Ten EUI scholars recently received research funding for collaborative projects with scholars at the Geneva Graduate Institute (IHEID), under an arrangement that is connected to the Swiss Chair at the EUI.
The funding awards, five in total, will support a multidisciplinary range of activities in political science, social history, and global economics. In this funding round, several early-stage researchers are among the recipients, diversifying the group of beneficiaries. While the grant amounts are modest and the timeframes short (the calendar year 2023), this seed funding is important for new and existing researcher networks and to facilitate the more ambitious collaborations.
Brief descriptions of the winning projects follow.
EUI Max Weber Fellow Giada Giacomini will explore the accountability of international institutions toward local populations in the context of Green development projects, examining just transition litigation and the role of Grievance Redress Mechanisms. She will collaborate with Liliana Andonov, an International Relations Professor at IHEID.
PhD researchers from the EUI Department of History, Daphne Budasz and Anna Orinsky, Max Weber Fellow Anna Dobrowolska, and History Professor Benno Gammerl aim to advance migration and border studies by bringing in gendered and racialised histories of family, exploring how echoes of colonial regulation of intimate relations can be found in today’s policies on mobility. Their collaborators at IHEID are Professor of History and Politics Nicole Bourbonnais and PhD candidate David Motzafi-Haller.
PhD researcher from the EUI Department of Political and Social Sciences, Julian Vierlinger, and his IHEID counterpart Professor Christiana Parreira, will take a close look at Lebanon's politics today, asking how and why democracies transition from prevalent clientelism to programmatic politics. This project takes a fresh perspective on patron–client relations, focusing on how such linkages react to stressors derived from decline – economic crisis, state failure, and new entrant politicians.
By convening a workshop with academics and international trade and development experts, Professor at the EUI's Robert Schuman Centre, Bernard Hoekman, and Schuman Visiting Fellow Marco Sanfilippo, will lay the foundation for a broader collaboration with IHEID, to explore the next agendas for supply chains in developing countries. For Africa in particular, they will highlight interconnection of local labour markets, increasing protectionism and development in a globalised world. The project partner at IHEID is Economics Professor Julia Cajal-Grossi.
The grant awarded to Max Weber Fellows Effrosyni Charitopoulou and Natalia Garbiras-Díaz will support a conference and a research publication on Scholars-at-Risk in the Social Sciences. The event is designed to encourage the participation (in presence or virtual) of persecuted and 'silenced' academics, as well as researchers from CIVICA alliance institutions and from Switzerland. Interviews and data collection before and after the meeting will aim to understand better the impact of repression on scholars' wellbeing and their production of knowledge, as well as raise awareness of differential risks and successful coping strategies.
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