Fringe Politics in Southeastern Europe II - Conservative Social Movements and the Mainstreaming of Extremism in Southeast Europe

H-Nationalism CfP: Fringe Politics in Southeastern Europe II - Conservative Social Movements and the Mainstreaming of Extremism in Southeast Europe

Discussion published by Cristian Cercel on Thursday, October 16, 2014

CfP: Fringe Politics in Southeastern Europe II – Conservative Social Movements and the Mainstreaming of Extremism in Southeast Europe

The relationship between state and society in Southeastern Europe hasundergone a recent phase of intense restructuring, with protest politics and new waves of social movements from the political margins questioning the status quo and shaking up entrenched political systems. When approaching this development, scholarship has thus farpredominantly focused on social actors and groups with a distinctively democratic and progressive potential addressing various issues, suchas austerity, the privatisation of public space, the (non) provisionand privatisation of welfare and public utilities, poverty, corruption, bureaucratic inefficiency, environmental concerns andauthoritarian tendencies. However, the recent anti-Cyrillic protestsin Vukovar (Croatia), football hooliganism or the rising influence of political Islam in parts of the region, have showed the particular power of social movements with a more conservative base, representing a kind of ‘grassroots nationalism’ or nationalism ‘from below’. While popular protest movements led by social groups and actors from theconservative spectrum of politics are often equated with ‘anti-democracy’ or ‘extremism’, this workshop’s rationale is to explore and understand their political, social, economic and culturalpolicies, strategies, tactics, paradoxes and contradictions.

Our aim is to bring together different strands of politics ‘at the margins’ in SEE that have been largely overlooked by contemporary scholarship, including, but not limited to: veterans’ organizations inthe post-Yugoslav space, sport fan groups and ‘hooliganism’, patriotic NGOs (such as the Serbian Obraz and Naši 1389), religious-conservative mobilisations (such as In the Name of the Family in Croatia),right- wing movements/parties (such as Golden Dawn and Ataka) andpolitical Islam. The network's geographic definition of SEE includesGreece, Slovenia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania, Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Albania, and Serbia. However, we also welcomecontributions that look at other cases, if they include a comparativecase from SEE. The goals of the workshop are to provide insights into the political strategies and tactics of these social actors and to discuss the impacts these social movements may have for the meaning ofdemocracy in the region. We are looking for contributions in the formof contextualized case studies which discuss the preconditions for the emergence of such social groups and actors, as well as accounts of howfringe politics enters the political mainstream.

The workshop welcomes papers that engage with social movements,protests and social actors (including those which have a regional and transnational focus) in one or more of the following aspects:

- The domestic linkage of conservative social movements We are looking for contributions which examine the domestic linkageswithin and between different forms of fringe politics, as well asquestions regarding the relationships between these politics at the margins, the state and other institutionalized actors

Citation: Cristian Cercel. CfP: Fringe Politics in Southeastern Europe II - Conservative Social Movements and the Mainstreaming of Extremism in Southeast Europe. H-Nationalism. 10-16-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/3911/discussions/48958/cfp-fringe-politics-southeastern-europe-ii-conservative-social Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Nationalism

- Transnational networks Within the theme, the workshop welcomes papers studying transnational networks and/or partnerships across fringe politics both from within and beyond the SEE region. Additionally, this section also looks at how these movements and developments in SEE relate to global events.

- Opportunities and impediments This research section is interested in how different domestic and/or international developments create opportunities and constraints for these fringe politics to challenge the political status quo.

The workshop will be organized by the UACES Collaborative ResearchNetwork ‘Fringe Politics in Southeast Europe’ (http://www.cer.qmul.ac.uk/UACES%20Network/index.html) and will be hosted by the Centre for Southeast European Studies (http://www.suedosteuropa.uni-graz.at/en) at the University of Graz. The workshop will take place on 19./20. March 2015

To propose a paper, please send an abstract (up to 500 words) and a biographical note (200 words) to [email protected] by 15 November 2014. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 1 December 2014. Accommodation will be covered fully and there is a limited fundfor travel expenses contingent on the timely submission of a full draft (5000-8000 words) to the workshop organizers by 5 March 2015.