This event features interventions by EUI Scholars Filip Kostelka, Kalypso Nicolaidis, Andrea Gaiba, Adélie Chevee, Silvia Suteu, Vanja Mladineo, Peter Kreko, and other members of the EUI community.
This closing event brings together members of the EUI Research Cluster on Transnational Democracy in the 21st Century, along with its extended intellectual and practitioner community, for a final roundtable of reflection and forward-looking debate. It will provide a shared space to synthesise what the cluster has learned over the past three years about the practices, possibilities, and limits of democracy across borders. It will situate these insights within today’s wider democratic landscape—one marked by both painful setbacks ('the black'), inspiring advances ('the blue'), and bruising battles ('the black and blue').
Participants are warmly invited to offer prepared interventions or to contribute spontaneously analytical, comparative and life insights. We will seek to weave together our diverse experiences, identify converging themes and articulate a mutual understanding of the key obstacles and enablers of democratic renewal in different contexts, and what remains to be imagined or fought for, one struggle at a time - within Europe and well beyond it. Researchers are encouraged to share their research findings and public scholarship on democratic struggles observed, analysed, or directly experienced during this period. We will explore the tensions between innovation and inertia, mobilisation and fatigue, institutional entrepreneurship and resistance, as well as the practical challenges that confront democratic experimentation in local, national, European, and transnational arenas.
The session will be kicked off by the Cluster co-conveners. EUI Professor Filip Kostelka will reflect on the forces that shape democratic openings and closures today in Eastern Europe, and EUI Professor Kalypso Nicolaïdis will present the 'ups and downs' of her recent experience with citizen engagement and interactions with EU institutions.
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