Though the projects, the EUI Widening Europe Programme aims to reinforce a Europe-wide research community in the social sciences and humanities, as well as mark a significant step forward in fostering collaboration and innovation across Europe.
The call winners, comprising scholars from the Widening countries together with EUI academics, are as follows:
CINE aims to address a scholarly gap in the constitutional review of emergency legislation. It will investigate whether and how the methods of constitutional interpretation have changed in emergency situations across Europe, exploring courts' historical deference to executive powers during times of crises. The lead investigators are Gráinne De Búrca and Zoltán Szente (EUI Department of Law), together with Fruzsina Gárdos-Orosz (HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences).
Alexander Monge-Naranjo (EUI Economics Department) and Ctirad Slavik (Charles University) will collaborate in a research project investigating Finance and inequality - FaI. They will evaluate comprehensively how different aspects of financial markets shape the income and welfare of households with different education and labour market skills, to understand what the macroeconomic impact of alternative financial reforms on a country’s overall income distribution is.
FEMETRICS aims to address gender data gaps by assessing official statistics providers, highlighting the non-economic aspect of gender-data availability, capturing the broader wellbeing of women and girls, and analysing policy and legal frameworks. The team of investigators Gaby Umbach (EUI’s Robert Schuman Centre), Jaromir Harmáček (Palacký University Olomouc), and Bogna Kietlinska (University of Warsaw) seeks to optimise data collection patterns to inform policymaking on women's wellbeing, identifying best practices and data gaps for improved approaches, policies, and institutions.
In OPENARCH, Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol (EUI Department of History) and Peter Pavel Klasinc (AMEU University Maribor) will analyse the accessibility conditions, research experience, and levels of education and training on the right to access public archives of Widening countries on the side of archivists, on the one hand, and of scholars on the other hand.
PSYMIG, whose lead investigators are James Dennison (EUI’s Robert Schuman Centre) and Olivera Komar (University of Montenegro), explores the psychological motivations behind migration behaviour in Montenegro, considering factors such as propensity, regularity, destination, and status. Through survey data collection, PSYMIG seeks to understand how psychological predispositions interact with socio-demographic, political, and economic contexts, as well as access to migration networks and other psychological factors.
Arnout van de Rijt and Herman van de Werfhorst (EUI Department of Political and Social Sciences), along with Marta Sylwestrzak and Tomasz Kopczewski (University of Warsaw), are leading WIDELABS, a project aiming to conduct laboratory experiments in Widening countries. Their research explores the following research questions: Can a minority of experts protect against emergence of a false collective belief? Does a wider definition of merit facilitate greater diversity in academic evaluations? What can make care-related careers more attractive to men? Why do humans perform worse when working with AI?
Lead investigators Benno Gamerl (EUI Department of History), Márkus Keller (ELTE), and Zsuzsanna Kiss (ELTE), will collaborate in GLOBINTERSECT, a project looking at race, ethnicity, gender, class, age, disability, displacement, and other markers of difference from a transregional and transcontinental perspective. It will trace how configurations of diversity and modes of intersectionality shifted with global connections and disconnections since the early 19th century.
SUPER aims to identify solid foundations for a legal framework that may prove politically acceptable and legally effective in Ukraine, and also compatible with EU requirements, when it comes to the protection of national minorities under the wider EU rule of law framework. The lead investigators are Deirdre Curtin (EUI Department of Law), Costanza Hermanin (EUI’s Robert Schuman Centre), Iurii Barbash (Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University), and Enrico Albanesi (Università di Genova).
In RECONCOURT, Gábor Halmai (EUI’s Robert Schuman Centre) and Ágnes Kovács (ELTE) will scrutinise and develop existing scholarship on judicial resilience, focusing particularly on constitutional courts (CCs) in regimes that are currently undergoing autocratisation or that have distinct historical experiences with such processes. The project will examine the interplay among exogenous factors, such as the societal discourses about CCs and key political concepts, e.g., democracy and the rule of law.
CitWidE examines the impact of legal, demographic, and political factors on citizenship regulation in post-2004 EU member states and candidate countries. Despite national sovereignty being the traditional view on citizenship laws, recent europeanisation, migration experiences, and democratic consolidation have led to potential shifts. By leveraging an expert network across 12 Eastern European countries, the project seeks to assess convergence in citizenship policies amid changing dynamics influenced by European integration and historical legacies. The lead investigators are Maarten Vink (EUI’s Robert Schuman Centre), Dorota Pudzianowska (University of Warsaw), and Szabolcs Pogonyl (Central European University).
TJG, led by Kristin Fabbe (Florence School of Transnational Governance) and Stefanos Katsikas (University of Cyprus), will examine how retributive, compensatory, and restorative forms of justice were and were not applied in the Greek case at various junctures from the end of the Second World War (1945) to the present. The project will also trace how elite decisions regarding retributive, compensatory, and restorative justice contributed to the processes of state consolidation, democratisation, and the formation of salient political cleavages in Greek society.
The EUI Widening Europe Programme, supported by contributions from the European Union and EUI Contracting States, is designed to strengthen internationalisation, competitiveness, and quality in research in the Widening countries.