The provisional program of the Workshop “Eurasian Parliamentary Practices and Political Mythologies: Imperial Legacies, Diversities, and Representations in the 20th and 21st Century,” to take place in Heidelberg on June 17-18, 2019, is now online.
The Workshop will focus on the historical and “reestablished” institutions of collective decision making on the territories of the former Russian, Qing, and Ottoman Empires, as well as adjacent regions of Eastern Europe, Inner and East Asia, and explore parliamentary practices and political mythologies in these parts of Eurasia. The organizers seek to stimulate the dialogue between historians, political scientists, anthropologists, and other scholars working on the named contexts, as well as to breach the divide between different area studies. The goal of the workshop is to present well-researched historical studies of institutions of collective and deliberative decision making in indigenous, imperial, and post-imperial contexts and outline the use of the concepts, stemming from the practices of these institutions, and the appeals to historical practices in modern and contemporary political mythologies. The workshop will contribute to the history of concepts and the study of contemporary political mythologies and practices in both theoretical and empirical terms by bringing the material in a variety of non-European languages into the international academic discussion and tracing the exchange in practices and ideas across Eurasia.