Major Research Activities of the Chair
1) Whose Norms? Domestic Contestation and Patterns of Norm Diffusion in the European Neighbourhood (with Dr. Assem Dandashly, Maastricht University)
This project examines the normative rivalry between the EU and other regional actors and how it plays out at the domestic level in the societies of the European neighbourhood. It aims at: 1) examining the competing norms of political authority of both the EU and of non-EU actors in the eastern and the southern European neighbourhoods; 2) investigating societal and elite reactions to externally promoted political norms in the neighbourhood; and 3) making a cross-regional comparison of the degree of traction that externally promoted political ideas have in the societies of the two neighbourhoods. Read more about the project here: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/fdem20/29/3.
2) Revisiting the Democratisation and the de-democratisation of Eastern Europe
This project examines the initial push towards liberal democracy in Eastern Europe in the 1990s and early 2000s and the push back against it thereafter, leaving place to a deepening authoritarian trend characterised by weakened judicial independence, restrained media freedom, curtailed civil liberties, eroded checks on government and politically divided societies. The project places the societal norms of legitimate political authority at the centre of scientific enquiry and enquires into how they have evolved over the period since the collapse of communism and shaped the political trends in three groups of Eastern European countries – the EU member states from East Central Europe, the EU accession countries from the Western Balkans and the non-candidate former Soviet republics from the eastern neighbourhood.