Subverting Communism in Romania explores the role of law in everyday life and as a mechanism for social change during early communism in Romania. Mihaela Serban focuses on the regime’s attempts to extinguish private property in housing through housing nationalization and expropriation. This study of early communist law illustrates that law is never just an instrument of state power, particularly over the long term and from a ground up perspective. Even during its most totalitarian phase, communist law enjoyed a certain level of autonomy at the most granular level and consequently was simultaneously a space of state power and resistance to power. The book draws from archives recently made available in Romania, which have opened up new perspectives for understanding a mundane yet crucial part of the modern human experience: one’s home and the institution of private property that often sustains it.

This book examines the economics of everyday life and the Final Solution in Southeastern Europe, specifically the role that the mass confiscation of Jewish property and exclusion of Jews as well as other undesired population groups from the national marketplace in Southeastern Europe played in transforming economic life and social relations. It aims to understand how ordinary people in the region responded as beneficiaries, bystanders, perpetrators, rescuers, and, above all, victims to Aryanization, and how regimes and governments adapted its basic principles to their specific national contexts and ideological and ethnic agendas. Aryanization appeared in some of its most radical, accelerated, and yet idiosyncratic forms in Southeastern Europe, representing a staging post or parallel process on the journey to the Final Solution. At the same time, it represented a modernizing project through which states on the periphery of Hitler’s new Europe could not only catch up with the rest of the continent but also seek to gain legitimacy among their own citizens by using systems of mass robbery to satisfy consumer demand and aspirations of social mobility in economies of want and scarcity. This volume is aimed at scholars and students of the Second World War and European fascism, genocide and occupation politics, Jewish studies, and Southeastern Europe.

Small-scale trade and smuggling are part of everyday life at many borders. These trading activities often compensate for economic shortage that many households are suffering from in consequence of e.g. political transformation processes. Despite of the diversity of transborder small-scale trade and smuggling and their wide dispersion, not only in Europe, their reception within social sciences is relatively low. The contributions shed therefore light on research in geography and neighboured disciplines. On the basis of empirical research findings from borders all over the world, the authors thrive to analyse mechanisms and conditions of the informal activities and to detect parallels and differences of informal economic structures from different perspectives. This book is valuable reading for researchers in geography, sociology, ethnography, and in political science.

The study of law and social movements provides an ideal lens for rethinking fundamental questions about the relationship between law and power. This Research Handbook takes up that challenge, framing a new, more global, dynamic, reflexive, and contextualised phase of social movement studies.

Visual Rhetorics of Communist Romania: Life under the Totalitarian Gaze offers personal accounts and theoretical insight into the Cold War era when little information about life beyond the Iron Curtain could transpire to the West. Adriana Cordali develops a unique visual rhetorical theory for analyzing communist totalitarian propaganda and the resistance to it, and reveals the deliberate, strategic in/visibilities the rhetoric of power engaged in. Building upon the local history, ideology, and politics of the regime imposed after WWII, she identifies propaganda’s rhetorical features, visual tropes, and symbols and examines striking photographs and print materials from Ceaușescu’s regime (1966-1989) and the time of regime change (1989-1990), as well as an award-winning Romanian film that depicts women’s life at the time. Converging visual rhetoric and culture with history and politics, Visual Rhetorics of Communist Romania is a first book of this kind and will interest readers of rhetoric and communication, visual rhetoric, and political discourse in the region.

Capitalist private property in land and buildings – real estate – is the ground of modern cities, materially, politically, and economically. It is foundational to their development and core to much theoretical work on the urban environment. It is also a central, pressing matter of political contestation in contemporary cities. Yet it remains largely without a history. This Element examines the modern city as a propertied space, defining real estate as a technology of (dis)possession and using it to move across scales of analysis, from the local spatiality of particular built spaces to the networks of legal, political, and economic imperatives that constitute property and operate at national and international levels. This combination of territorial embeddedness with more wide-ranging institutional relationships charts a route to an urban history that allows the city to speak as a global agent and artefact without dispensing with the role of states and local circumstance.

Presentations of National Cultures. Fifty-one texts illustrate the evolution of modernism in the east-European region. Essays, articles, poems, or excerpts from longer works offer new opportunities of possible comparisons of the respective national cultures, from the different ideological approaches and finessing projects of how to create the modern state liberal, conservative, socialist and others to the literary and scientific attempts at squaring the circle of individual and collective identities.

Among communist states, Romania is, in several respects, a unique case. Romania has been the only Warsaw Pact member to deviate consistently from Soviet foreign policy norms and, alone within Eastern Europe, to avoid oil imports from the USSR. The leadership of Nicolae Ceausescu since 1965 has, meanwhile, governed through a studious commitment to socio-economic centralization and control often reminiscent of' Stalinist orthodoxy. Intellectual freedom, artistic liberty and workers' rights have changed little relative to Poland, Hungary or the transient Prague Spring. Such international and domestic policy distinctions, as well as a record of impressive industrial growth, necessitate an effort to understand the dynamics of Romania's socio-economic and political life. This volume is meant to delineate trends in political, social and economic life which will constitute dynamic elements for the Romanian system during the 1980s and beyond. Contributors, all scholars with lengthy research experience in Romania, the Balkans and communist states generally, have sought to identify factors likely to be influential during this and ensuing decades. In that sense, this is a "predictive" volume containing not "crystal-ball gazing" but the careful identification and assessment of trends influencing Romanian foreign and domestic policies, economic and political performance, and societal transformations. By suggesting elements crucial to socio-economic and political change in Romania, we hope to make observing this intriguing communist state somewhat less haphazard and more systematic.

The current transformation of many Eastern European societies is impossible to understand without comprehending the intellectual struggles surrounding nationalism in the region. Anthropologist Katherine Verdery shows how the example of Romania suggests that current ethnic tensions come not from a resurrection of pre-Communist Nationalism but from the strengthening of national ideologies under Communist Party rule.