Call for Papers

The Institute of National Remembrance in Krakow invites you to participate in the academic conference “Beyond the rules, beyond duty, beyond the law. Everyday life, informal practices, and the non-professional lives of Security Service officers in the years 1956-1990.” („Poza regulaminem, poza służbą, poza prawem. Codzienność, praktyki nieformalne i życie pozazawodowe funkcjonariuszy SB funkcjonariuszy SB w latach 1956-1990”)

Security Service officers were part of the communist state's apparatus of repression, which has been relatively well researched and understood. Thanks to the exhibition “Faces of the Security Service” (“Twarze bezpieki”) and subsequent monographs, basic facts about the careers of rank-and-file officers and the managerial elite have been identified: names, promotions, and positions. We know what rules and normative documents defined their operational work. We also know the ideological, moral, and ethical expectations that were officially placed on Security Service officers. This body of knowledge, partly biographical and partly concerning the organization and formal aspects of their work, is undoubtedly considerable. At the same time, however, it is rather poor in terms of showing real people in a specific, living social environment. We want to look at the practical mode of operation of an officer who had to make various decisions, who was sometimes negligent or overzealous, frustrated or excited. We would like to shed light on the complex organizational environment, which mixed veterans with novices and sent officers signals of efficiency, ideology, and bureaucracy at the same time.

We also want to see SB officers outside their basic professional context: their family and social circles, their careers as activists and community leaders, and their professional paths after leaving the service.

Examples of research topics therefore include areas such as:

– informal practices of Security Service officers related to operational activities; discrepancies between regulations and practice; cases of false, uncertain, or superficial registration of secret collaborators;

– abuses in SB reporting: falsification of statistics, manipulation of statistics and performance indicators; maintaining “dead souls” and “dead cases” in operational records;

– contacts between officers and the underworld and criminal world; criminality of officers;

– factors contributing to the success or failure of officers’ careers; nepotism and clientelism within the ministry;

– SB operating styles and organizational culture; SB practices emerging from SB archival documents and the activities of the prosecutor's office and the IPN vetting department;

– social roles of officers outside of service: family members, party, social, and sports activists;

– social and professional roles of former officials in the Polish People's Republic and after the political transformation, organizations, professions, and areas of public life attracting former officials; former Security Service officials as midwives and guides to the world of communist-era licensed capitalism.

We are interested in analyses, case studies, and other forms of research rooted in historiography, archival science, sociology, social psychology, and cultural anthropology. We are interested in specific officers and environments, but also in structures, styles of operation, organizational philosophies, and the functioning of bureaucracy in the secret police.

We leave outside the scope of our considerations media and pop-culture images of SB officers related to the fields outlined above.

As organizers, we reserve the right to select papers from among the submitted proposals.

Conference date: May 21-22, 2026.

Conference venue: Branch of the Institute of National Remembrance in Krakow, ul. Stefana Czarnieckiego 3, 30-536 Krakow

Application deadline: March 20, 2026.

Please send electronic submissions to:

Dr. habil. Daniel Wicenty, email: daniel.wicenty@ipn.gov.pl; tel. (58) 668 49 13

We will send information about accepted papers by March 31, 2026.

The papers presented will be published in a special thematic volume of “Aparat Represji w Polsce Ludowej 1944–1989” (a peer-reviewed journal indexed by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education), so we ask speakers to submit their academic articles (approx. 1 publishing sheet in length, format in accordance with the IPN publishing guidelines) by June 20, 2026.

The organizers do not anticipate a conference fee.

The call for articles for No. 24 (2026) is ongoing

We invite researchers to send to the editor's address articles describing various aspects of the functioning of the repression apparatus in People's Poland and the Eastern Bloc countries.
Among other things, we are waiting for biographical articles on officers of the repression apparatus, editions of sources, articles describing the state of research on the security services in Poland and Eastern Bloc countries, and reviews of publications devoted to this subject. The Varia section will publish interesting syntheses, analyses and case studies. According to the current scoring system of the Ministry of Education and Science, 40 points are awarded for publication in our journal.
Editorial address: redakcja.arwpl@ipn.gov.pl