Introduction
Since it was launched, economic sociology. perspectives and conversations (or, as it used to be known, economic sociology_the european electronic newsletter) has combined a focus on global topics, such as financialization, inequality, and climate change, with attention to important topics related to specific regions, such as the future of the euro, capitalism in Latin America, or economic sociology in Asia. Over the years, the local topics discussed have covered much of the globe. This issue focuses on Central and Eastern Europe, a region already discussed before in this publication. In 2007, Nina Bandelj edited the issue “Economic Sociology of Postsocialist Transformations.” At the time, the change from state socialism to capitalism was the central topic of economic sociology in this region. After 1989, the notion of postsocialism provided scholars with what, following Andrew Abbott, can be called a “generational paradigm” (Abbott 2001, 23–25), which shaped much of economic sociology from the region for more than two decades. Since the issue edited by Nina Bandelj was published, this interest in postsocialist transformation has been gradually fading, as many economic sociologists from the region have moved on to other topics, such as consumption, credit, housing, digital platforms, or illiberal backlash and the rise of populism. Originally, this issue was supposed to spotlight this development or, to put it differently, to look at economic sociology after postsocialist transformations. But the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the horrors of the war changed those plans. Instead of looking more broadly at the recent developments of economic sociology in Central and Eastern Europe, this issue focuses on the war in Ukraine and its impact on the region and beyond. The impact of the war is, of course, mainly on and within Ukraine. But the war has also greatly impacted Russia, if only as a result of the extended economic sanctions. And the war economic sociology. perspectives and conversations Volume 24 · Number 2 · March 2023 2 Economic sociology in times of war by Marcin Serafin is also widely felt in other countries of the region, which are in the position of having an armed conflict take place so close to their borders. The consequences of the war, however, also reach outside the region, as the war in Ukraine is not only a historical event, in the full theoretical sense of the term (Sewell 2005), but also a global one.
