The Making of Solidarity: A Conference on Eastern and Central European Dissidents, 1945-1991 A close reading of Ivan Dziuba’s classic 1965 essay Internationalism or Russification? offers a useful lens through which to understand a distinctive feature of Russian colonialism: its operation not only through discrimination and coercion, but also through the language of brotherhood. Written from within the Soviet system, this insight anticipated questions that postcolonial theory would not fully engage with for decades. It also serves as a reminder that Eastern and Central European intellectuals were thinking rigorously about imperial power long before postcolonial frameworks entered broader academic discussions of the region. The Making of Solidarity takes this intellectual tradition as its point of departure — not merely as historical background, but as a body of thought that continues to illuminate the present. To do so demands a particular approach to history: one that treats dissident thinking as a form of knowledge production in its own right, and that attends carefully to how the memory of dissidence has itself been shaped — which figures have been canonized, which forgotten, and by what institutional, political, and cultural processes those selections have been made.. Open Call Details: https://berlin.instytutpileckiego.pl/de/events/the-making-of-solidarity-a-conference-on-eastern-and-central Proposal deadline: 31 August 2026 Send proposals to: conference@pileckiinstitut.de