The Post-Soviet as Post-Colonial. A New Paradigm for Understanding Constitutional Dynamics in the Former Soviet Empire

We will discuss the book “The Post-Soviet as Post-Colonial. A New Paradigm for Understanding Constitutional Dynamics in the Former Soviet Empire” (Edward Elgar 2022) with the authors William Partlett (University of Melbourne,) and Herbert Küpper (Research Centre for Eastern and South Eastern Europe, Regensburg) and the first comment: Immo Rebitschek (Friedrich Schiller University Jena)

Chair: Małgorzata Głowacka-Grajper (Faculty of Sociology UW)

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The Post-Soviet as Post-Colonial. A New Paradigm for Understanding Constitutional Dynamics in the Former Soviet Empire describes the collapse of the Soviet Union as a moment of decolonization and the post-1991 constitution-building experience as a postcolonial one. Partlett and Küpper’s application of the post-colonial paradigm to the former Soviet world adds new facets to post-colonial constitutional theory by presenting a third type of (ideology-based) colonialism and a third type of decolonization.
William Partlett is an Associate Professor at Melbourne Law School. He writes and teaches in the field of public law. Professor Partlett’s research takes a historical and comparative approach to questions of public law. He is particularly interested in how constitutional text shapes political ordering and historical memory, particularly in a post-colonial context.

Herbert Küpper is Professor for European and Comparative Public Law at the Andrássy German-Speaking University at Budapest and Managing Director of the Institute for East European Law at Regensburg. He is particularly interested in the relationships between various fields of law (especially the interaction of private and administrative law), between (constitutional) law and politics and between language and law including questions of legal translation.
Immo Rebitschek is an assistant professor for East European History at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. He has published on the history of criminal justice in Stalinist Russia, on Soviet war crime tribunals, the German occupation in Ukraine 1918 as well as on the history of famine and humanitarianism in Tsarist Russia. He is currently writing a history of famine relief in the Late Russian Empire.

Series „Postcolonial perspectives – postdependance entanglements” is organized in frames of two research projects sponsored by the National Science Centre, Poland “Remembering Soviet repressions in the post-multiple colonial Russian Far East”, no. 2020/39/B/HS6/02809 and Social Memory and the Post-Imperial Russian Heritage in Poland no. 2021/41/B/HS3/00852.