Violence: Social Practices and Power Relations
This research area brings together projects dealing with forms and manifestations of violence beyond purely physical practices. It approaches the subject from different thematic and methodological perspectives. These include the analysis of written sources and the evaluation of material and visual culture. The research focus spans several eras and integrates synchronic as well as diachronic comparisons. It understands the exercise of violence to be a social practice that takes historically specific forms, is inscribed in various power relations, and is constitutive of economic orders.
Examples are the various forms of unfree labor, which run like a common thread through the history of the greater East-Central European region. One example currently under intense scrutiny in Poland is the history of “ordinary people” (historia ludowa), which focuses, among others, on forced servitude in the context of early modern estates in Poland-Lithuania (Adam Leszczyński, Adam Wyżga, and others). Research on unfree labor can also include the slave trade, which played a significant role in the state-building of the first Piasts and the Přemyslids. Concepts of unfree labor, the slave trade, and “markets of violence” (Georg Elwert) make it possible to connect comparative and interdisciplinary approaches.
The changing practices of violence in the modern era are reflected in the growing number of victims of wars and genocides since the nineteenth century. Among the conditions that contributed to such changes were the rapidly increasing efficiency of weapons systems (which were directed more and more at civilian populations) as well as the turn to pseudo-scientific racial ideologies, especially eliminationist anti-Semitism. National Socialism, the German occupation during the Second World War, and the Holocaust, together with the violence of Stalinist rule, constitute for East-Central Europe the terrible apex of this history of modern violence and a shared transnational experience within the region. The Second World War thus plays an important role concerning research into violent projects of ethnic homogenization.
The research area aims to stimulate discussion of the following topics:
- Connections between violence and (lack of) statehood
- Everyday violence in rural and urban areas
- Violence in connection with migration and processes of emancipation
- Discourses on (structural) violence
The sub-project is part of the international and interdisciplinary research project “The global pontificate of Pius XII: Catholicism in a divided world, 1945–1958,” which deals with the role of the Vatican in the reconstruction phase after the end of the Second World War, the emerging conflicts between the capitalist West and the communist East, and the simultaneously unfolding processes of decolonization..
First, this sub-project examines the Holy See’s policy towards the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church during and after its liquidation in the late Stalinist and Khrushchev periods. It also includes a study of the Vatican-Soviet relations regarding the Roman Catholics who permanently resided or were temporarily present (as missionaries or prisoners of war) in the USSR. Furthermore, since both the Vatican and the Soviet Union had interests throughout the world, this research project involves a cross-country comparative perspective with particular attention to the impact of global trends on national religious politics in the Soviet Union and the local situation there. At the same time, it attempts to give a voice to those catholic believers and priests in the USSR, who were far away from the high politics but were – at least in theory – a matter of concern to the Holy See’s officials. As a result, the study expects to assess three levels: international, national, and local.
To understand the complex connections between the religious and political aspects of the topic, the Vatican’s diplomatic instruments, its diverse ways of informal engagement, and sources of information are reconstructed. The question of the place that Soviet Greek- and Roman Catholic communities occupied in the Vatican’s diplomacy in comparison to its policy regarding the Russian Orthodox Church is of particular interest. It is also a crucial part of the project to establish what image the Vatican had of Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church hierarchs and lay activists who were defending their Church within and beyond the USSR. Thus, this research intersects diplomatic and political history, church history, the history of special services, as well as Alltagsgeschichte.
Renaissance humanist political thought is marked by the calls to reform customs and rejuvenate virtue. Among such social reformers was Andreas Fricius Modrevius (1503–1572), who criticized the inequality in the practice of ascribing wergild on the basis of social status and argued in favor of capital punishment. This argument was introduced in his oration Lascius sive de poena homicidii (1543) and reformulated in his Commentariorum de Republica emendanda libri quinque (1551), which attracted a wide readership in Europe. Among the followers of Fricius, Andreas Volanus (1530–1610) stands out. Volanus took up the aforementioned idea and criticized this “law that inflames criminal audacity” in his political treatise De Libertate politica sive civili (1572). His call for abolition of wergild and its substitution with capital punishment achieved limited success in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania: capital punishment for premeditated murder with aggravating circumstances without recourse to social status was enacted into law in the Third Lithuanian Statute (1588). Volanus campaigned against the practice of ascribing fines for murder throughout his life, as exemplified by the address to the municipality of Riga, published as De lege Polonorum homicidii non capitali impia (1599).
Fricius and Volanus studied at protestant universities and leaned towards radical reformation, their visions of social order were supported by the teaching of the Scripture. As such, this is a study in cultural transfer of political ideas from Holy Roman Empire to Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The project engages with the arguments laid out in the aforementioned texts by utilizing Cambridge contextualist methodology and takes a comparative perspective to evaluate the novelty of said argument within Renaissance Europe.
