The present issue of Ab Imperio completes our annual theme on the new research program “languages of self-description of empire and nation.” This thematic program emerged as a product of the evolution of the journal – initially founded as a medium for translating the methods and terminology of nationalism studies into the humanities and social sciences in the post-Soviet space – over the past five years. As we followed our initial goals, we increasingly realized the limits of focusing strictly on “national experience.” It became clear to us that there was a need for new approaches that could account for the diversity and the multi-vectored dynamics of processes in the Russian Empire, USSR, and the post-Soviet space. In search of new research questions, we shifted from single thematic issues to annual programs, which made it possible to test the historical experience of the region against the historical meta-narratives and meta-concepts, such as “modernization,” “borderlands,” and “historical memory.” This experiment became a unique and, admittedly, an exceedingly ambitious attempt to synthesize and apply the present paradigms of social knowledge to the study of empire and nationalism in the Russian Empire, USSR, and the post-Soviet space. Our experiment has not offered ready answers, but it has led to the formulation of new questions.
The first issue of the journal in 2005 opened with an editorial that formulated the project of “new imperial history.” The editorial highlighted how the language of scholarship tends to reproduce the normative discourse of nationalism. It also reflected upon the historical scholarship of the preceding period and demonstrated the impossibility of fixating the phenomenon of empire in essentialist and institutional definitions and the fundamental methodological limitations of the comparative history of empires, whose perspective does not allow the researcher to go beyond the institutional and sociological description of imperial structures. The idea of “new imperial history” suggested a reconstruction of languages of self-description of empire and nation and shifted attention to the dynamic and static self-representations of different groups and individuals inhabiting the heterogeneous space of multinational empires. The “new imperial history” encapsulated, in our view, a search for the original semantics of categories in their specific historical context, i.e. in the dynamic interaction of signifying subjects. We termed the emerging picture and research setting the “imperial situation.” The “imperial situation” is a working hypothesis whose insights and limits are probed in a continuing discussion on the pages of Ab Imperio. This discussion testifies to the fact that the imperial situation always involves the presence of different historical subjects and the relations between them never lead to the homogenization of political, social, and cultural space. However, the heterogeneity of the space of historical experience in itself does not provide a sufficient ground for classifying this space as a particular type.
The problem of definition in this case ought to be solved historically rather than through abstract contemplation. In the light of the contextual approach, the heterogeneity of imperial experience ceases to resemble the opposition of typologically similar historical actors (for example, national movements) but is rather revealed as an overlapping relation between historical actors of different types. The languages of self-description used by these historical subjects contain both archaic and modern identity references; the archaic ones have often acquired modern connotations, while such phenomena as the standardized linguistic community and the national territory have been historicized. Finally, an important characteristic of the “imperial situation” is the lack of a dominant and coherent self-description of empire, that is, the lack of a rational cognitive frame rooted in epistemology and defining the parameters of such a self-description. The definition of empire emerges as a projection of modern politics, rational social knowledge, and historical actors, who construe empire as the point of departure for their own progressive movement toward the national state and modern nationhood. The history of the perception of empire, as well as the history of attempts to systematize and rationalize imperial space, are inseparable parts of imperial history.
In the light of this working hypothesis, the most problematic question is what actually constitutes “the legacy” of empire. Consider the articles that explore the role of the image of Chinggis Khan’s empire in contemporary debates and practices of identity construction (in the historical section of the current issue). These articles demonstrate how the past has been instrumentalized – as various groups compete in constructing groupness – since the collapse of the USSR. The authors of these articles unpack how the “entrepreneurs” of historical memory have been directed by the search for alternative versions of historical genealogies of national communities that first emerged in the framework of the Soviet project. These articles also demonstrate how the semantic space of Soviet and Russian (rossiiskaia) collective identity has been undermined by historical memories of the “Mongol” empire. They stress the ambiguity and ambivalence of the canon of post-Soviet identities of the Mongol peoples, which includes controversial elements of the image of Chinggis’s empire. The religious, ethnic, and spatial aspects of memory about the past empire have served as a resource for a range of competing projects of post-Soviet groupness, from the narrowly genetic “Khalkha Mongol ethnos” to the pan-Monglolian linguistic and cultural community. The editors of Ab Imperio thank Tatiana Skrynnikova for guest-editing the forum on the empire of Chinggis Khan in the consciousness of post-Soviet Mongol peoples.
The materials in the sections “The Newest Mythologies,” “ABC: Studies of Nationalism and Empire,” and “Archive” also testify to the permanence of group identity construction since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In that sense one can retrospectively speak of the legacy of empire, since the post-Soviet political entities and national groups have emerged in contexts of either absent national states or of those lacking the legitimating mechanisms for appropriating the inherited political entity. In this situation, the USSR has been constructed as an empire and as the point of departure for future-oriented discourses and practices of nationalization. The articles in these sections demonstrate how the concept of “ethnos” and the practice of ethnic regulation have become an exit from the “post-imperial” situation of ambivalence and insecurity about other markers of social and political cohesion.
A closer look at the articles also reveals how differently “ethnos” has been perceived and instrumentalized in seemingly similar post-Soviet contexts. In the case of the “ethno-traumatologists” and “ethno-vitalists” described by Serguei Oushakine, we encounter a biologization of politics and an attempt to find in biology and organicist discourses a firm foundation for comprehending the ruptured social reality. The articles in the forum about ethnicity and nationalism in post-Soviet Uzbekistan (guest-edited by Marlene Laruelle) reflect upon the nationalization of the Soviet national project by a newly independent state grappling with the legitimacy of its sovereignty and nationhood in the 21st century. Thus, a critical look at the post-Soviet situation as a post-imperial situation reveals the vagueness and multifaceted nature of the seemingly solid and self-evident category of ethnicity, the twists and turns of which depend on the historical context and political demand. The category of ethnicity here describes both the construction of traditional Soviet “ethnoses” and the mode of ascribing meaning to the political, social, and cultural differences that have emerged since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The fact that the category of ethnicity, which seemingly lost its analytical significance due to its genetic connotations, appears to be relevant in many studies in this issue, calls yet again for a theoretical reflection on our analytical language and its ability to function beyond the cognitive framework of disciplines defined by the historical logic of the inevitability of the national state.
Precisely such a reflection is offered in the “Theory and Methodology” section. The section opens with three interviews with the editors of volumes that first addressed the phenomenon of “imperial legacies.” It is followed by an exchange in letters between Marina Mogilner, an editor of AI, and the French scholar Alain Blum, dedicated to the issue of “imperial legacy” and the search for an adequate language to describe it. In his letters, Alain Blum stresses the importance of the universalist language of social categories for analyzing the recent protest riots in the French suburbs and emphasizes the traditional character of French political institutions and practices (which are at the same time a classic example of modern national state’s practices). In response, Marina Mogilner poses questions regarding the functioning of a language different from the one of social analysis. This language has been formed in the interaction between the host society and immigrants (united by their experience of life and survival in France, the former metropole of a colonial empire) and operates on the level of ethnic and cultural categories. In essence, this discussion does not simply lead to the question of the significance and potential of a universalist apparatus of social categories, on the one hand, and of a particularist, ethnographic approach, on the other. Rather it complicates the very boundary between the two analytical languages: the self-representation of the participants in the protest riots as a particular social group does not contradict the study of that very representation as a way of describing cultural differences, that is, as a (newly constructed) ethnicity that functions in the framework of the generally accepted political language of the French national state.
Following the epistolary dialogue, the article by Sylvie Thenault explores the genealogy of the legal institution of the “State of Emergency,” now an integral part of French law and legal practice, in the context of the crisis of the French colonial empire. Thenault introduces an important variable into the aforementioned discussion: apart from the language of social analysis and the language of ethnicity (ever-changing, multilayered, and re-interpreted), an analysis of the French post-imperial (and post-national?) situation must account for the language of political tradition, since the French discourse of nationhood and the many legal practices associated with the imperial past were born in the French revolution.
The texts in the methodological section, presented in the form of debates and discussions, demonstrate that the phenomenon of imperial legacy is most clearly visible in the epistemology of modern historiography and social knowledge. It is in this realm that the phenomenon of empire is “post-” conceptualized by the view from modernity; in this realm an attempt has been made to describe the problems of today’s world with the help of imperial historical experience and the legacy of empire. This re-conceptualization of empire has taken place against a background in which the nation and the national state is no longer seen as the only explanatory model and recipe for the solution of contemporary problems. That is why a “post-” situation, being politically very indeterminate, can become an extremely promising research setting. We hope that the present issue of AI supports this conclusion.

Editors of Ab Imperio:

I. Gerasimov
S. Glebov
A. Kaplunovski
M. Mogilner
A. Semyonov