Institutions and Institutional Change in Postsocialism: Between History and Global Adaptation Pressures (KomPost)

Basic data for this project

Description

"Institutions and Institutional Change in Postsocialism: Between History and Global Adaptation Pressures” are the themes of a multidisciplinary research network that has been established by eight German universities and research institutes in early 2010. Focusing on the successor states of the former Soviet Union, the network studies how political, economic, legal and cultural institutions are created and changed in a context of historical legacies and global integration. how political actors interpret and reframe institutional accounts, such as ideas of legitimate order and authority, to realise their interests and legitimize their intentions. The network is envisaged to contribute to renewing East European area studies in Germany as a field where different disciplines engage in productive scholarly exchanges. Multidisciplinary communication is a key aim of the network: Social scientists who seek to explain the emergence and change of institutions are provided with opportunities to learn more about cultural and historical contexts.Area specialists socialized in the humanities are offered conceptual perspectives that allow to interpret historically or culturally specific phenomena from a systematic and comparative perspective. Thus the network enables researchers to get acquainted with the state of the art in neighbouring disciplines. All network projects use qualitative methods of research, relying on case studies, small-n comparisons and contextualized data.