Workshop Political History PhD Network.
17-19 June 2019, University of Jyväskylä, Finland.
This three-day workshop was an initiative of the Political History PhD Network. It was organized by Zachris Haaparinne, Risto-Matti Matero, Jari Parkkinen, Juho Saksholm, and Joonas Tammela (University of Jyväskylä).
Continue readingRepresenting revolutionary terrorists as heroes and martyrs was a typical feature of the mythology of the Russian revolutionary underground at the beginning of the 20th century. This mythology described Underground Russia, the world of the revolutionaries, as an ideal country inhabited by ideal people. The purpose of that epos was to represent the revolutionary struggle, and individual revolutionaries in such a way that they would gain sympathy from the wider public and become role models for other revolutionary fighters. Sympathetic representations of women who committed political violence seem to be especially shocking in the context of Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, since female violent behavior contradicted the existing gender order.
Continue readingWhen more than 150 years ago the Dutch newspaper Het Nieuws van de Dag (News of the Day) described the future of politics as “in darkness”, it warned its readers that “the bloody feuds of yore are coming again”.[1] What sounds like a line from a post-apocalyptic movie bears an interesting analogy on current discussions about the future of Western politics. Recently, scholars have painted an equally dark picture warning about the “hollowing of Western democracy” and identified a future of “post-democracy”.[2] In the center of these concerns is the ability of political parties to fulfill their function as a core institution of democracy. Scholars fear that decreasing membership numbers are a symptom of democratic decay. Parties will lose their ability to connect political elites and civil society, and, thereby, inevitably extend the void between rulers and the ruled.
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Securing Europe after Napoleon. 1815 and the New European Security Culture, edited by Beatrice de Graaf, Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands , Ido de Haan, Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands , Brian Vick, Emory University, Atlanta (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2019), 325 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1108428224.
Continue readingHenk te Velde has been installed as the new President of the APH. At the 6th international PhD conference in Paris, 20-22 June he made a short statement on the future of the Association:
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University of California Press launches a new journal called Global Perspectives. It is interdisciplinary and at the same time endorses disciplinary roots and routes to tackle larger global questions. For political historians the journal is an opportunity to publish with a leading press, to reach a large, global readership and to make their voices heard by colleagues not only from other countries, but other disciplines as well. Yet interdisciplinary academic writing and thinking, for Global Perspectives, is not a dogma to be realised in each article or contribution, but rather defined by mutual respect and interest, seen as various ways of addressing shared questions.
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In June 2018 Prof. Marc Lazar (SciencesPo Paris) steps down as President of the Association for Political History. We asked him to reflect on the first 4 years of the APH and the future of political history in general.
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