This event features a presentation by Dr Dorjana Bojanovska Popovska (University of Bologna).
Abstract
Literature on contemporary illiberalism has successfully tracked how self-proclaimed illiberals operate within the mechanisms of democracy, exploiting its historical weaknesses—primarily as an unfinished project. The concept of misappropriation of rights is appropriately situated as another strategy operating within these contemporary trajectories, in a multilevel, multidirectional efforts to undermine constitutional democracy. Building on, rather than departing from, the core notion of misappropriation of rights, the chapter shifts the focus from micro-strategies to a broader understanding of the forces and tools employed in this context. Focusing primarily on the European experience, the chapter identifies complementing strategies that are used by the same actors on national and supra national levels towards undoing democratic structures from within. The chapter situates the misappropriation of rights alongside other concepts and tools that work in the direction power concentration and maximization as well as other strategies that serve as drivers of the reconceptualization of the public sphere that ultimatly erode the egalitarian foundations of liberal constitutions.
Speaker
Dr Dorjana Bojanovska Popovska is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the CEU Democracy Institute and a Re:constitution Fellow at the Faculty of Law, University of Bologna. Her research operates at the intersection of public law, religion, and illiberalism. She holds an SJD (summa cum laude) and an LL.M. in Comparative Constitutional Law from Central European University (CEU), as well as an LL.M. in Constitutional Law from the Iustinianus Primus Law Faculty in Skopje. A fellow of the ICLRS Young Scholars Fellowship on Religion and the Rule of Law, she has held visiting scholar appointments at the Department of Law, University of Milan (2019), and the Europa Institute at Leiden Law School (2017). Dorjana has taught and lectured extensively across Europe, including at CEU (Budapest and Vienna), Bard College Berlin, Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Budapest, and the Universities of Milan and Bologna. She is the author of Religion, State and Constitution: The Limits of Constitutional Secularism (forthcoming January 2027, Routledge, Law and Religion Series).
Register