06-07 October 2016: Workshop on Democratic Advances and Authoritarian Persistence in the European Neighborhood
On October 6th and 7th 2016, Gergana Noutcheva and Assem Dandashly, Assistant Professors in International Relations and European Foreign Policy at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, will be hosting an International workshop on Democratic Advances and Authoritarian Persistence in the European Neighbourhood at Maastricht University’s Brussels Campus.On October 6th and 7th 2016, Gergana Noutcheva and Assem Dandashly, Assistant Professors in International Relations and European Foreign Policy at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, will be hosting an International workshop on Democratic Advances and Authoritarian Persistence in the European Neighbourhood at Maastricht University’s Brussels Campus.
The workshop aims at investigating why some countries in the EU’s eastern and southern neighbourhood have liberalised whereas others have resisted change or even strengthened their authoritarian rule. While the authoritarianism and democratisation literatures have investigated, mainly from a domestic and institutionalist perspective, authoritarian survival and collapse as well as democratic breakthrough and consolidation, the EU-focused scholarship has predominantly focused on the failure of the European Neighbourhood Policy to initiate positive change in Eastern Europe and MENA.
Not only have these different strands engaged little with each other, but they have also frequently under-credited the societal dimension of ‘democratisations from below’. This workshop aims to bridge these weakly connected strands of research and fill in the gaps in our knowledge of the reasons for authoritarian persistence and democratic advances in the European neighbourhood.