Tomasz Rawski

University of Warsaw | UW · Faculty of Sociology

The article discusses the memory struggle over the genealogy of the Third Polish Republic which took place in the Polish parliament in the late 1990s. This struggle ensued around the National Independence Day and was decisive in establishing the symbolic definition of Polish post-1989 statehood as anti-communist. The article demonstrates how post-S...

Every society is marked by memory gaps. Taking Poland and (East) Germany as examples, we use a social constructivist-poststructuralist approach and conduct focus groups and qualitative interviews to investigate how the communist past is remembered in private everyday discourse and its differentiation from the hegemonic public memory discourse. Both...

The Persistence of National Victimhood: Bosniak Post-War Memory Politics of the Srebrenica Mass Killings This article reveals the origins of the radicalisation of memory politics in Bosnia and Herzegovina after the year 2010. It shows that the radicalisation in the public sphere of Bosnia and Herzegovina was eventually possible due to the long-ter...

Review Essay

The article discusses the emergence and early development of three SouthEast European nationalisms: Macedonian, Montenegrin and Muslim/Bosniak, all of which were born as mass phenomena only in the second half of the 20th century. The author argues that the first three decades of the socialist Yugoslavia (1945-1974) should be considered crucial to t...

Razem z rozwojem dyskursu biurokratycznego coraz większego znaczenia dla nauki nabiera widmo specjalisty bez ducha z Weberowskiego opisu modernizacji – kogoś, kto do perfekcji opanował wąskie, technicznie zdefiniowane obszary ekspertyzy. Rozwój tej logiki, wówczas jeszcze nie wszechmocnej, pozwala właśnie Weberowi bardzo ostro postawić jej problem...

Hierarchies and Boundaries. Structuring the Social in Eastern Europe and the MediterraneanThe article is an introduction to the 8th issue of Colloquia Humanistica. It discusses the concepts of boundaries and hierarchies and their role in structuring the social reality of (semi)peripheral Eastern Europe. The text discusses, on the one hand, the rele...

Book Review: Siniša Malešević (2019). Grounded Nationalisms. Cambridge: Cambridge University PressA review of the latest book by Siniša Malešević, an established theoretician of nationalism. The review not only indicates the main theoretical innovation of this work in relation to his previous works, but also identifies Malešević's twofold theoretic...

This book identifies and examines nationalist strategies of Bosniak nation-building used in the period 1995-2015 by the representatives of the Bosniak nationalist camp – centred around the dominant political parties, the politically involved members of the Islamic Community and the former army officers/war veterans – in memory politics pertaining t...

The article discusses a shift of the paradigm structuring Polish official memory of World War II and the state-socialist period that took place in the post-1989 Polish parliament from antifascist to anticommunist. On the example of the political struggle in parliament over the memory of May 1945 (Victory Day) that occurred on three consecutive majo...

Against Homogeneity. Transcultural and Trans-Lingual Strategies in Cultural Production The key idea of the present volume of Colloquia Humanistica is the struggle against homogeneity. All the papers deal with the problem of homogenous narratives and homogenous practices, which most often falsify the complex reality of the human world. No matter if...

The Empire Strikes Back. Russian National Cinema After 2005 The paper provides critical analysis of the latest wave of Russian national cinema (2005-2013), considered one of key instruments of Vladimir Putin’s nation-building cultural policy. The analysis, focused mostly on historical film and war film, reveals the concept of an ‘imperial nation’...

The chapter concerns the role of cultural politics during and after Yugoslav socialism, as illustrated on the example of Croatia. Falski and Rawski examine the discursive trajectories of two central categories in post-1990 Croatia: “the Croatian nation” and “representative democracy.” The authors trace how they moved from the margins of the sociali...

The paper concerns symbolic politics as an instrument of state-building process. On the example of the struggle for state symbols (the flag and coat-of-arms) of contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina (1991-98), the paper shows wide range of strategies of defining the symbolic core of the state. In this way, two main goals have been achieved: (1) signi...

The main thesis of the paper is that there is a clear tendency to symbolic restoration of social elitism within the latest wave of Polish national cinema (being interpreted in terms of an ideological production that implements the assumptions of the state-led politics of memory). The analysis, based on Polish feature films made after 2006 and embed...

p> Muhamed Filipovic’s apparent alternatives This text is a review essay pertaining to Muhamed Filipovic’s book who are we, Bosniacs? The reviewer first reconstructs the idea of Bosniac identity presented in the book under review, as based on the concept of original multiculturalism. Next he criticises this idea and demonstrates its two basic wee...

This paper investigates the intellectual output of Siniša Maleševic – the British theorist of nationalism and state, so far unknown to the Polish sociology – presented in his three key works. The text not only points to key determinants of Maleševic’s thought, but also identifies the author’s theoretical contribution in the field of contemporary th...

How to Escape? The Trap of the Transition in the Recent Cinema of Bosnia and Herzegovina (2000-2012)The paper concerns the latest cinema of Bosnia and Herzegovina (2000-2012). Focusing on the cinema of social criticism (represented by movies which try to rethink the new socio-political order gradually emerging in BiH after the war of 1992-95), the...

The Russian Cinema of the DissolutionThe paper takes the issue of Russian reckoning cinema after 1989. This current can be defined as comprising the films which try to lay the foundations of a new narrative about the Soviet Union (alternative to the dominant narrative). The authors reflect on the specificity of the filmmakers’ critical attitude tow...

Artykuł podejmuje problematykę przemilczeń w narracjach biograficznych funkcjonariuszy aparatu władzy PRL. Stanowi studium strategii unikania opowieści o okresie Polski Ludowej, a jego podstawą jest czternastogodzinny wywiad narracyjny z emerytowanym pułkownikiem Ludowego Wojska Polskiego. Autor proponuje kontinuum strategii unikania, które rozciąg...

Miejsce pamięci to kategoria użyteczna w analizie dyskursu i dzięki temu można ją zastosować w badaniach debaty publicznej. Przykład chorwacki pokazuje, w jaki sposób pojęcia związane z ważnymi historycznie lokalizacjami, stają się symbolami postaw i wyborów politycznych. Są one nie tylko referentami, ale uruchamiają całą sieć powiązań semantycznyc...