The Arms That Tie Together: How Eastern Europe and the Global South Made the Global Arms Market (Péter Apor)
This paper explores the rise of a new international arms market of Eastern European producers and global South consumers in the 1970s and its transformation into a global enterprise that involved North American and Western European participants, as well. My work will examine how military relationships triggered the re-imagination of geo-cultural zones and linkages in terms of global core and peripheries. This paper seeks to understand the role of Eastern European arms deliveries in creating international networks of trade and tradesmen and the role of socialist state companies as competitors in a global arms market. This paper explores how the pre-1945 legacies of regional arms industries were discovered as export resources and, at the same time, pressed socialist leaders to look for markets in the decolonizing world.
Writing a Biography - an interdisciplinary challenge (Izabela Wagner)
As an academic genre, biography can be perceived differently depending on the discipline. For historians, it was and still is a prestigious form of writing, whereas sociologists, who usually focus on the populations and groups of people and not individuals, treat such an intellectual exercise with more reservations (with the obvious exception of famous sociologists’ lives studied by the historians of sociology). However, this is in the field of sociology, that in the first decades of the 20th century (in Chicago and Poland) biographical methods were created, only to be developed by the scholars in France.
In my talk, I will discuss the value of the biographical approach and the challenges encountered in writing a collective biography. By collective biography, I mean the story of a given group, analyzed in context (which corresponds to the category "life and times - biography"). I will investigate how ethnographical study and collective/group biography interlink. My talk will include the elements of my current project - "Stroke 1968 - History and Herstory of Exiled Intellectuals".
In order to attend the Colloquium, please register. Participants will be admitted according to the limited room capacity of 15 people. The ZOOM link will be sent to the online participants the day before the event.