International Council for Central and East European Studies

17/08/2026

Members of all sister associations are encouraged to join BASEES annual conference

📣 Open Submission Period 📣
British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies Annual Conference
📅 April 9-11, 2027
📍 Robinson College, University of Cambridge
Cambridge, United Kingdom

This year's BASEES Annual Conference welcomes paper, panel, and roundtable proposals with an area-specific focus as well as positioned within disciplinary and interdisciplinary frameworks.

These disciplines and areas include, but are not limited to: Politics; History; Sociology; Geography; Film and Media; Languages and Linguistics; Literatures and Cultures; Anthropology; Economics; Baltic Studies; Polish Studies; Ukrainian Studies.

Conference organizers particularly encourage proposals that help push forward efforts to decentre and decolonize the study of the region

The conference organizers also welcome proposals for thematic colloquia that can be held as part of the conference. If you would like to propose a colloquium, please email the conference organizer at [email protected]

📅 Submission deadline: October 5, 2026

👉️ For more details, see the conference listing on the BASEES website: https://buff.ly/s4kd4Bf

17/08/2026

After an afternoon of presentations on the ideological conversions and religious repressions within the early Soviet Union, we welcome our first keynote by James Kapaló, a professor in the Department of the Study of Religions at the University of Cork.

The lecture, "Resilient Religioscapes: Coerced Conversion and the Transformation of Space in Communist and Post-communist Eastern Europe," explores the relationship between processes of forced conversion and confessional dissolution during the decades of communist rule and their impact on the religious landscape of the region.

Professor Kapaló’s research has primarily focused on the history and experience of religious and ethnic minorities in East Central Europe, especially Hungary, Romania and Moldova, and is informed by the diverse fields of anthropology, history, folklore and transitional justice. He pays particular attention to the critical role of gender in the dynamics of religious change in the twentieth century and the creative agency of religious communities that have experienced state-sponsored repression and terror.

From September 2016 to 2021, he was Principal Investigator of the European Research Council Project Creative Agency and Religious Minorities: Hidden Galleries in the Secret Police Archives in Central and Eastern Europe (ERC project no. 677355), a four year project that explored the significance of the visual and material presence of religious minorities in the secret police archives in Hungary, Romania and the Republic of Moldova. His most recent book, co-authored with Kinga Povedák, is The Secret Police and the Religious Underground in Communist and Post-Communist Eastern Europe (2021).

17/08/2026

📣 Open Submission Period 📣
British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies Annual Conference
📅 April 9-11, 2027
📍 Robinson College, University of Cambridge
Cambridge, United Kingdom

This year's BASEES Annual Conference welcomes paper, panel, and roundtable proposals with an area-specific focus as well as positioned within disciplinary and interdisciplinary frameworks.

These disciplines and areas include, but are not limited to: Politics; History; Sociology; Geography; Film and Media; Languages and Linguistics; Literatures and Cultures; Anthropology; Economics; Baltic Studies; Polish Studies; Ukrainian Studies.

Conference organizers particularly encourage proposals that help push forward efforts to decentre and decolonize the study of the region

The conference organizers also welcome proposals for thematic colloquia that can be held as part of the conference. If you would like to propose a colloquium, please email the conference organizer at [email protected]

📅 Submission deadline: October 5, 2026

👉️ For more details, see the conference listing on the BASEES website: https://buff.ly/s4kd4Bf

27/07/2026

Polity Press has recently published a book, Entangled Empires: Four Centuries of China - Russia Relations by Sören Urbansky & Martin Wagner

As expansionist empires, socialist superpowers and authoritarian regimes, China and Russia have much in common. While many in the West fear the formation of an authoritarian alliance between these two great powers, and while Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping call themselves 'good friends', the geopolitical interests of Beijing and Moscow are often at odds with each other. They may be comrades, but they don't always march to the same beat.

In order to gain a clear understanding of China–Russia relations in the twenty-first century, we need first to understand the long history that brought them to this point. In Entangled Empires, Sören Urbansky and Martin Wagner offer an introduction to the 400-year history of these two distant neighbours: from their first official contact in 1618 and the falling out of the two communist regimes under Khrushchev and Mao, through to China's response to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

This expertly researched history of the relationship between these two nations will be essential reading for all students and scholars of Chinese and Russian history and politics, and for anyone interested in the changing balance of power in the world today.

27/07/2026

Call for Articles – Volume 9 of the Totalitarian and 20th Century Studies yearbook
The Editorial Board of the Totalitarian and 20th Century Studies yearbook announces a call for submissions for the next special issue of the publication, covering the years 2025–2026. We invite researchers from various disciplines, including history, political science, law, and sociology, to submit scholarly articles, editions of source materials, and reviews in line with the profile of our yearbook.

21/07/2026

[News from the ICCEES Member Associations]
The 40th anniversary of the Korean Association of Slavic-Eurasian Studies (KASEUS)

On 20 June 2026, the Korean Association of Slavic-Eurasian Studies (KASEUS) held a conference commemorating its 40th anniversary. ICCEES President Matthias Neumann and Secretary Yoshiro Ikeda honored the occasion with recorded video messages of congratulations, warmly received by colleagues in Korea and gratefully acknowledged by the association.

KASEUS was founded in 1985, just as perestroika was beginning to reshape the Soviet Union. In a divided Korea, where research on the Soviet Union had long faced political constraints, that year opened the way for Soviet and Russian studies to develop in earnest, laying the groundwork for the field’s expansion through the 1990s. The anniversary thus commemorates not only an institution but a turning point in Korea’s engagement with the Slavic-Eurasian world.

We extend our congratulations to our colleagues at KASEUS and look forward to continued collaboration within the ICCEES community.

07/07/2026

【Call for Applications: 2027–2028 Foreign Visitors Fellowship Program】
The Slavic-Eurasian Research Center (SRC), Hokkaido University, is pleased to announce *the 49th round of its Foreign Visitors Fellowship Program (FVFP) for 2027–2028*.
Application deadline: August 7, 2026
For details and application materials:
http://src-h.slav.hokudai.ac.jp/fvfp/index1.html
List of previous FVFP Fellows:
https://src-h.slav.hokudai.ac.jp/fvfp/index17.html

02/06/2026

[New Publications!]
News on the recent publication of a book based on an international conference organised by SFERES (The French Association for Russian and East European Studies in Social Sciences).

Pascal Bonnard & Carole Sigman (eds), 1989 in the East: Between Order and Subversion, Routledge, 2026.
https://www.routledge.com/1989-in-the-East-Between-Order-and-Subversion/Bonnard-Sigman/p/book/9781041128151

This book revisits the processes that led to the collapse of communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the USSR. This disintegration appeared to be the result of complex mobilisations where the repertoires of action, the institutional and non-institutional ties, the ideological preferences, and the identities of the actors, including the most official ones, have been profoundly changed. The modes of contestation have gone from a self-limited subversion of established institutions, with some forms of collaboration with the regime, to much clearer and more radical forms of head-on opposition. Opposition movements developed according to rhythms and modalities specific to each country, sometimes to each social sphere. Social mobilisations, institutional transformations (both visible and less visible), and the emergence of new actors in all social spheres are therefore central issues in this book.

- Introduction, Pascal Bonnard and Carole Sigman
- The multiple posthumous lives of Imre Nagy, the Hungarian hero of 1989, Catherine Gousseff
- The ecological discourse of the Round Table as part of the neoliberal turn in Poland, Iwona Bojadżijewa
- The “happening of the people” in Yugoslavia at the end of the 1980s: mass movements and disrupted meanings in a disintegrating society, Anne Madelain
- The role of the working class in the collapse of bureaucratic socialism in Albania (1990–1991), Arlind Qori
- A paradoxical triumph: the rise and fall of Soviet academic environmentalism (1973–1991), Laurent Coumel
- Household plots and the second economy: continuities and transformations from late Soviet Russia to the transition period, Svetlana Barsukova and Caroline Dufy
- The transnational action of Baltic independence movements in the USSR (1988–1991), Katerina Kesa

30/05/2026

The 13th East Asian Conference on Slavic Eurasian Studies in Fukuoka, Japan has started strong. Yoshiro Ikeda, Matthias Neumann Yoko Aoshima ites.google.com/view/eac2026fukuoka

12/05/2026

Conference Alert! www.aaeasstudies.org