You are here: Home > IUEU Student Profile Robert Podbereski
IUEU Centre 2008 PhD Scholarship Holder at la trobe University
PhD Topic:
Social Secession: The Collapse of Soviet Totalitarianism in Poland and Czechoslovakia, 1976-1989.
My thesis aims at describing the terminal stage of the process of detotalitarianisation in some countries of Central Europe, especially in Poland and Czechoslovakia. It focuses on the gradual separation between state and society. Such a ‘social secession’, which manifests itself in the erosion of the officially recognized forms of civil life and spontaneous emergence of their unofficial alternatives, is considered a phenomenon of not a revolutionary but structural nature, which has its roots in the system's intrinsic contradictions.
I hope to prove that the new terminological framework based on the notion of ‘social secession’ provides an effective mechanism for understanding the collapse of the Soviet system in the area. Post hoc explanations of totalitarianism in its terminal decline do not differentiate between the process of detotalitarianisation and that of establishing liberal democracy: all factors contributing to the decline and fall of totalitarianism are fully appreciated, regardless of the consequences for the prospects for liberal democracy in the future. ‘Social secession’, however, could have serious consequences as manifested especially in the post-1989 heated debate on the issue of "the struggle to come to terms with the past". I am deeply convinced that the proper analysis of the process of detotalitarianisation is not possible without taking into account of the exorbitant price the Central European societies had to pay for their political freedom.
Research Interest
Comparative totalitarianism and nationalism studies
Comparative social and cultural history and its methodological foundations
The legacy of 1989
Cultural history of Central Europe
Religions of the world
Value pluralism
Education
2009 (ongoing), PhD candidate, La Trobe University, Melbourne.
2001, MA (Philosophy), University of Lodz, Poland.
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