Transition/Transformation and Crisis
Transition/Transformation and Crisis

Investigating Southeast European Societies Through Conceptual Expedients

Summary/Abstract: This article critically discusses a number of concepts such as transition, transformation and the more recent one of crisis used in the grand narratives of social sciences (anthropology and sociology in particular) to analyse the changes that occurred over the last twenty-five years in Eastern Europe and in Southeastern Europe in particular. The article points out some of the methodological weaknesses of these grand narratives that are due in the first place to a far too limited horizon in terms of time. The longue durée perspective proposed by historian Fernand Braudel, instead, brings to the fore the specific persistence in change of phenomena such as the citizens’ enduring mistrust towards the public sphere (state, civil society, politics etc.) and the centuries-long reproduction of power and domination relations between hegemonic societies and political classes on the one hand (empires, the Soviet Union, national elites and, last but not least, the EU) and the socially subaltern and peripheral strata of southeast Europe’s societies on the other.

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