Dipartimento di Culture, Politica e Società

Descrizione del progetto

The growing lack of interest of the European societies' citizens in participating in political life through traditional instruments of representative democracy has caused a renewed concern of the EU and its member states for the promotion and encouragement of active citizenship. This has resulted in a process of democratic engineering inspired by the principles of the participatory and deliberative conceptions of democracy.

Democratic experimentation along these lines, which can be observed in some EU countries, gave rise to the promotion and institutionalisation of democratic innovations (public debates, neighbourhood councils, citizens' juries, participatory budgets, etc.). At the same time, in the post-socialist and post-conflict societies of the Western Balkans (WB), the lack of democratic tradition, of efficient mechanisms of the citizens' participation and the infinitely prolonged accession to the EU pose additional challenges to any attempt to meaningfully engage citizens. Moreover, while the crisis of representative democracy in the EU resulted in a call for more democracy and tangible efforts to institutionalize different democratic innovations aiming to foster the effective inclusion of citizens, similar actions are almost completely absent in WB states. However, we have recently witnessed in this region different kinds of citizens’ participation in initiatives against growing authoritarian tendencies. The examples of these bottom-up citizens’ mobilizations vary from the so-called “colourful revolution” in Macedonia's capital Skopje to plenums in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and a wide variety of civic initiatives at local levels in all countries of the region.

All these initiatives exhibit the citizens’ willingness to participate in and democratize societies. In such demands for inclusion and participation, citizens of the WB countries sometimes search for inspirational traditions, like socialist self-government modes, but they also look to other forms of participative strategies for inspiration, above all to democratic innovations (the plenums in BiH, for example).

Still, while both sets of the above discussed innovative democratic practices – democratic innovations promoted in the EU countries and bottom-up citizens’ mobilizations in the WB countries – have the goal to reinvigorate democracy by promoting the broader inclusion of citizens’ concerns and opinions into the political process, there is a lack of knowledge of their interaction and possible interplay. We therefore wish to examine their joint potential for democratizing political processes in Western Balkans.

This Jean Monnet Networks project aims at building a consortium of higher education institutions, civil society organizations and research institutions with the purpose of exploring the potentials of innovative democratic practices to democratize WB societies while bridging a divide between the scholarship on grassroots democratic initiatives (in WBs) and on institutionalized democratic innovations practiced in many EU countries.

Research projects on democratic innovations and on bottom-up citizens’ mobilizations have often been separately conducted, and the two phenomena have even been juxtaposed. Not only do the two modes of political action conceive differently of the principles of inclusion, but, it has been argued, the democratic innovations are based on institutionalized deliberation while the collective mobilization allegedly exclusively relies on protest and negotiation.

The bottom-up citizens’ mobilisations in WB states offer diverse insights into these issues and call for further analysis. Through bringing together carefully selected researchers and civil society actors from the EU and the WB, this Jean Monnet Network initiative aims at enabling sustainable and institutionally supported knowledge exchange regarding the interplay between the mentioned modes of citizens’ participation. We also aim at promoting innovative democratic practices in the WB, whose institutionalization is seen as an indispensable element in building the citizens’ resilience to growing authoritarian and populist tendencies.

The project plans a number of multinational activities. During the first year, three workshops will produce detailed plan of the project, and a systematic review on active citizenship. Building on exchange in workshops two democratic innovations that take into consideration the peculiarities of WB societies will be implemented at the local level at the beginning of the second year. These will produce primary qualitative and quantitative data to be used in further research and will be presented during the summer school that will bring together scholars, experts and civil sector actors. In the third year, short-term stays of young researchers (who make up the majority of the WB teams) will be organized with the aim of building the capacities of young researchers.

The network would also write a Handbook on Democratic Innovations for the WBs and design an MA module in Innovative Democratic Practices.

The project will conclude with a conference that will collect the contributions for the special issue focused on the interplay between democratic innovations and grassroots initiatives.

Overall, this project aims at creating a truly multidisciplinary network of researchers, whose expertise lies within the fields of citizenship and democratization processes, with the purpose of advancing and promoting the knowledge on citizens' participation and democratic innovations. Some of the envisaged outputs are peer-reviewed high-quality journal papers, but also working and policy papers based on primary data, as well as a handbook on democratic innovations. They all target not only the scientific community, but also civil actors and policy makers and lay citizens, with an overarching aim to accomplish a greater social and political impact. 

Note

Coordinatore: Università di Belgrado
Team: The network includes University of Graz (CSEES) and Departments of Culture Politics and Society at University of Turin, University of Sarajevo and Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje as well as Belgrade Fund for Political Excellence.