CALL FOR PAPERS: STATE VS INDIVIDUAL MORALITY IN POST-SOCIALISM

Deadline 10 February 2014

About STSS (www.tlu.ee/stss)

STSS is fast-growing open-access interdisciplinary journal for the study of transition societies. Created in 2009, it has been indexed by SCOPUS in 2012 and we are currently in Q3 (3rd quartile), ranking 320 out of 552 journals included in sociology and political science. Given that we are an independent journal created only four years ago we believe this is already a good result and we are confident we can improve our ranking quickly in the next few years. Please check our articles if you want to be convinced of our potential. Our primary focus is post-socialist countries of Eastern Europe and the former USSR, although we are open to contributions focusing on any other world region.

We are a bi-annual publication of the Institute of Political Science and Governance and the Institute of International and Social Studies of Tallinn University and it is indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), EBSCO, ProQuest, and the International Political Science Abstracts (IPSA). All our articles are available for free through the Central European Online Library and our website www.tlu.ee/stss that you are welcome to visit if you want to learn more about us. In addition to the targeted call given below, we welcome articles all year round.

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We are looking for 1-2 more papers on the topic: STATE VS INDIVIDUAL MORALITY IN POST-SOCIALISM.

Over the past decade we have witnessed a tendency to critically look at the way state morality, laws and rules are constructed. Following the appearance of Gibson-Graham's seminal work (1996), the term diverse economies has come to populate a growing number of scholarly works across a wide range of disciplines. As part of this scholarship alternative narratives to capitalism have been explored and neoliberalism has been criticised. Based on the Bourdieaun remark that individual and state moralities do not necessarily overlap, a number of empirical works (Polese 2008; Rasanayagam 2011; Wanner 2005) have shown the limits of the corrupt-non-corrupt distinction. This, in turn, has highlighted the potential conflict between what is legal (with a definition of legality provided by the state) and what is socially acceptable by the citizens
themselves (van Schendel & Abrahams 2005). This has led to the understanding that what a society, or a group of individuals, is ready to accept and justify is not necessarily what the state official narrative (based on laws and rules) would accept.

We welcome empirically-rich accounts, constructed on recent and/or ongoing research, that broadly deal with the topic suggested above.

The deadline for the 2014 Spring issue is 10 February 2014. However, potential contributors are welcome to contact us at an early stage to discuss an idea you might want to develop or have developed. Please visit the webpage www.tlu.ee/stss for further information on submission guidelines or contact stss@tlu.ee (also if you would like to discuss a proposal).


Suggested preliminary literature

Gibson-Graham, J.K. (1996). The End Of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. Oxford UK and Cambridge USA: Blackwell Publishers.

Polese, A. (2008). "If I Receive it, it is a Gift; if I Demand it, then it is a Bribe" on the Local Meaning of Economic Transactions in Post-soviet Ukraine. Anthropology in Action, 15(3), 47-60.

Rasanayagam, J. (2011). Informal Economy in an Informal State in Surviving Post-Socialism. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy,15(11/12), 681-696.

van Schendel, W. & I. Abraham (Eds.) (2005). Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Wanner, C. (2005). Money, Morality and New Forms of Exchange in Postsocialist Ukraine. Ethnos 70(4), 515-537.