Completed Programmes

With this Program, we aim to investigate the ways historical knowledge is constructed through the disciplines of archaeology and art history in Southeastern Europe (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Cyprus, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia and the Turkish province of East Thrace). Based on the observation that the culture-historical way of thinking about past cultures remains dominant in our region, we envisage understanding why this is so; at the same time, we wish to encourage the construction and deployment of a new theoretical and methodological framework that will enable us to look at the cultural past(s) of our region in multi-modal and cross-disciplinary ways.

The overarching objective of PREVEX is to put forward more fine-tuned and effective approaches to preventing violent extremism. Focusing on the broader MENA region and the Balkans, context-sensitive, in-depth case studies of the occurrence and non-occurrence of violent extremism will be carried out and then brought together in a regional comparison.

The project seeks to place the current anti-liberal and anti-democratic backlash in Eastern Europe, arguably manifesting the all-European socio-political and ideological crisis in its most acute form, into a comparative historical perspective. It raises fundamental questions concerning the intellectual contribution and responsibility of those local and international actors (scholars, experts, think-tanks, NGOs, public intellectuals, etc.) who devised roadmaps for the transition to liberal democracy and market economy, and the interplay of these roadmaps and the realities “on the ground”.

Pilot phase project of the Centre for Advanced Study Sofia, 2019-2022, supported by the Centre for Culture and Governance in Europe, University of St. Gallen. It tries to provide a detailed comparative analysis of the current evaluation policies in both minor and major non-English-speaking countries (a) such as e.g. Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Greece, Slovenia, the Baltic States, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary, as well as (b) those somewhat better positioned with regard to research funding, such as e.g. Holland, Finland, Sweden, Norway, and juxtapose these with the situation in countries like Germany, Austria, Italy, France, and Spain.

The inspiration behind the seminar series is the paucity of systematic research on ownership in Bulgaria’s recent history that has not been comprehensively covered at university level, either by the faculties of History and Social Sciences, or by  economics and Philosophy. A possible reason for its neglection is the relatively short historical period since the fall of the communist regime which puts certain limits to any disinterested academic  evaluation. In addition, Bulgarian academics seem to be repulsed by the monotonous ideological clichés that were imposed by the regime on ownership, and thus avoid their scholarly deconstruction.

CAS new seminar Existential Policies under Socialism is based on the presumption that despite the propaganda and repressive apparatus available to the totalitarian state, the latter has been unable to fully implement the matrix of its social-engineering project because of numerous reasons, ranging from faults within the very design and methods of execution, to the presence of different types of resistance  alternative ideologies, traditions, everyday tactics). Following a post-revisionist approach, it attempts to capture the junctions and discrepancies between the ideological models and real-life experience, and investigates the points of tension between the public and the private, between the collective and the individual, between ideology and practice by visualising the tension between the system and everyday life.