The Making of Solidarity: A Conference on Eastern and Central European Dissidents, 1945-1991 - Instytut Pileckiego

This open call invites proposals for an interdisciplinary conference on Eastern and Central European dissidence, solidarity, and anti-imperial thought.

The Making of Solidarity: A Conference on Eastern and Central European Dissidents, 1945-1991

12-13 November 2026

A close reading of Ivan Dziuba’s classic 1965 essay Internationalism or Russification? offers a useful lens through which to understand a distinctive feature of Russian colonialism: its operation not only through discrimination and coercion, but also through the language of brotherhood. Written from within the Soviet system, this insight anticipated questions that postcolonial theory would not fully engage with for decades. It also serves as a reminder that Eastern and Central European intellectuals were thinking rigorously about imperial power long before postcolonial frameworks entered broader academic discussions of the region. The Making of Solidarity takes this intellectual tradition as its point of departure — not merely as historical background, but as a body of thought that continues to illuminate the present. To do so demands a particular approach to history: one that treats dissident thinking as a form of knowledge production in its own right, and that attends carefully to how the memory of dissidence has itself been shaped — which figures have been canonized, which forgotten, and by what institutional, political, and cultural processes those selections have been made.

The conference challenges the dominant understanding of Eastern European dissidence that took shape in international academia during the Cold War and became further entrenched in the years following 1989. This understanding tended to privilege figures who had already established networks in Paris or London, while overlooking workers and labor activists, as well as religious, national, and cultural communities whose resistance took different, less readily translatable forms. It elevated Russian voices, at times even those inflected with imperial nostalgia, while failing to fully recognize the anti-imperial thought of Ukrainian, Hungarian, Lithuanian, and other dissidents. The Making of Solidarity proposes a reorientation: toward those whose resistance has been harder to recover, and toward what Václav Havel famously described as “the power of the powerless”—the refusal of ordinary people across the full breadth of Eastern and Central Europe to live within a lie. 

The conference also marks the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Polish Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR) in 1976—one of the most consequential initiatives to build solidarity across class divisions under an authoritarian regime. This anniversary is not merely commemorative. The making of solidarity—the difficult and unfinished work of bringing together people from diverse backgrounds in opposition to structures of oppression—remains a challenge for contemporary societies. It is through this continuing relevance that the legacy of dissident movements still speaks to the present.

These histories are now being reconstructed—and actively contested—across digital platforms, with Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine lending new urgency to figures such as Vasyl Stus, the Ukrainian poet and dissident who died in a Soviet labor camp in 1985. By bringing together historians, literary scholars, postcolonial theorists, and digital humanists, The Making of Solidarity asks not only which histories have been overlooked, but also under what conditions their recovery becomes possible—and what forms of solidarity, across time and borders, that recovery demands.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

The Making of Solidarity: A Conference on Eastern and Central European Dissidents
12–13 November 2026 · Pilecki Institute Berlin · In person and online

Proposal deadline: 31 August 2026
Send proposals to: conference@pileckiinstitut.de

We welcome proposals from historians, literary scholars, postcolonial theorists, digital humanists, and practitioners working across the following themes:

• Soviet imperialism and colonial frameworks: Russification, cultural erasure, and linguistic suppression
• Forgotten voices: workers and labor activists, women dissidents, religious, national, and cultural communities
• Cross-class solidarity: the organizational history of resistance movements
• Western perceptions and selective memory: how Cold War narratives shaped the canon of dissidence
• Digital memory: archives, platforms, and the contested reconstruction of dissident legacies
• Contemporary resonances: resistance, anti-imperialism, and the ongoing war in Ukraine

Travel and accommodation support 

All on-site participants are eligible for reimbursement of the following expenses:

• accommodation costs of up to EUR 300;
• second-class rail travel.

Reimbursement is subject to the submission of the relevant receipts.

Proposals should include a 300-word abstract and a 150-word biographical statement and should be submitted as a single document by email to conference@pileckiinstitut.de no later than 23:59 on 31 August 2026. Authors of books published between 2024 and 2026 are also encouraged to submit proposals. The programme committee will notify applicants of its decisions by 18 September 2026. Successful applicants will then have one week to confirm their participation.

The conference is organised by the Pilecki Institute Berlin in cooperation with the Jan Nowak-Jeziorański College of Eastern Europe in Wrocław (KEW) and the Stus Center (Стус Центр).