Индивидуални проекти

The project explores international institutions that are deliberately designed not to produce any policy output. Certain multilateral agreements and permanent organizations are deprived of capacity for policy development or implementation. Examples include the UN Forum on Forests and the Copenhagen Accord. Such institutions can be an obstacle to cooperation and prevent governance by legitimizing collective inaction. Empty institutions serve two political purposes: they hide the failure of international negotiations and neutralize public calls for genuine policy. Research is based on direct participatory observation of twenty-nine rounds of international environmental negotiations between 1999 and 2015 and interviews with diplomats and policymakers. During the period of the fellowship, I will conduct interviews at ministries in Sofia and finalize a book that documents these diplomatic processes and introduces a new concept to academic scholarship on global governance.

The project looks into the challenge of decentralised enforcement in core areas of the Internal Market, like competition law, consumer law and IP law. One way of ensuring coherence of decentralised enforcement has been through different types of enforcement networks. However, while the concept of ‘network’ presumes equivalence of interconnected units, in the regulatory areas at the centre of this project, there is considerable diversity in institutional design and governance approach among the EU Member States. Through a combination of theories and methodologies the project explores the impact of institutional diversity on the effectiveness of network governance and in turn, the implications of network governance for national institutional autonomy.

Phenomenology has historically accorded a privilege to temporality. In contrast, by scrutinizing the constitutive role of existential spatiality for human existence, this project defends the equiprimordiality between temporality and spatiality. I will present an outline of a “transcendental geology” of lived space, grounded on some leading phenomenological discourses – phenomenology of affectivity and corporeity, existential psychiatry and Daseinsanalysis, as well as hermeneutic phenomenology. If Heidegger’s project in Being and Time (1927) reveals the normative and axiological character of lived space, the particular problems of bodily nature [Leiblichkeit] and embodiment are left undiscussed in his early hermeneutic phenomenology. On the other side, Richir’s and Maldiney’s phenomenological projects outline an expanded scope of existential spatiality, proceeding from the questions regarding the origin of lived space and the consequences of deviated spatialization in abnormal psychic states of human life. Thus, the aim of the following research is to perform a methodological synchronization of the above-mentioned discourses in the form of architectonics of the existential spatiality, revealing the dimensionality of lived space as pre-condition for the original openness of the human existence to the world and to the other.

The project focuses on understanding diversity (and wider topics of inclusion, representation, participation and equality) in the context of judicial legitimacy and rule of law in Europe. It aims to inspect and document the ways in which diversity considerations have been acknowledged as relevant for, or even incorporated in, the functioning and legitimacy of European courts, and to examine relevant factors, benefits, downsides, justifications, limits and effects of diversity in relation to judicial legitimacy and the rule of law. It will build upon the literature on equality, procedural legitimacy and rule of law, as well as my existing research on judicial legitimacy and the rule-of-law challenges in the EU. The overall approach is interdisciplinary, drawing on a variety of sources (such as legal, philosophical, socio-legal and (social) psychological texts as well as existing judiciary-related actions and policy initiatives). In addition to the descriptive and normative engagement with the topic, we shall also reflect on the policy implications of research results – with a view on increasing judicial legitimacy in Europe.

Three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall Bulgarians are still on the crossroad between nostalgia and negation, seemingly unable to construct an overall picture of their socialist past. Importantly, we still lack a thorough study on the characteristics of social change that was accomplished by the socialist regime.Understanding the dynamics, the magnitude, and the thoroughness of the social change, which transformed Bulgarian society in the half-century after the World War II would be the prime task of this research project. Due to various reasons it would restrain from the conventional approach and instead would go along the new current in the academic literature, which applies alternative measures of standard of living like (1) real wages, (2) infant mortality, (3) life expectancy at birth, (4) daily calories intake, and (5) anthropometric data (height and weight) of children and adolescents.Given the near-complete infancy of Bulgarian research on the subject it would be naïve to pretend that it could master a full understanding of the social change. Rather, this proposal is a first stage of a larger and continuous research which has to be confined to a less ambitious scouting exercise for mapping the data scene and initial analysis of the preliminary findings.

The main aim of the project is the analysis of the development and changes of the idea of civil society during the transformation period. I want to rethink its evolution in a particular historical context and its repercussions. Specifically, I concentrate on the question about the effectiveness of the idea of civil society as the mobilizing frame, with particular emphasis on the discursively constructed boundaries between what is civic and non-civic. I am interested in how the discourse of civil society has “distributed” and relegated civic activity, how the discrepancies between the idea and reality were determined, where their causes were perceived. During the analysis I will concentrate on special features of this discourse – its binary mode (Czyżewski,2008) and pedagogical overtone (Starego, 2008) observed in Poland. In the research I will use the discursive analyse approach. Hence, the newspapers’ articles concerning civic (dis)activity, social organizations and movements will create my data corpus. It will be constructed in a way which allows observation of the discourse evolution, as well as an examination of the reminiscence of the civil society idea shape in contemporary applications. Additionally, in order to broaden the conclusions of the empirical findings, I will place them in the context of the observations and conclusions from other post-socialistic societies, asking the question about the universality of the idea of civil society and its undemocratic potential.

This paper is an attempt to explain some of the peculiarities of the present-day socio-political situation in Serbia by tracing the dynamic and interplay of its main identity narratives during the last 30 years. It represents a contribution to understanding post-socialist Serbia, through the way its identity narratives were setting the framework for key political choices and orientations. On the one hand, it will draw on the idea that (state) narratives “fix the meanings of the past and limit the opportunity for further political contestation” (Subotić 2013). This will help to analyse the persistence and re-appearances of certain narratives seemingly exhibiting the force of inertia in public discourses, and thus limiting the possibilities for major changes both in public imaginaries about the national self and in the political course of the country. On the other hand, relying on the notion that ethno-national discourse is “a moving, relational and multidimensional object” (Pavasović Trošt 2018), the analysis will provide an understanding of how, when, and with which actors (internal and external) identity narratives become more plastic and susceptible to change, indicating in the discursive space, possibilities for a change in political orientation and action.

A political resolution adopted by the Hungarian Parliament in 2020 April declared that the Fundamental Law of Hungary started a new era and terminated the so-called ’post-communist’ period of the country. This earlier period can be labelled as the era of liberal constitutionalism or that of the Rawlsian neutral state or that of ’legal classicism’. The first characteristic of this period was the primacy of the law and the judicalisation of the politics where the judicial bodies – and most importantly the Constitutional Court – played a significant role. Secondly, the mimetics of the ’good practices’ and institutional solutions of the Western legal cultures has to be mentioned. Accordingly, the main source of political legitimacy was thought to be the integration to the West while the main political enemy was an internal one: the former communist heritage was to be overcome. This process was to be done by way of modernising the legal system, based on the rule of law.After 2010, however, the era of legal classicism seems to be followed by a romantic spirit. A new paradigm has risen within the public sphere: the primacy of the politics that aims to constrain the previously dominant judicial actors in the name of popular will. Clear normative traces of the new tendency are the repeal of the former case law of the Constitutional Court and the instrumental usage of law and constitution amendments that lead to the politicization of law. Parallel to these, a strong constitutional identity-based discourse has appeared that aims to protect Hungary as a nation state within the European integration. In addition, this process is surrounded by a significant discourse on the criticism of juristocracy and elitism that seems to be a suitable narrative also for the criticism of the European integration that is in itself a legal construction of the Member States’ elites. Accordingly, European integration gained negative connotations as becoming a new external threat capable of endangering the survival of the nation and its real values, while the main source of political legitimation shifted from the Western liberal model to the revival of the nation and the idea of the historic constitution. Based on these observations, my goal is to study the main legal discourses accompanying this paradigmatic change and its evolution through the series of constitutional amendments.

This research project focuses on the emergence of spiritualized forms of psychotherapy and self-help psychologies that have become an important component of the booming industry of personal and spiritual growth in Romania and throughout Western and Eastern Europe and aims at analyzing the paradigmatic shift taking place in psychology and in psychotherapeutic practices that are employed in modeling a new form of subjectivity. By drawing on Michel Foucault's, Nikolas Rose's and Charles Taylor's work Gog's research looks at how these emergent psychotherapies are producing bio-political technologies that attempt to governmentalize both old and new capitalist societies. The research is interested in analyzing the way these new spiritual psychotherapies operate and how they generate a new subjective interiority based on self-development and self-realization and on a new understanding of personal authenticity that is becoming increasingly popular, first in Western Europe and gradually in Eastern Europe as well, through academic and professional networks, books, digital media and public lectures and the establishment of new psychological associations.

The project explores post-1989 discourses, genealogies and political-intellectual communities that undergirded the rethinking of peripherality in Romania after EU accession. Its central hypothesis is that the resilience and diversity of domestic discussions about the country’s European incomplete self and its problematic recognition within the EU fuelled an equilibrium that prevented neo-authoritarian hegemony over political and intellectual fields. I examine three interrelated trajectories for identity production: the recent past, democratisation, and Romania in Europe. I argue that the cognitive dissonances amassed along these axes during the first eighteen years after 1989 constitute the foundation for the discursive shifts since 2007. I connect such dynamics of self-representation to social mobilizations from the 2010s to point out (dis)continuities in the fusion between identity and social-political discontent. The project compares Romania’s path to countries where elites positioned themselves as the West or, later, the real Europe (Poland or Hungary), or with those that experienced similarly torturous trajectories to and within the EU (Bulgaria).