Date: 22-23 October 2025 | Location: Tirana, Albania

The Institute for the Study of Communist Crimes and Consequences in Albania (ISKK), in cooperation with the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile (IICCMER), invites proposals for a scientific conference on “Power and Control of Society in Communist Regimes.” This event will bring together scholars from a variety of disciplines to examine how communist parties seized and maintained power—and why, despite pervasive social control, these regimes eventually collapsed.

Goals and Objectives

  • Analyze the relationship between political authority and mechanisms of societal control from the establishment of communist regimes through their demise.
  • Compare practices across different countries of Eastern Europe and beyond.
  • Discuss how instruments of control—both violent and non-violent—shaped everyday life under communism.
  • Foster interdisciplinary dialogue and future research collaborations.

Conference Format

  • Thematic Sessions: Each session will focus on one aspect of power and control.
  • Presentations & Panels: Individual papers (20 minutes each) followed by round-table discussions.
  • Networking Opportunities: Coffee breaks and receptions to encourage informal exchanges.

Confirmed Session Topics

  1. Seizure of Power: Party structures, revolutionary tactics, and the elimination of political rivals.
  2. Institutional Instrumentalization: How traditional bodies (courts, local councils, professional associations) were repurposed for regime control.
  3. Economic Organization: Control of property, labor allocation, and resource distribution as tools of social discipline.
  4. Propaganda and the Arts: The use of press, literature, film, and fine arts to manufacture consent and enforce ideology.
  5. Repressive Apparatus: Political police, intelligence services, show trials, and the judicial system.
  6. Education and Youth Mobilization: Schools, youth leagues, and the indoctrination of new generations.Reasons for Collapse: Internal contradictions, popular resistance, international pressures, and reform movements.
  7. Surveillance Technologies & Archiving: The role of wiretapping, informers, secret archives, and modern efforts to digitize surveillance records.
  8. Ethnicity, National Minorities, and Border Regions: How regimes managed—or weaponized—ethnic identities.
  9. Dissent and Resistance: Samizdat publications, underground art, strikes, and spontaneous revolts.
  10. International Dimensions: Comintern influence, Soviet advisers abroad, and the export of control models to client states.
  11. Memory, Monuments, and Museums: Post-communist debates over memorialization and reinterpretation of the past.

Call for Papers

We welcome 300-word abstracts and a short CV from researchers in history, political science, sociology, cultural studies, law, and related fields. Submissions should offer original data, comparative perspectives, or novel theoretical insights into power and social control under communist rule.

Abstract deadline: 20 August 2025
Send to: info@iskk.gov.al  and office@iiccmer.ro

Selected papers will be published in a co-edited volume, which aims to become a lasting reference for scholars of totalitarian regimes.

We look forward to your contributions and to advancing our collective understanding of how totalitarian systems govern—and why they unravel.