From early Marxism to late post-structuralism and postcolonial studies, social theorists have worked hard to expose the fundamental dependence of any author’s opinion – including scholarly ones – on bigger social structures, be it class, race, or language in the broad sense. At the end of the day, this critical deconstruction of meaning production and the accompanying regimes of truth boil down to the dilemma of positionality: Does the critical awareness of scholars’ multiple limitations help substantiate their judgment or undermine it as a mere derivation of external factors? By extension, the same dilemma applies to other people as objects of our studies: Should we treat them as functions of their social roles or acknowledge their agency in at least partially shaping their life scenarios?
This dilemma is neither naive nor simply resolvable by siding with a certain school of thought. While the Leninist orthodoxy of class-based partisanship can be dismissed by some today as archaic and even vulgar, the same epistemic-cum-rhetorical mechanism behind the argument of gender- or race-based determinism of one’s positionality cannot. For one, the determinism of social structures is real, and the resulting bias can be compensated for only by admitting its manifold impact on the human perception of reality and developing strategies to minimize this effect. This work can never be expected to be complete, so by embracing the idea of active positionality and hence personal responsibility, a scholar remains open to further criticism, a situation not everyone finds comfortable. The alternative understanding of positionality essentially treats it as a fixed identity in a world populated by other externally predetermined fixed identities, with personal ability to alter the situation close to nil. The concept of identity is a very crude approximation of coherent patterns of behavior that can be empirically observed, and this concept was methodologically exposed as problematic long ago.^[1] Nevertheless, it has the great advantage of reducing the unstable complexity of multiple factors potentially predetermining one’s worldview and actions to one or two, fixed in their meaning and effect. Once embraced by a scholar or assigned to a protagonist, an identity averts any further criticism besides what is prescribed by the appropriate scenario of identity politics. Even this criticism can be minimized by actively partaking in denunciation of one’s own flawed identity – a mechanism well-studied on the example of Stalinist practices of various outcasts’ socialization as the mother of all identity politics. ^[2]
Obviously, the problem is not the well-justified self-criticism of one’s inherited privilege, individual or based on group belonging, but the inconspicuous substitution of the focus on personal flaws for systemic analysis. The fixation on rigid identities makes analytical work redundant and instead shifts attention to the “theater of identities” – their predetermined trajectories and patterns of interaction – as a moral matter par excellence. Deconstruction becomes a one-off exercise, producing a snapshot of rigid structures of identity and their constellation, with further deconstruction efforts no longer required. With their roles and values assigned once and for all, the momentarily registered asymmetry of identities becomes interpreted as a permanent hierarchy of moral virtues.
In the late 1990s, the rise of studies of complex societies as open systems problematized the logic of identity-centered analysis as based on the simplified understanding of society as a closed system – one that redistributed the finite quantity of resources, including power, wealth, and violence, among the invariable “cast” of social actors. This new direction of studies was most prominently represented by new empire studies, ultimately leading to new imperial history. The imperial turn of the late 1990s relied on constructivist methodologies of nationalities studies, new gender and cultural studies prompted by the earlier anthropological turn, and the subaltern studies that championed the social history effort to recover even the most oppressed social groups’ historical agency. As a result, historical empires were reconsidered as imperial formations characterized by asymmetries of power, pluricentric in terms of sources, and multidirectional in terms of projections. It became common to oppose imperial formations as mechanisms managing human diversity toward the normative monoculturalism of nation-states. New histories of imperial formations highlighted the situation of the middle ground and the role of intermediary social groups, hitherto overshadowed by stories of government institutions and supreme power. History was becoming more diverse and multifaceted – until this trend, suddenly upended, faced a massive backlash against what was perceived as giving the imperial past a pass on its multiple injustices.
The discontent built up for many years and exploded at the turn of the 2020s against the backdrop of the #MeToo and BLM movements, and was further reinforced by the disruption of the established international balance by Russia’s open invasion of Ukraine, Israel’s massive response to the horrific October 7 attack from Gaza, and most recently by the foreign policies of the Trump administration in America. Public intellectuals and many professional historians directly translate the modern-day political rhetoric of decolonizing into a harsh criticism of imperial formations of the past as if they were adversarial forces active today, interpreting any complexity in their analysis as attempts to whitewash imperial evil. Reproducing the tropes of the bygone period of anti-colonial struggle, modern critics speak of homogeneous “empires” and “colonies” locked in unequivocal relations of domination and oppression. One would expect to find such blatantly simplified accusations in popular literature or political pamphlets penned before the imperial turn that exposed the complexity of imperial formations – not immediately in its wake. Or at least it could be expected that the body of knowledge produced by various revisionist imperial histories would serve as an effective argument against these accusations. Paradoxically, no scholarly arguments seem to hold authority against the old-new anti-imperial, often conflated with anti-colonial rhetoric that dismisses them as made in bad faith.
The fact that imperial-turn scholarship is rebuked by arguments of moral nature rather than by alternative scholarly interpretations may hold clues to the roots of this conflict. Hardly any scholar of empire would excuse or support oppression and injustice committed by imperial regimes many decades or centuries ago. However, as soon as scholars start attributing some innate “imperial” qualities to an imperial formation, they transform it into an entity with an identity of its own and hence with stable moral qualities. This is facilitated by many historians of empires sharing methodological nationalism and taking the theater of identities at face value. To them, the normalization of diversity in imperial polities meant a readjustment of the old script of identity politics. Instead of ruthless oppressors, the imperial elites were now assigned new roles as custodians of diversity or champions of development and progress. Once again, certain systemic characteristics were interpreted as moral qualities embodied by rearranged identities.
There is no contradiction, at least from the point of view of historical actors, if the same person commits injustice while wishing the best or imposes oppression in the name of progress. The same social institutions can have an even more divergent effect on different groups of the population in different situations. But these mundane facts can be reconciled and logically presented in a historical narrative only if that narrative persistently models society as an open system with no single authoritative frame of reference or all-abiding cultural and moral standards. The imperial turn facilitated this intellectual operation only because “empires” provided historians with the easiest cases for registering social complexity. Outside this broader concern with historians’ own analytical positionality vis-à-vis their objects of study, nothing in empires was self-evident or substantially different from other political forms. Empire studies for the sake of empires led to their exoticization and idealization, producing at best a peculiar tradition of “imperiology.”
A historical inquiry into society as an open system is driven by the study of primary sources and historiography as much as by the historian’s inquiry into their own positionality: What potential blind spots, informed by the author’s cultural patterns, gender, or class, might affect this study and how can these be mitigated by asking additional questions of primary and secondary sources? How might political views and personal preferences bias interpretation? While it may not fully compensate for potential distortions, a constant practice of self-inquiry along these lines prompts historians to define and explore new perspectives on the subject.
The exploration of the positionalities of both historians and their historical protagonists – including the study of their languages of self-description – has been at the core of the new imperial history approach that considers an imperial formation to be merely an example of complex society. Studying empires as “things” endowed with stable qualities and populated by groups with assigned identities inevitably leads to supplanting analysis by moralizing, especially in the modern climate of culture wars. Some scholars find it possible to go beyond explaining the mechanisms of imperial formations to vindicating empires for their record of diversity management or modernizing efforts. Still other historians, concerned with appearing on the wrong side of history if they pursue the original course of impartial scholarship, preemptively assume an accusatory stance toward empire.
Historical scholarship is not above moral judgment – it is just that the primary task of professional historians is different. More importantly, identity-based moralizing is no substitute for critical awareness of one’s positionality. Methodologically, it is a wrong answer to the real problem presented by the study of complex societies as open systems, where the position of the observer is never static but constantly shifts to present multiple perspectives associated with different historical actors. These often conflicting perspectives need to be synthesized in a coherent narrative, without streamlining hierarchies and complexities, while also critically addressing the historian’s own positionality. The current climate of culture wars driven by identity politics further disincentivizes many historians from pursuing this uneasy path.
The scheme outlined above might seem to be abstract theorizing until one reads the forum “Studying Imperial Formations at the Time of Culture Wars” in the “Methodology and Theory” section of this issue of Ab Imperio. Densely populated by historiographic references and empirical examples, the five contributions to the forum discuss the predicament of historians of imperial formations in the current intellectual and political climate. The forum opens with Alexander Morrison’s critical review of Alan Lester’s edited collection The Truth About Empire: Real Histories of British Colonialism (2024), which frames the discussion within the broader context of debates surrounding Nigel Biggar’s “Ethics and Empire” collective research project.^[3] It is no mere coincidence that it was the late 2010s when the Oxford professor Nigel Biggar launched a collaborative project to elaborate a permanent ethical assessment of the British Empire’s historical record, which he found to be overall positive. What is even more telling is that in response to this initiative by the professor of moral and pastoral theology at the University of Oxford, who is expected to tackle ethical problems, a broad coalition of professional historians of the British Empire produced an edited volume that advanced the opposite – vehemently negative – moral assessment of it. Despite the historical accuracy of the arguments for and against, which Morrison carefully assesses, only a homogeneous subject is expected to possess a permanent moral character or an “identity.” Evidently, several decades of painstaking reconstruction of the British Empire as a complex system, sustained and dismantled through the interaction of numerous social actors possessing varying degrees of historical agency, have been reduced to a drama of identity politics.
Krishan Kumar’s contribution to the forum focuses mainly on problematizing the claim of moral superiority based on one’s postimperial situation and anti-imperial stance. He notes that most of modern postimperial societies’ achievements are rooted in the imperial past, and that the criticism of empires originated within imperial powers and was an integral part of their functioning. While largely framed in the logic of compiling a balance sheet of imperial legacy, Kumar’s approach also undermines clear-cut structuralist binaries. It is more in sync with prioritizing historically and situationally contextualized and analytically framed inquiry, which is central to the methodology of historical positionality.
Pieter M. Judson even more persistently questions the validity of modern debates regarding the legacy of empires by challenging the traditional dichotomy between “empire” and “nation-state,” particularly in the context of post-Habsburg Central Europe. Judson suggests that the rigid separation of “empire” and “nation-state” as analytical categories obscures significant continuities and shared practices between these forms of political organization. Therefore, he dismisses the identity-based view of the past and any moral generalizations that focus on social structures instead of actions.
The intellectual and political climate in American academe mirrors that of Europe, though the understanding of “empireness” has historically focused on American foreign policy rather than the dynamics of America’s diverse society. Tim Roberts examines the evolving discourse surrounding American imperialism, tracing its historical rationalizations and critiques from the late nineteenth century through the present day. He highlights the tension between American exceptionalism, which often denies or justifies imperial actions, and counterarguments that emphasize parallels with other empires.
The forum concludes with Caterina Scalvedi’s reflections on the challenges and possibilities inherent in the historian’s craft when studying colonial rule, focusing particularly on Fascist Italy’s empire in Africa. Drawing inspiration from the Nigeran writer Chinua Achebe’s experiences, Scalvedi argues that analyzing colonial history solely through binaries like “colonizer” and “colonized” is uninformative. Instead, she emphasizes the importance of the “middle ground,” highlighting the centrality of the unintended consequences, bargaining, and diverse agencies that existed within colonial societies, demonstrating that power relations were far from unidirectional and fixed. Scalvedi contends that acknowledging this complexity, found in the “great human stories” of historical records, empowers historians to move beyond simplistic moral judgments and develop new, more nuanced paradigms for understanding the past through strategic exercise of the historian’s positionality.
In the “History” section, Zhanibek Akimbek and Saule Uderbaeva tell a “great human story” and offer a full-scale study of a historical protagonist’s evolving positionality, using the example of Boris Trizna (1867–1937). Born to a Ukrainian noble family in Kyiv, Trizna became a military cadet in St. Petersburg, was exiled to serve as a private in Turkestan for his alleged connections with the revolutionary underground and rose through the ranks to become an army captain in a remote garrison. In 1906, he managed to change his career path by becoming a precinct superintendent (uchastkovyi pristav) in the system of military-popular governance that existed in the region, enjoying practically unlimited authority over the “native” population of tens of thousands. After the February Revolution, the former “tsarist official” Trizna was elected to the high Provisional Government post of commissar (governor) of the entire Syr-Darya Region. This service background notwithstanding, he managed to hold positions of authority during the Soviet period, albeit not in the administration but in the spheres of cultural heritage and nature preservation. It is impossible or meaningless to frame Trizna’s life story using social identities approach: the scion of an ancient Ukrainian family with revolutionary connections who becomes a colonial administrator is typical of no “identity,” like the imperial army officer with extensive police functions who turns into a revolutionary commissar contemplating the democratization of local administration. However, integrating Trizna’s various roles through his dynamic positionality in response to changing circumstances, rather than his supposed identity, can logically explain his life trajectory and significantly enhance our understanding of empire and colonialism.
Another article in the section, by Matthias Battis and Börries Kuzmany, challenges the conventional understanding of the early Soviet nationalities policy as primarily territorial, arguing that non-territorial (personal) national autonomy arrangements were a significant and integral aspect of Soviet policy at least until the mid-1920s. Despite theoretically favoring territorial autonomy, the Bolsheviks implemented non-territorial government structures to manage national diversity. These arrangements, often inspired by Austro-Marxist ideas, provided cultural and sometimes material support for specific nationalities regardless of their geographic location. It appears that early Soviet nationalities policy was a pragmatic blend of territorial and personal principles, with non-territorial national autonomy playing a crucial role in the Bolsheviks’ efforts to build a centralized yet diverse state. Therefore, it is at least uninformative to ascribe certain policies to the Soviet regime as supposedly inherent to it, just as to homogenize the variety of locality- and personality-based interactions into identities such as “the Bolsheviks” or “the Soviet project.”
In the “Newest Mythologies” section, Ilya Gerasimov revisits Venedikt Erofeev’s iconic poem Moscow-Petushki (1969–1970) through the double lens of its aesthetic, theological, and political polemic with Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita and Julia Vaingurt’s reading of Erofeev as an embodiment of the “weakness” trope in late Soviet culture. The author argues that Erofeev rejected Bulgakov’s elitism and Faustian modernist ideal of heroic action. However, the acceptance of weakness as intrinsic to human nature is only one aspect of Erofeev’s complex worldview. The key to this worldview is the understanding of an individual as endowed with a multifaceted personality irreducible to any rigid set of qualities or single social identity, as exemplified by the poem’s main protagonist, Venichka. Gerasimov suggests that Erofeev created this protagonist using the trope of Ahasver – the Wandering Jew – emphasizing his role as a timeless witness to supreme truth rather than a Christlike figure. His life takes a tragic turn when the open future suddenly closes, collapsing into endless repetition under a new disguise. Gerasimov defines the postmodern condition as this radical change of cultural temporality defying modernity’s futurism, evolutionism, and progressivism. Experiencing time as standing still, the culture of the postmodern era imagines the future as no longer offering a distinct alternative to the present. Unlike modernist culture, which interprets social diversity as a product of varying levels of historical progress, postmodernism understands it as inherent, fixed identities. Erofeev’s poem transcends a simple dichotomy of power and weakness as stable identities, instead exploring the possibility of finding personal freedom and the meaning of life in an era when modernist ideals have become obsolete. Erofeev’s poem is read today as a gospel of self-reflective positionality – of the author and their protagonist – that outlines an escape from the tedious identity theater with its tendency to unquestionable moral superiority.