Call for Papers for the volume “A Life for Tomorrow – Social Transformations in South-East Europe”

Deadline for submitting full papers: January 20, 2014

Institute for Democracy “Societas Civilis” Skopje (Macedonia), Centre for Empirical Cultural Studies of South-East Europe (Serbia), Social Research Kosova (Kosovo) and Centre for Social Research “Analitika” (Bosnia-Herzegovina) are issuing a call for papers to be published in the volume “A Life for Tomorrow – Social Transformations in South-East Europe”. Priority will be given to papers presented at the “Lost in Transition” conference held on July 6th and 7th, 2013 in Skopje, but other submitted papers will also be given due consideration. The deadline for submissions is January 20th, 2014. Publication is expected by the end of June 2014.

Transitional change in the past two decades is only part of an unending sequence of socio-politico-economic changes which the countries of the South-East European region have been undergoing for the past 100 years. Older members of these communities have often, without changing their place of residence, been citizens of many different states and experienced multiple changes of political systems, ideologies, constitutions, legal systems, and accompanying institutions, and they have borne witness to the creation of entire new social classes and strata and the destruction of old ones. This continuous vortex of transformation, which prevents the stabilization of social structure, and which makes official institutions particularly fragile and thwarts strategic action, has been accompanied by an almost incredible inability of these societies to change and a surprising stability of social practices. It is as if wars, revolutions, and the dissolution of entire world-orders create waves on the surface of the practices of these societies, which then quickly revert to their established course. It is precisely this interplay between head-spinning change in official social institutions and extraordinary stability of social practices that we are interested in.

This volume will be published as part of the project “Resistance to Socio-Economic Changes in Western Balkan Societies. Testing Two Theories of Social Development" which has been realized within the Regional Research Promotion Programme in the Western Balkans (RRPP), run by the University of Fribourg upon a mandate of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, SDC, Federal Department of Foreign Affairs.

We are inviting political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, social psychologists, legal experts, political economists to take part in the consideration of social, political, economic, legal, cultural, religious, familial, demographic, educational, media changes in the South-East European societies.

Papers should be written in English, a maximum of 6000 words in length (excluding the bibliography), Times New Roman font, 12 points,  contain an abstract of 300 words, as well as up to five key words, in the text, following the abstract. Brief biographies of contributing authors (150 words per contributing author) should likewise be submitted. Other formatting requirements (quotations, bibliography) will be supplied to the authors of selected papers. Papers should be sent in electronic format to the address lft@idscs.org.mk or cesk2010@gmail.com. Articles will be reviewed by international experts.

e-mail: lft@idscs.org.mk or cesk2010@gmail.com.