Focusing on the debates in the First and Second State Duma of the Russian Empire, the article argues that the imperial parliament was the site for articulating and developing multiple approaches to political community. Together with the better studied particularistic discourses, which were based on ethno-national, religious, regional, social…[Read more]

The article discusses various meanings which were ascribed to religion in the parliamentary debates of the perestroika period, which included Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, and other religious and lay deputies. Understood in a general sense, religion was supposed to become the foundation or an element of a new ideology and stimulate Soviet or…[Read more]

This chapter provides an overview of dependent constitution-making under one-party regimes in Albania, Bulgaria, China, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, North Korea, Mongolia, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia during the first decade after the Second World War. Employing and further developing the concept of the informal Soviet empire, it…[Read more]

Over the course of the twentieth century, a broad array of parties as organizations of a new type took over state functions and replaced state institutions on the territories of the former Ottoman, Qing, Russian, and Habsburg Empires. In the context of roughly simultaneous imperial and postimperial transformations, organizations such as the…[Read more]

This book examines the political parties which emerged in the former Ottoman, Qing, Russian, and Habsburg empires and not only took over government power, but merged with government itself. It discusses how these parties, disillusioned with previous constitutional and parliamentary reforms, justified their takeovers with programs of controlled or…[Read more]

This working paper presents in full translation four texts of the Uzbek early 20th-century jadid reformist Abdurrauf Fitrat. Identifying educational reform as the main key to progress, he advocated for the emancipation and nationalisation of the Chaghatay/Uzbek language as a tool to educate the masses rather than to serve the interests of a…[Read more]

Scientific diagrams could and did appear in unexpected places. This essay discusses such an example: the diagrams that the thirteenth- to fourteenth-century scholar George-Gregory Chioniades added to a manuscript of John of Damascus’s Fountain of Knowledge as part of his commentary on the text. I argue that the diagrams were a very important, if…[Read more]

Seit fast vier Monaten herrscht Krieg in der Ukraine. Ein Blick in die Geschichte zeigt, warum Putin glaubt, dem Land die Eigenstaatlichkeit absprechen zu können – und weshalb sein Vorhaben nur scheitern kann.

This working paper presents a 16th- or 17th-century Ottoman translation-cum-commentary of the preface and introduction of one of the classics of Islamicate rhetoric, al-Qazwīnī’s Talkhīṣ al-Miftāḥ (The Key’s Digest), a 14th-century work on rhetoric based on al-Sakkākī’s 13th-century seminal Miftāḥ al-ʿUlūm (The Key of Sciences). This part…[Read more]

The Cairo Genizah is well known as a repository for hundreds of thousands of manuscripts that the Jewish residents of Fustat (Old Cairo) produced and consumed in the premodern period. Foreign “collectors” acquired most of these manuscripts for European libraries in the second half of the nineteenth century, with the majority arriving at the Cam…[Read more]

The State Conference in Moscow, a one-time quasi-parliamentary assembly of over 2,500 delegates, was intended to help the Provisional Government resolve the military, political, and economic crises of the First World War and the Russian Revolution by building a broad public consensus. Due to the inadequate representation at the conference, its…[Read more]

The translation of a short treatise on paranomasia, simile, and metonymy, by the foremost Persian-Turkish lexicographer of the 15th century, Lütfu’llāh el–Ḥalīmī. The text combines a rather dense and elliptic prose style with a remarkably lucid and clear-cut typology of seven types of tajnīs, seven types of tashbīh, and nine types of majāz, ofte…[Read more]

Putin’s Russia suffered a bitter defeat in the first weeks of the Russian-Ukrainian war. However, the Kremlin will keep on trying to place Ukraine into its orbit, as well as project its influence further into the Western world. Unceasing and dynamic aggrandizement under strong leadership is one of the most functional approaches to statecraft in R…[Read more]

Russian military aggression and diplomatic pressure against Ukraine stems from the neo-imperial thinking of Russian elites and ordinary citizens. This thinking requires reproduction of expansionist patterns that once led Russia to its “historical greatness”: construction of a territorially large state, rich in resources and demographically div…[Read more]

Through the case of Emerson’s appropriation of Persian poetry this volume provides a thought-provoking example of how the literary founding father of a nation is cosmopolitan and receptive of foreign cultures in what might seem a purely “nationalistic” agenda. It will appeal to those in the field of Persian literature, comparative liter…[Read more]

There were six waves of regionalism in Western Europe and Russia: in the decades of the 1830s, the 1860s, the 1890s, the 1920s, the 1970s and the 1990s. Russian regions were not behind Western European ones but rather went through the same stages of development at the same time or sometimes even earlier, until after the Stalin era, when they did…[Read more]

In celebration of the tenth anniversary of the second centennial of Ākhūndzade’s birth, three Azerbaijani texts in translation by the Molière of Azerbaijan. The texts—one poem, one letter, and one prose text—reflect Ākhūndzāde’s sharp, sometimes vitriolic, take on Rūmī ’s teaching (a dangerous, incomprehensible word jumble), most poetry and po…[Read more]

The article uses Eric Voegelin’s ontology to address domestic processes in contemporary Ukraine. It explains how interpretations of experiences of history and transcendence evoke political order and justice. It also outlines the nature of political symbols deriving from these experiences. The article argues that Ukraine’s social architecture is…[Read more]

First translated into Persian in 1949, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is among the most popular works of American fiction in Iran. Although the anti-US policy of the post-1979 political system has tried to erase the manifestations of the previous period’s American influence, Iranian interest in Huckleberry Finn has been inc…[Read more]