Individual projects
The current research project, “Liability for Future Harm,” considers the justifiability of criminalizing conduct that increases the risk of harm. In so doing, it examines the challenges that arise when attempting to balance the apparent necessity of criminal prohibitions against risking harms with the restrictions to individual freedom they pose.
Over the last decade in post-socialist Bulgaria the displacement of Roma people from derelict legal and semi-legal settlements has drastically increased. While Roma property rights on the parcels of land and constructions are often dubious, this is not less the case with illegal houses, villas, luxury complexes, garages, and balconies which have mushroomed among the majority population. Yet, after new legislation on land ownership was passed in 1999 and 2005, it has mostly been shabby Roma settlements which have been destroyed and replaced with bits of infrastructure and new development projects. The inhabitants of these settlements have been displaced often to remote destinations with no conditions and infrastructure for them to continue their normal life. My study asks what past and present legal regulations and economic and cultural policies make Bulgarian Roma settlements particularly vulnerable to practices of demolition and their inhabitants to displacement. What were the policies in socialist Bulgaria which allowed the permanent precariousness of Roma housing and contributed to the post-socialist change of status of their settlements from extra-legal to illegal?
To explore these questions I will use archival materials and interviews with high-ranking officials with decision-making power in municipal and national institutions. I will analyze the materials through the theoretical tools developed by scholars, who have researched empirically how neoliberal regimes treat communities in the margins of the state (Wacquant 1999; Smart 2001; Das & Poole eds. 2004). Their work has asked how nation states create categories to regulate in favor of the market and disenfranchise surplus populations and push them out by the urban frontier (Smith 2004). As a result, marginal groups live in a state of exception, subjected to neurotic regimes of citizenship (Isin 2002). Their life and labor become increasingly precarious and their struggles remain invisible (Sassen 2001; Smith 2004; Tayyab 2010). Roma displacement has similar effects. To understand how this process impacts Bulgaria, it needs to be understood vis-a-vis Bulgaria's socialist past. My research explores policies and practices under state socialism, which allegely - and unlike its adversary of decentalized laissaiz-faire capitalism - aimed at centrally planned economy under which housing was provided to all workers (French & Hamilton 1979; Tsenkova 2009). I ask how did socialist regimes reason their decision to put a blind eye on informal housing arrangements, and leave marginal communites in extralegal - if not necessarily illegal - situation?
I am deeply convinced that the further deepening of the study of historical memories in Bulgaria and partially abroad is timely, essential, and could be quite critical for the better understanding of current social and cultural dynamics.
This project is a case study of social mobility and terror in the Independent State of Croatia, exploring the Holocaust and racial politics under the rule of the fascist Ustasha movement through the prism of social, economic and intellectual history. It challenges conventional historiography about an ideologically-homogenous movement in which power devolved from the centre to the regions and in which the state was governed from the top down. It also rejects the separation between socio-economic and cultural politics and genocide inherent in many studies of the Ustasha state; instead, it considers the extent to which they were part of a wider synthesised process.
The project analyses to what extent the Ustasha state’s campaign of mass killing and deportation was instrumentalised from above by state agencies and officials and how far it was a response to pressures from below, a means of negotiating and addressing generational, economic, intellectual and social conflicts. It also considers how mass terror was informed and even driven by ideas about social mobility, economic transformation and cultural revolution present not just in the Ustasha movement but Croatian society in the 1930s more widely.
During the First World War about thirty thousands soldiers of the Italian national minority were fighting in the Austro-Hungarian army: sent to the eastern front, around twenty thousands of them fell into captivity and remained in the Russian prison camps until the end of the Civil War. The proposed analysis will provide an interesting litmus test of the effectiveness of both the Italian and Russian nationality policies towards the Italian POWs and even propose a quantification of the different attitudes. The research will then address the question of how the life and the options of the Italian POWs changed after the October revolution: the Communist regime considered the prisoners as possible agents of the revolution abroad and therefore their living conditions and the propaganda towards them meaningfully changed. The memoirs of former Italian prisoners (those who fought with the Bolsheviks and those who fought against) will than provide an interesting opportunity to analyze of how national and political identities intersected with one another and to understand to what extent such choices were due to individual agency or to uncontrollable circumstances.
China's "Great Leap Forward" campaign is one of the major economic disasters of the 20th century. In 1958, the Communist leadership launched a massive drive with the goal of speeding up China's economic development. The rapid pace and deep reorganization of the agriculture and industry resulted in food shortages that turned into a full blown famine claiming the lives of tens of millions of people. Impressed by the initial success of the "Great Leap Forward" in China, Bulgaria's leadership implemented similar policies, which caused severe imbalances in the economy and constrained growth in subsequent years. The current project examines the political economy and the impact of the "Great Leap Forward" campaign in China and Bulgaria in a comparative context.
Despite the apparent importance of Edirne in the Ottoman era, the city received very little scholarly attention to date. All details of its development and transformation from a major Byzantine urban center into a capital of a Muslim state still remain virtually unstudied. The very few pioneering academic works on Edirne did not exhaust the topic and failed to provide a comprehensive evaluation of the transformation of Adrianople into one of the world's most prominent Islamic centers. Therefore, the city still awaits a thorough and profound study on its history, architecture, and development of urban space that would bring to light and underline its significance and well-deserved place in the history of South East Europe.
The aim of the project is to offer a study on the development of Edirne in the course of the first century of Ottoman rule over the city, which will make amends for the existing significant gap in the related literature. The project will focus on the process of transformation and conversion of the Byzantine Adrianople into the Ottoman capital Edirne through a detailed study on the change of city's spatial hierarchy and urban morphology consciously carried out in the early Ottoman era through architectural patronage. Examining Edirne's development in comparison to other major cities transformed by the Ottomans, like Bursa (Prusa) and İznik (Nicaea), the project will argue that Edirne's modification contributed significantly for the shaping of a distinctive model of urban planning, employed by the Ottomans that was replicated at a smaller scale in other parts of the Balkans. Some of the cities modified or created from scratch by the Ottomans after the thus established model, such as Dydimoteicho, Plovdiv, Skopje, and Sarajevo, nowadays are one of the principal cities of the modern Balkan states.
Venice and Constantinople were major rivals, yet also partners in diplomacy, warfare and commerce at the time of the Doge Andrea Gritti (1523-1538) and Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent (1520-1566). The documentation left by the Venetian Republic and its learned men might yet lead down avenues yet little researched and inform new research areas. A basic source upon which the proposed project's research shall rest are the extensive 58 volume Diaries of that leading Venetian 15th and 16th Century humanist, Marino Sanudo, with their notes on the daily activity of the Venetian Senate.
Venetian documents have not been subjected to analysis to show the emergence and development of mutual connections, friendships and acquaintances on both sides. Opening a new prospect to social history would serve the following research themes:
- to highlight the network of spies who advised Venetian diplomats and the Republic's Senate and to answer questions as to who they were by origin and social position, what motives caused them to act as spies, and - most important - what kind of information interested the Venetians most. The fate of this information will represent a substantial part of the study: what road it followed from the Senate's secret archives to eventual publication and distribution;
- to analyse the information left by Venetian diplomats at the conclusion of their Constantinople missions on eminent figures in the Ottoman administration such as the Sultan, the Viziers and the Court, as well as the mechanism of forming friendships and social networks and indeed the milieu of daily life in the Ottoman metropolis.
- to show the image of Ottoman diplomats visiting Venice, thus entering the field of imageology. Here, Venetian papers can only show the Venetian standpoint, leaving much of the pattern in the shadows. We know only what Marino Sanudo relates on Ottoman ambassadors and emissaries visiting Venice, yet nothing of the information they took back to the Ottoman Court.
The proposed research would focus on the interaction between Eastern Orthodox Christianity and liberal democracy as developed in Southeastern Europe (SEE) after the fall of communist regimes. The central thesis would defend that Eastern Orthodoxy has a potential to foster the process of democratization in SEE societies by requiring an inclusive and participative political framework that corresponds to its basic religious doctrines. In their public statements Orthodox Church leaders often emphasize values and principles common to both liberal democracy and Orthodoxy - personal liberty, equal justice, responsible and participatory government.
A critical assessment, however, renders a more nuanced picture. Eastern Orthodoxy has a long-lasting tradition of reverence towards the secular state and its leadership often in their non-democratic form. Against more progressive understanding of Orthodoxy, its rich historical heritage include periods of cohabitation with empires and modern nation-states which were keen in utilizing religion for their own limited and often illegitimate goals. From this interaction both Eastern Christianity and the secular statehood suffered significant damages in their internal logic. Persisting focus within Orthodoxy either on the concept of symphonia (connected to the imperial legacy), or to the ethno-cultural understanding of Eastern Orthodoxy (related to the nation-state building of 19th century) may hamper its progressive and transformative potential in South East Europe.
In line with recent studies on the public role of religion in society (Habermas, Taylor, Burger), the research will focus on the idea that the religion could be present in the public sphere and this could be beneficial to church, state and society. In more conceptual terms, Eastern Christianity is presented as universalistic and personalistic, rather than particularistic and ethno-nationalistic, thus emphasizing its hidden participatory potential. This central claim of the research is vital in the context of democratization and EU integration of the SEE region - Orthodox doctrines could enhance the values and principles of emerging democratic polities.
As part of the Sofia Visiting Fellowship Dr Litina will be exploring the attempts for the lifting of the Schism between the Bulgarian Church (1872) and the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople between 1932-1935, investigating the involvement of the Bulgarian State in the decisions of the Bulgarian Church on this issue, as well as the involvement of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, which had played a crucial role in the efforts to prevent the Schism six decades earlier, and finally the role of international diplomacy in these negotiations within the wider context of the British Mandate in Palestine and the Middle East (1922-1948). Dr Litina will be consulting mainly unpublished documents preserved in Libraries and Archives in Sofia, including the Central State Archives in Sofia (ЦДА), the Ecclesiastical Historical and Archival Institute of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, the Library of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences as well as ecclesiastiical journals of the Bulgarian Church and articles published in the national and local Bulgarian Press. It is hoped that the results of the research will shed further light on this subject in particular and on the history of Bulgaria and the Balkans in the 20th century in general, highlighting the important role of ecclesiastical centres of power in shaping political developments in the region.