GUEST EDITORS’ NOTES:

Irena Šumi and Hannah Starman
Institute for Ethnic Studies, Ljubljana

This compilation of eleven short articles is 
the work of the members of the Open 
Society Institute sponsored HESP ReSET 
project entitled Postcolony and 
postsocialism1 contexts in social scientific 
writing and teaching. Our work on the 
project began in August 2003, and will 
continue until the end of September 2006. It 
brings together a group of nineteen junior 
university teachers from ten countries in 
Southeastern Europe (Albania, Bosnia, 
Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosova, Macedonia, 
Romania, Serbia, and Slovenia) and one 
from Moldova, and a group of seven
resource persons from Poland, Slovenia, the 
United Kingdom and the United States. We 
would like to first express our gratitude to 
the editors of the AEER for hosting us, and 
to thank all the contributors for their fine 
work.

The articles present various themes that our 
project members jointly study and debate in 
order to reach critical, and hopefully also 
novel perspectives on how social sciences 
analyze and interpret the realities of life in 
what is commonly categorized as postcolony 
and postsocialism contexts. In doing so, the 
authors featured in this issue of AEER either 
address the re-thinking exercise directly 
(Buchowski, Šumi, Vacarescu, Wildcat) or 
choose to do so through critical 
presentations of their own research. This in 
itself takes quite a span: from war trauma 
and misogyny in post-war Bosnia 

                                                          
1 As a group of scholars, we decided to use the 
noun form of these words wherever possible for 
reasons of analytical correctness: once you name 
something postcolonial or postsocialist, you tag 
it, while e.g. ‘postsocialism context’ refers to a 
political reality that does not necessarily assume 
that phenomena under investigation are per se 
‘postsocialist.’  In other words, the adjective 
form describes the situation as objective whereas 
the noun expresses the distance from such 
objectifying practices.

(Husanović); the rather convulsive state of 
affairs in Romology in Europe and Slovenia 
(Janko-Spreizer); the ideologies of nation 
and its demographic perseverance in 
Slovenia (Knežević-Hočevar); perceptions 
of literary postmodernism in contemporary 
Romania (Mihalache); dilemmas of 
reconciliation of cultural and ethnic 
difference in Macedonia (Muhić); 
philosophical views on Romanian folklore 
and its representations inside and outside the 
Romanian public (Popoveniuc); to 
Antisemitism in the ten new members/
candidate states of the European Union 
(Starman). 

What may not be readily observable from 
the pieces presented is to what degree we 
have, within our project, profited from 
excercising our rather ambitious goal of 
paralleling rather than directly comparing 
two vast (and ever increasing) bodies of 
social scientific production on postcolony 
and postsocialism respectivelly. As we 
wrote in our project’s plan 
(http://www.inv.si/hesp/project.htm),

The production of both post-colony 
and post-socialism social science can 
... be seen as analogous and 
structurally comparable for a number 
of reasons: both base their respective 
problem fields in a singular, global 
political process; both organise their 
perspective, and position their points 
of view, along a clear, although 
differently conceptualised, contrast 
between (Western) metropolises and 
(non-Western) peripheries; both 
employ, and produce, generalisations 
on a global scale.

We hope that the issue provides a pleasant 
and informative read.

Jen
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