Current projects

Contexts of Violent Extremism in MENA and Balkan Societies (CONNEKT)

Funding body: EU
Programme: H2020 - SC6 - GOVERNANCE - 2019
Duration: 2020 - 2023
Researchers involved CSEES: Univ.-Prof. Dr.phil. David Florian Bieber, MSc Lura Pollozhani

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Active citizenship: promoting and advancing innovative democratic practices in the Western Balkans (ACT.WB)

Funding body: EU
Programme: Erasmus+, Jean Monnet Network
Duration: 2018 - 2022
Researchers involved CSEES: Univ.-Prof. Dr.phil. David Florian Bieber, Dr.phil. M.A. Armina Galijas, M.E.S. Dr.iur. Marko Kmezić

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The Testimonies of State Repression: Experiences of Imprisonment, Dismissal and Social Exclusion. Narratives of Kosovar educators, students and artists between 1989 and 1999 (Heras+)

Funded by: HERAS+ Higher Education, Research and Applied Science Plus (Kosovo), (Austrian Development Agency)
Duration: 2021 - 2022
Researchers involved CSEES: Univ.-Prof. Dr.phil. David Florian Bieber

Project information:

The project is coordinated by CSEES and, together with the University of Prishtina (Vjollca Krasniqi) and Dr Ana Devic (Serbia), aims to investigate the hitherto little-researched history and social and political impact of occupational exclusion among Kosovo Albanian university lecturers, students and artists from the early 1980s onwards.

Women's and gender history in Southeast Europe in the 20th century

Funding body: Elisabeth List Fellowship Programme
Duration: 2022 - 2023
Researchers involved CSEES: Rory Archer, Drivalda Delia, Rachel Trode, Chiara Bonfiglioli

Project information:

The Elisabeth List Fellowship Programme for Gender Research has been awarded to Dr Chiara Bonfiglioli (University College Cork) and Dr Rory Archer (University of Graz). They will work on the project "Women's and Gender History in Southeast Europe in the 20th Century: Oral History, Ethnographic and Biographical Approaches as a Way to Promote Intersectionality' supported by two Junior Fellows, Drivalda Delia (University of Regensburg) and Rachel Trode (EUI Florence).

Gender and women's history in Southeast Europe has received considerable interest in the last two decades, especially when it comes to the history of women's participation in inter-war religious associations, anti-fascist resistance movements, state socialist women's organisations, the second feminist wave and peace movements during the Yugoslav wars. Recent studies have also examined the interactions between gender and women's history, social history and labour history. However, despite these scholarly advances in the field, gender is still often treated in isolation and not in its intersection with other factors of social differentiation, even though intersectionality is well established as a theory and method in both the social sciences and the humanities. When it comes to the application of intersectional, postsocialist and postcolonial approaches, women's and gender history does not seem to keep up, even though there are several philosophical and political debates in the field of women's and gender studies in the region, both on intersectionality and on the need to combine postsocialist and postcolonial studies.

The project will emphasise how oral history, ethnographic and biographical approaches can help us to challenge simplistic understandings of gendered transformations during the socialist period and its aftermath and to integrate ongoing debates on intersectional, postsocialist and postcolonial approaches and interpretations into women's and gender history in Southeast Europe.

Further information: Project_description_01.03.2023.pdf (uni-graz.at)

Research Advisory Group on the Western Balkans: Balkans in Europe Policy Advisory Group (BiEPAG)

Funding body: European Funds for the Balkans
Period: - 2022
Participating researchers CSEES: Univ.-Prof. Dr.phil. David Florian Bieber, M.E.S. Dr.iur. Marko Kmezić
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To the Northwest! Intra-Yugoslav Albanian migration (1953-1989)

Funding body: FWF
Period: 2020 - 2023
Researchers involved CSEES: Univ.-Prof. Dr phil. MA Rory Archer, MA Mladen Zobec
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Jean Monnet Chair in the Europeanisation of Southeastern Europe (SEEinEU)

Funding body: EU
Programme: Erasmus+, Jean Monnet Chair
Period: 2019 - 2022
Researchers involved CSEES: Univ.-Prof. Dr.phil. David Florian Bieber

CareWork - Female Paid Domestic Care Work: A Node of Social Reproduction

Funding body: EU
Programme: H2020 - Marie S. Curie Individual Fellowship
Period: 2021 - 2023
Researchers involved CSEES: Dr Nejra-Nuna Čengić, Univ.-Prof. Dr.phil. David Florian Bieber (supervisor)

CareWork is an anthropological study on women's paid domestic care work for children and elderly people in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). Motivated by the worldwide undervaluation of this essential activity as real work and by recent global changes in its organisation, the research goes beyond the almost exclusively anthropological theorisation of care within kinship studies. Building on (socialist) feminist scholarly traditions on domestic labour that place care at the centre of political economy, CareWork examines women's informal paid domestic care work as a socially productive and reproductive relational activity in a dialectical relationship with broader social changes in BiH and beyond. To complement current research and fill gaps, it uses an innovative methodology: it tracks care work through 'care clusters' (different households differently affected by it) and focuses on two linked sites - Sarajevo (main site) and Austria (auxiliary site, a nearby top destination for labour migration of care workers from BiH) - to reconstruct the dynamics and dialectics of such work. This ethnographic study revolves around the following questions: a) How is this care work organised? b) How is it shaped in the light of Europeanisation processes in relation to broader social processes (e.g. reconfigurations of work and social security, of ethnonational relations, of migration patterns)? c) What effects/changes does this care work entail for the various parties involved? Global changes are particularly visible in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as the country has been characterised by numerous formal - post-war, post-socialist, Europeanising - transformations over the last 25 years. CareWork traces how social transformations converge in care work, affirms care as a central category of anthropological theory, and shows how social scientists can productively use it as a prism to study social transformations, as a deeply gendered nexus of social reproduction with regressive and emancipatory potential.

SPATIALITIES OF EUROPEANISATION IN THE WESTERN BALKANS (EURoWEB)

Funding body: EU
Programme: H2020 - Marie S. Curie Individual Fellowship
Period: 2021 - 2023
Participating researchers CSEES: PhD Ana Pajvančić-Cizelj, Univ.-Prof. Dr.phil. David Florian Bieber (Supervisor)

The researcher will conduct a EURoWEB to investigate how the Europeanisation of the Western Balkans (WB) manifests itself at under-researched socio-spatial levels. By introducing an innovative TPSN (Territory, Place, Scale, Network) framework into Europeanisation studies, testing it in a WB region with the 'gender lens' and developing a new methodological tool, the project will explore how territory, place, scale and network interact to enable or hinder the Europeanisation of the WB. Starting from the critical and horizontal conception of Europeanisation, the Europeanisation of the WB will be analysed by focusing on the exchange, transmission and mutations of EU urban policies through inter-urban networks (IUN). The researcher will collect qualitative and quantitative data on the participation of urban actors from Zagreb (Croatia), Belgrade (Serbia) and Pristina (Kosovo) in the selected European IUNs and conduct a social network analysis (SNA) and a qualitative network analysis (QNA) to capture not only the impact of the networks but also their interplay with other socio-spatial dimensions in which they are embedded. This will allow her to sketch the contours and explain the underlying, invisible and under-theorised but effective spatialities that underlie the dynamic process of Europeanisation of WB. The fellowship offers a unique opportunity to bridge the significant gaps between socio-spatial theorising and Europeanisation studies. Building on the fruitful exchange between the researcher's expertise in urban sociology and the host institution's and supervisor's expertise in South East European Studies/Europeanisation, the overall aim of the fellowship is to develop a new socio-spatial concept of Europeanisation and a new methodology that can be used in further Europeanisation research within and outside the EU as well as in further empirical testing of the TPSN.

Revisiting Europeanisation in Southeast Europe. An Historical and Sociological Approach of Norm-Diffusion (RESEE)

Funding body: EU
Programme: H2020 - Marie S. Curie Individual Fellowship
Period: 2020 - 2022
Participating researchers CSEES: Ph.D Dorian Jano, Univ.-Prof. Dr.phil. David Florian Bieber (Supervisor)

The future of Europe will depend crucially on its ability to transform and unite the continent. Southeast Europe, with its complex historical developments and its own particular Europeanisation, is considered difficult to Europeanise. However, the Europeanisation of South Eastern Europe has a much longer history, dating back to the 19th century and earlier. The main aim of the RESEE project is to establish Europeanisation research on Southeast Europe as a complex, historically grounded process, firstly by developing a meaningful narrative integration of the prevailing knowledge on the historical dimension of the Europeanisation of Southeast Europe; secondly, by discussing the usefulness of Europeanisation and the related process through historical examples of how Europe has influenced Southeast Europe and vice versa; and thirdly, by tracing the process, we create an explanatory model that maps the events and actors, the causal mechanisms and factors that interact when a specific historical Europeanisation process unfolds in Southeast Europe. RESEE is an innovative project that examines a long and much-discussed "periphery of European otherness" and contributes to rethinking the region in a reflexive way that makes it meaningful and useful in the current EU policy project on European integration. The main academic outputs of RESEE include a living review of the literature, a course proposal and workshop on the historical dimension of the Europeanisation of Southeast Europe, a policy paper on best practices of successful historical cases of the Europeanisation of Southeast Europe, and a range of other dissemination and communication activities. These outputs will attract the attention of academics, policy makers and also European society as they are a valuable source of scientific knowledge; they show high policy relevance for practitioners and are of societal importance, especially for improving citizens' perception of South East Europe and European integration.

Normalising a Difficult Past? Cultural trauma and collective memory in Austria and Croatia (CULTRAMACY)

Funding body: EU
Programme: H2020 - Marie S. Curie Individual Fellowship
Period: 2019 - 2022
Participating researchers CSEES: PhD Ana Ljubojevic, Univ.-Prof. Dr.phil. David Florian Bieber (Supervisor)

This project follows the theoretical framework of cultural trauma and aims to analyse the impact of trauma on the collective memory of the wars in Austria and Croatia and the social processes through which this memory is created, performed and maintained. More specifically, the dynamics of two corresponding forces will be explained: cultural trauma as a reaction to a rupture in the social fabric and collective memory as a unifying element for group identity. The CULTRAMACY project draws on methods of quantitative and qualitative analysis and uses the methodological tool of framework analysis. In order to analyse the impact of trauma on collective memory, this comparative study pursues the following specific objectives: 1) impact of trauma on collective and individual as well as cultural and public memory, 2) journeys of memory through time and space - intergenerational and transcultural transmission of memory, 3) analysis of patterns of European memory. This research is located at the interface of the academic fields of memory research, social theory and political science. It aims to contribute to academic research on three different levels. Firstly, it contributes to the theoretical debates in memory research by looking at collective memory from the perspective of cultural trauma. Secondly, it offers a truly comparative perspective outside of methodological regionalism, while still recognising the nation as an important framework or 'yardstick' of collective memory. Finally, this research traces the journeys of memory across borders and generations to provide some innovative insights into similar phenomena in an increasingly globalised world experiencing migratory flows. Therefore, the CULTRAMACY project aims to map a critical engagement with negative heritage, transcending boundaries of national memories and revisiting the foundations of the transcultural sphere of European memory.

State disintegration in the context of macroeconomic crisis - the case of Yugoslavia (DISMAC-Y)

Funding body: EU
Programme: H2020 - Marie S. Curie Individual Fellowship
Period: 2019 - 2022
Researchers involved CSEES: Dr Ana Podvrsic, Univ.-Prof. Dr.phil. David Florian Bieber (Supervisor)

The financial and economic crisis in the Eurozone, Brexit, the rise of Euroscepticism, nationalist voices and populism, and the decline in public support for the European Union (EU) have put concerns about European (dis)integration and the prospects of the Eurozone high on the political agenda and in academic discussions. DISMAC-Y places itself at the centre of these concerns and proposes to draw lessons from the process of political disintegration of Yugoslavia. This historicisation of the European experience through a case study of a country known for its federalist state structures, complex multi-scalar governance and uneven regional development is a highly innovative research project that fills the 'blind spots' of political economy and comparativists in existing research on the disintegration of Yugoslavia. The restructuring of the Yugoslav monetary system is seen as the starting point of the research, which builds on newly available material resources and builds on an original framework to examine disintegrative interactions between different actors and sectors of the Yugoslav economy from a historical-political-economic perspective. DISMAC-Y provides a systematic examination of the political and economic role of the monetary system in times of macroeconomic crisis and makes the Yugoslav experience analytically comparable to other similar experiences of political (dis)integration, especially the European one. In doing so, it significantly pushes the existing boundaries of Yugoslavia research and deepens our understanding of European integration and monetary experiences.

Research Project: Elastic Borders - Rethinking the Borders of the 21st Century

Funding body: Nomis Foundation
Period: 2022 -2026
Researchers involved CSEES:

Prof Bilgin Ayata

Dr Laura Jung

Dr Chiara Pagano

Phd Candidates: M.A. Artemis Fyssa, Mag. Dott. Mirco Buoso

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