SOS4democracy – Social sciences for democracy: A training program for improving research on illiberal systems and finding ways to build more robust democracies
ABOUT THE PROJECT
The turn to illiberalism, often combined with populist anti-European Union rhetoric, represents a serious threat to the future development of the European community. Although most of the recent research on illiberal politics focused on Poland and Hungary, we have seen how illiberal trends emerged in many other countries, including Slovenia, Italy, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Turkey.
Despite the persistent presence of illiberal practices, there is still limited research capacity to address these issues in South-Eastern Europe. The main reasons for the limited research on illiberal trends are the lack of institutional support for new interdisciplinary research programs for studying illiberalism, the lack of support for intersectoral cooperation to include the non-academic sector in research, and the lack of training programs to better equip staff members from the academic and non-academic sector for conducting research on illiberalism.
The project “Social Sciences for Democracy: A training program to improve research on illiberal systems and find ways to build more robust democracies” aims to create an alliance of research and higher education institutions, civil society associations and media organizations to strengthen scientific research on the recent turn to authoritarian systems in South-Eastern Europe. In addition, the project will develop a new training program that will strengthen the critical research of the recent turn to authoritarian systems. This four-year project is coordinated by Vasja Badalič.
Ten project partners from five countries will participate in the project: Institute of Criminology, Newspaper publishing house Delo (Slovenia), Roma Tre University, Libera – Associations, names, and numbers against mafias (Italy), Vrije University Brussels (Belgium), IstanPol – Institute for political science studies in Istanbul, Boğaziçi University, Özyeğin University (Turkey), and the University of Sarajevo, Association of Citizens Why not? (Bosnia and Herzegovina).
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 101119678.
For more info about visit the website https://www.sos4democracy.eu/
Project duration: 1.9.2023 – 31.8.2027
