Rethinking 1989

This five-year Leverhulme Trust-funded research (2014-18) aims to connect the decline, collapse and transformation of state socialism in the Soviet Union, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe to broader global processes. It supports a range of projects which explore both the global entanglements which informed this transition, and the way in which global, regional and local processes have shaped the way we have come to understand the decline and end of state socialism.

Projects supported here address the post-socialist transformation of cities, the ‘Fall’ and human rights between the global and local, criminal justice and the production of history across regional transitions, the ‘globally entangled history’ of cultures of transformation, late and post-socialist elites and the rise of neo-liberalism, and the global story of Yugoslavia’s collapse.

We also seek to create links with those interested in understanding this moment of major political, economic and cultural transformation from different regional perspectives.