Текущи програми

Based on a detailed historical analysis of the emergence of the contemporary concept of equality in international human rights law the project paints a comprehensive picture of the structural deficiencies of this concept and proposes an alternative. The research on equality is a burgeoning field. However, as highlighted by many scholars, the processes of globalisation require a re-articulation of the traditional vision of equality and in particular alternatives to both the welfare state and neo-liberal thinking. I argue that to achieve this re-articulation a deeper historical understanding of the structural elements and presuppositions underlying the current equality thinking in international human rights law is required. Systemic and systematic analysis of this deficiencies can only emerge from a careful historical analysis of institutionalisation of equality in the League of Nations and the United Nations. Insights gained from this historical examination are then complemented by philosophical and broader theoretical reflections on difference and identity by Deleuze, Derrida, Nishida, and queer theory to propose a novel approach to equality. This approach is expected to be more adapted to the conditions of globalisation. Examples from arts to be created in cooperation between the scholar and the artists are used as illustrations.

The project seeks to explore the history of mercenary employment in Muscovy during the Smolensk War with Poland-Lithuania from 1632 to 1634 within a broader historical context. This period represents the most extensively documented case in Muscovite history where large military units, comprised entirely of foreigners (primarily Germans, Englishmen, and Scotsmen), were recruited abroad under fixed mercenary contracts. Through this case study, I investigate the dynamics of interaction with foreign private military entrepreneurs in Muscovy and present this evidence within the framework of state-building processes and mercenary service in Early Modern Europe. While recent research has highlighted the significance of private military actors in Central and Western Europe from the 15th to the 18th centuries, the narrative surrounding Russian military history during this period has predominantly remained state-centered. My objective is to challenge this narrative by applying methodological frameworks developed for studies on European military entrepreneurship to 17th-century Muscovy. The research is primarily based on unpublished sources from Russian, British, Swedish, and German archives, which I have already collected. During my time in Sofia, I intend to finalize my prosopography database on mercenary officers in Muscovite service and complete the draft of the monograph on this subject.

The project is about writing a book on the Russo-Ottoman War of 1828-1829, focusing on its long-term impact on the Balkans and the Caucasus. In the scholarly literature the war has been studied from narrow and nationalistic agendas, without using the Ottoman archives and with little use of the archives of Georgia and Armenia. The proposed research and ensuing monograph will develop a synthetic and comprehensive narrative and a more objectively balanced view of the war, without being drowned in technical details. Research questions: What was the impact of the 1828-29 Russo-Ottoman War on the European balance of power, the Eastern Question, the Balkans and the Caucasus? Why were Russian military authorities reluctant to use Balkan irregulars in this war? Were the Bulgar volunteers similar to the Greek klephti? Why was Russia more successful than the Ottomans in gaining the neutrality of Kurdish tribes along the Caucasian borderlands? Why did Russia set up an Armenian province out of the khanates of Erivan and Nakhichevan, ceded by Qajar Iran in 1828? Apart from the Greek independence and autonomy of the Danubian principalities, what was the legacy of the war?

Objectives – identification of manifestations and new trends in the use of the narrative of the Great Duchy of Lithuania (GDL) in modern Belarusian memory politics, description of forms, methods of its implementation and disclosure of antagonistic essence.The following questions will be investigated: 1. Appeal to the GDL in memorial laws, political documents, politicians' speeches. 2. Non-governmental initiatives to promote the narrative of the GDL. 3. Main stages, directions and forms of memory politics implementation. 4. Conflictogenic “zones of memory” about the GDL and antagonism of memory politics. 5. The significance of the actualization of the narrative of the GDL for the Belarusian societyThe novelty – creation of the first special study on the border of history, philosophy, geopolitics, sociology. Belarusian factology will be placed in the context of modern theory of memory politics.Research sources: scientific literature, media materials.

The research project deals with civilizational analysis in historical sociology and new perspectives on civilizational politics in the field of international relations. Contemporary civilizational analysis as a sociological paradigm devotes considerable attention to civilizational legacies in today’s world. At the same time the research programme of civilizational politics in IR regards civilizations as discursive constructs and focuses on the ways in which political imaginaries become institutionalized. Apparently, these perspectives can be seen as complementary. However, current discussions of Russian ‘civilizationism’ are characterized by selective appropriation of insights from new approaches in IR and general neglect of the findings of historical sociology. The project evaluates recent research on civilizational aspects of Russian politics and stresses the need to reconsider this issue taking into account the contributions of sociological civilizational analysis. The study of social and political imaginaries is a growing interdisciplinary field. It can be argued that the case of post-Soviet Russia is particularly relevant for the discussion of civilizational imaginaries. In particular, the project will focus on the relationship between the concepts of ‘civilization’ and ‘empire’ in construction of Russia’s identity. The project will employ the methodology of comparative-historical analysis.

When war broke out in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts of Ukraine in 2014, numerous charitable organizations, local and international NGOs and development aid programs began to offer immediate humanitarian relief in frontline communities. Today, eight years since the start of the war, their active engagement remains a valuable contribution to peacebuilding efforts and social assistance to the most vulnerable social categories. At the same time, pressure from donors and priorities of long-term engagement beyond short-term immediate relief, pushes the humanitarian sector to redefine their understanding of “vulnerability”. Development aid projects are gradually moving away from material assistance in the form of basic necessities, towards more long-term projects of community development, capacity-building, resilience and empowerment. My research project is situated in this context of international development actors redefining vulnerability in frontline communities of the Donbas. I want to explore, firstly, which social groups are identified as vulnerable and in greatest need of humanitarian assistance; secondly – how these understandings of vulnerability evolve over time when the war is no longer seen as an emergency but rather as an ongoing day-to-day reality in frontline communities, and finally – how changing understandings of vulnerability reflect ideological and bureaucratic shifts in the development aid sector.

In the mid-19th century, the Russian imperial government built a theatre in Tbilisi, the administrative center of its Caucasian colony, with the aim of advancing the civilizing mission in the Empire’s “Oriental” periphery. Funded by a local Armenian merchant, the building was simultaneously the first-ever European proscenium theatre in the region and a multistoried caravanserai. It thus formed the site of uneasy entanglement of fundamental concerns about art, economy, and public life as negotiated between Russian and local agents of empire, merchants, artists or the nascent Georgian nationalist intelligentsia. Retracing the evolution of the theatre-caravanserai from its conception in 1846 to its destruction by a fire in 1874, this research project explores the civilizational ambitions with which imperial agents invested it as well as the contingencies and contradictions of its usages throughout its existence. The theatre-caravanserai provides a privileged vantage point for exploring how modernity came to be projected and experienced at a moment of great modernizational hopes for the Empire’s Caucasian periphery. To do justice to the complexity of the object itself, the research project will combine insights from opera studies, art history, new imperial history, literary studies, social and cultural history and historical ethnography.

In a period of state reconstruction and bureaucratization, non-Muslim officials' employment is an essential feature of the expanding modern Ottoman bureaucracy. It is a generally shared observation but has not been tested thoroughly by resorting to quantitative methods and archival materials. My project deals with a solid and consistent sample involving a coherent group with representative characteristics of the bureaucracy and its Christian and Jewish members. I recently completed a three-year-project aiming to identify non-Muslim officials. All Christians (Armenian, Greek, Bulgarian etc.) and Jews employed in the civil administration were part of the research spectrum. The statistical survey's primary basis was the personnel registers kept in 1879-1914, consisting of 201 large volumes that provided information on 52,000 Ottoman officials. We find out that almost 3.000 non-Muslims (5.7% of total) worked in the Ottoman civil service.Within this project's framework, Dr. Kirmizi will examine the social and educational backgrounds and careers of Christian officials. The aim is to better understand the Christian officials' position in the Ottoman bureaucracy and their roles in it.

The project reconstructs the history of the literary theory and criticism in Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s and early 1930s in its close connection with the theoretical achievements of Russian formalism. The aim of the research is to demonstrate how the project of radical “modernization” of Ukrainian literature with the help of literary technique was used for the construction of the new national identity in the 1920s. The project deepens our understanding of political, cultural and intellectual history of Soviet Ukraine in the 1920s. On that basis, the cultural-historical and ideological context of the history of Ukrainian literary criticism and literature of the late 19th – first decades of the 20th century is consistently reconstructed. It offers a conceptually new reading of the literary and theoretical material of the 1920s. The success of this project will set a new benchmark in the historical narrative about modern and contemporary Ukraine. The project is based on the unique Ukrainian and Russian archival materials from the 1920s–1930s which are introduced into scientific circulation for the first time.

The research project focuses on the materialization of fictional hagiographic figures in late antiquity (3rd-7th centuries AD) that found embodiment in the sacred topography of Jerusalem and the Holy Land. It is especially interested in female holy figures, who are literary characters in their origin, such as Pelagia the Penitent, Mary of Egypt, and Susanna of Eleutheropolis. This project is twofold. It will first explore the construction of gender fluidity and ambivalence in the Lives in order to understand the registers of late ancient gender, gendered performances, as well as the gendering of virtue, spiritual progress, and asceticism, as integral to the construction of early Christian identity (objective 1). It will review, metacritically, the feminist theoretical apparatus that hagiography critics bring to bear on the vitae. The second part of the project looks at the embodiment of the saints and materialization of their cult places as reflected in sacred architecture of the Holy Land (objective 2). It concentrates on the connection between late antique hagiography and establishment of the saints’ holy places of Palestine as well as superposition of sacred spaces and holy sites. In late antiquity, these three women entered the liturgical calendar of the Byzantine Church and received places of worship in Jerusalem, visited by Western and Eastern pilgrims from the early Middle Ages onwards. It is this localized production of these ideological narratives and associated cultic sites that is to be specified historically.