1989 in the East: Between Order and Subversion

Pascal Bonnard is a political scientist and associate professor at Jean Monnet University of Saint-Etienne (France). He has worked on the politicisation of ethnicity and of memory in the post-Soviet space and on the circulation of norms at the margins of Europe. His current research topics include the workers from the Eastern Bloc (teachers, engineers, doctors) in the Arab countries during the Cold War and the reorganisation of the French administration in Algeria after the country’s independence.

Carole Sigman is a senior research fellow at the French National Centre of Scientific Research (CNRS) and a member of the Centre for Russian, Caucasian, Eastern European and Central Asian Studies (CERCEC, CNRS/EHESS). As a political scientist, she focuses on the authoritarian systems and their transformations. She first studied the disintegration of the Soviet system through the history of the Moscow ’informal’ political clubs during perestroika, and is now exploring the contemporary Russian authoritarian regime by focusing on the transformations and reforms of the university system.