Call for Papers: International Conference “Collapsed Empires: the consequences of 1917 in the Mediterranean and the World” Madrid, from 15 to 17 November 2017

Deadline for proposals: 16 January 2017

The centenary of the Russian revolutions of 1917 is a good time to rethink the consequences of collapsed empires and states that beginning at that point in time then have repeated throughout the twentieth century. In this conference, will be examined the dissolution of empires and the decolonizations after 1917 in spatial and chronological comparison, regarding what the Bolshevik Revolution meant as a political, social, cultural and geospatial phenomenon.

The aim is to pay special attention to the Mediterranean Basin, although global and transnational analyses are also welcome. We want to examine these developments within the perspective of the processes of independences after the Second World War as well as in relation to the consolidation of the post-colonial states (for example Morocco and Egypt). We are also interested in the exact inverse process: the independence and the recovery of full sovereignty after the collapsed of the Soviet Union 1989-1991.

The conference is financed by the MINECO’s project “Collapsed empires, post-colonial nations and the construction of historical consciousness. Memory infrastructures since 1917” (HAR2015-64155-P) and it has the support of the Faculty of Geography and History at the Complutense University of Madrid and the Research Group of Contemporary History at the Carlos III University of Madrid, through its project “The Spanish Crisis of 1917: international context and domestic implications” (Ref. HAR2015-68348-R).

The conference consists of three plenary sessions in which the central problems of the two research projects that take part in the conference will be discussed and of five panels open to the participation of researchers from around the world. We encourage you to send your proposals directly to the panel’s coordinators. Main conference languages will be Spanish and English, but we accept papers in French too. A special interest at the plenary sessions will be given to the consequences of 1917 at the South shore of the Mediterranean, with participation of experts from Morocco, the Turkey and Egypt. We explicitly encourage scholars from North African countries and Middle East countries to participate.

The deadline for proposals will be 16 January 2017.