals, and the divided city of Berlin as an arena of South-South interconnections. The focus will be on the entangled trajectories of Asian and African actors and how these were embedded in, but also, how they shaped the global Cold War. The aim is to contribute to a more inclusive historiography by relying on the framework of global-entangled histories.

In Pursuit of ‘Legality’ and ‘Justice’. Minority Struggles in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union

What did Muslim and Jewish groups in the Russian Empire, and Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Armenians, and other national groups under Soviet rule expect when they called on ‘justice’ and ‘legality’? And what did they achieve?

While there is no set definition of the ‘rule of law’, with over half a dozen indices competing for recognition, the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union would not score high on any of these. And yet, the notions of 'legality' (zakonnost’) and 'justice' (spravedlivost’) greatly mattered in both. Led by PD Dr. Stefan B. Kirmse, this ERC-funded project explores the ways in which ethnic and religious minorities, from the Russian Empire’s ‘Great Reforms’ of the 1860s to the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, routinely employed ‘legality’ and ‘justice’ to further and enforce their rights. In dialogue with local partners in six Soviet successor states, it looks at minority actors from both ‘above’ and ‘below’, as participants in policy-making and public debate, as judges and litigants, and as local activists.

Timely Histories: A Social History of Time in South Asia

TIMEHIST aims to write the history of time and temporal cultures in South Asia between the 1500s and the 1950s on a practice- and process-based approach to historical pasts. Covering this broad timespan under five modular units, the objective is to investigate and write the graded pasts of shifts and transformations that occurred within the temporal cultures of South Asia. In doing so, it departs from the usual approaches that focus either on the device (clock) or modern nation-state institutions such as army, school, factory, and office. Instead, while going beyond device-centrism, it puts ‘othered’ spaces of temporal practices such as field, farm, jungle, and river in the centre of the time’s history.

This five-year research project, headed by Dr. Nitin Sinha, started in January 2021. The project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (ERC Consolidator Grant) under grant agreement No 866421.

Projects of Affiliated and Associated Researchers

Anna Helfer

Contested History: The appropriation and re-interpretation of Senegalese past in artistic and intellectual processes in Dakar

Jona Vantard

Practicing History in post-1874 Assam

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