As political researchers, we find the study of "THE VULNERABLE" IN CONTEMPORARY POLITICS highly relevant especially in times of crisis, such as the current COVID-19 pandemic. But as scholars of politics, we are also VULNERABLE IN CONTEMPORARY POLITICS. With distrust in politicians continuing to remain pervasively high across the world and since political science still faces significant challenges in communicating its social and scientific worth to the larger public, questions on the relevance of studying political phenomena and even whether politics itself got any value are increasingly present in the public space. Under these circumstances, we should also rethink the merits and the vulnerabilities of our own work in a larger context, which addresses both the long-run survival of our discipline and the moral obligations of scholars as citizens, as well as the limits of acting as engaged spectators.

For the 7th edition of the international interdisciplinary conference of political research SCOPE: Science of Politics, organized by the Centre for International Cooperation and Development Studies (IDC) of the Faculty of Political Science of the UNIVERSITY OF BUCHAREST (Romania) in a special online format between the 20th and 24th of September 2021, we invite scholars across different disciplines to submit papers, panels or round table proposals, and treat this general theme from various conceptual, empirical and methodological perspectives, while addressing timely case-studies. Like for all previous editions, with the support of the Research Committee 33 (The Study of Political Science as a Discipline) of the International Political Science Association (IPSA), we also have a special section dedicated to debating the challenges that we face in our field as political researchers (READ THE FULL CALL FOR APPLICATIONS).

The international peer-review open access journal Annals of the University of Bucharest. Political Science series currently accepts manuscripts for its special issue 2/2021 dedicated to this topic (with a preferential deadline for SCOPE 2021 participants).

In addition, this year we joined forces with the Institute for Social Sciences (ICS) at the UNIVERSITY OF LISBON (Portugal) to offer the interested public a special online edition of the Research methods school on corruption and corruption control analysis (CORAN), 27-30 September 2021 (DETAILS & PROGRAM).

The closing keynote for this event will be offered by Prof. Donatella DELLA PORTA (COSMOS - Scuola Normale Superiore, Italy), Doctor Honoris Causa of the University of Bucharest.

This edition was dedicated to all those who lost their lives to COVID-19 due to various vulnerabilities of governace systems and/or the political instrumentalization of science.