DEMOCRACY, GOVERNANCE AND IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY POLITICS

DÉMOCRATIE, GOUVERNANCE ET IDENTITÉ DANS LA POLITIQUE CONTEMPORAINE

DEMOCRAȚIE, GUVERNARE ŞI IDENTITATE ÎN SPAŢIUL POLITIC CONTEMPORAN

If one skims through any recent issue of a major scientific journal relevant for contemporary political research, it is very probable to find at least one contribution with a title and/or abstract containing one or more of these three words: democracy, governance, and identity.

Each of these three concepts has a strong legacy of its own and each triggered the development of specific areas of studies, often bridging various disciplinary traditions. Sometimes they are also treated together but a common cannon involving all three of them seems to be still very weak.

Nonetheless, these three concepts have many things in common, particularly similar difficulties in defining them and distinguishing between their process, output and ideological dimensions, hence the emergence and wide use of larger conceptual fields such as the democracy/democratization, government/governance, identity/alterity.

Furthermore, there are numerous and significant recent contemporary political and social phenomena that require rethinking these three concepts in relation to one another and build a stronger common scientific reflection around them, both for practical and theoretical purposes.

Among such phenomena, one may quote, for instance, the last decade's uprisings in the name of democracy and better governance in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and South East Asia; the backlash of democracy and the burgeoning of the identity discourses throughout the world particularly in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis; or the transformation of the traditional political space brought by the new technologies and access to information through social media.

Within this context and aiming to explore such puzzles from various conceptual, empirical and methodological perspectives, while addressing timely case-studies, SCOPE 2015 proposed the following sections as clusters for more focused debates on the complex nexus democracy-governance-identity:

• New Theoretical Perspectives on Democratization and De-Democratization

• Good Governance and Equal Opportunity Policies: Legacies, Stakes and Trends

• Public Space(s), Private Values: In Search of a Global Social Agenda

• Shifting Maps and Moving Targets: Politics, Memory and Democratization after 1945

• Methodological Challenges and Innovations in Contemporary Political Research

The conference also includes a special workshop on the state of the discipline in relation to the topic of the general call. This is an English-language section co-sponsored by the International Political Science Association (IPSA/AISP) - Research Committee 33 (The Study of Political Science as a Discipline) and the European Confederation of Political Science Associations (ECPSA).

SPECIAL PRE-CONFERENCE EVENT

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

Workshop honouring the work of Professor Donatella DELLA PORTA

Bucharest, 7 May 2015

Event organized by

The Research Institute of the University of Bucharest (ICUB)

at the initiative of

The Centre for Equal Opportunity Policies (CPES, Faculty of Political Science, University of Bucharest)

The Centre for International Cooperation and Development Studies (IDC, Faculty of Political Science, University of Bucharest)

Throughout the last century, people have protested for jobs, for better wages, for governments, against governments, for equality, against war, against cruelty to animals, or for equal rights. In the street or in other settings in which collective aims and collective identity claims could be expressed, people have acted to protect their own interests or those of others and, in doing so, some of them became better citizens and advanced their countries on the road to democracy. For scholars of such phenomena, the last two decades offer plenty of food for thought. Services that were not available ten years ago (such as Facebook and Twitter) have been, since then, incorporated in the tool kit of any movement, becoming an essential part of the mobilization process. In Europe, freedom of movement within the European Union has recently facilitated the contagion between the homeland population and the temporary migrant population, with national protests on the same issue being sometimes organized in multiple cities across the continent. And worldwide, street protests are increasingly visible on a global scale, often changing attitudes and the traditional recruitment paths. At the same time, beyond the sheer amount of work that the abundance of new study material can generate, recent social movements literature faces significant conceptual, theoretical and methodological challenges. Although most now agree that agency, structure, identity and method all matter, there is still no scientific consensus on how these combine or should be understood for a better grasp of social movements.

This workshop aims to explore the most recent challenges that the study of social movements faces from different disciplinary and transdisciplinary viewpoints, to identify and examine the new phenomena and cases relevant for social movement research, and to investigate the potential of conceptual, theoretical and methodological innovation in the field, while honouring the work of Donatella DELLA PORTA, who will be present on the occasion. For this purpose, it invited scholars from any discipline or transdisciplinary tradition who have studied these topics to present and discuss the results of their current research projects. Both substantive contributions and methodological papers that present innovations in the study of social movements are welcomed.

This edition was organized within the Faculty of Political Science, University of Bucharest, through the joint work of the following research centres: Fundamenta Politica , CPES - Centre for Equal Opportunity Policies / Le Centre d'Études sur les Politiques de l’Égalité des Chances), IDC - Centre for International Cooperation and Development Studies , CSI - Center for Israeli Studies Goldstein Goren with the support of Asociaţia Alumni Universităţii din Bucureşti, The Research Institute of the University of Bucharest (ICUB), and Le Centre Régional Francophone de Recherches Avancées en Sciences Sociales (CEREFREA). The event benefited from the sponsorship of Bancpost.