The Social Landscapes of the Political

Director of research: Professor Apostolis Papakostas

Post-doctoral fellows: Kjetil Duvold, Vassilis Petsinis

The post-communist societies have been transformed from plan to market economies and from authoritarian regimes to liberal democracies and states governed by law. Old identities have been complemented with, or replaced by new ones, and in some instances older social identities have taken on renewed relevance. Parallel with state and, in some cases, nation building, these societies have been integrated into international collaboration and global competition. This theme's research is concentrated on the processes that are embraced in the phrase "the Westernization of the political order."  This Westernization expresses itself in a number of rapid, sometimes intertwined, parallel transformations. One obvious aspect is societies' and nations' multi-faceted, growing organizational and institutional entanglements in international and supranational institutions. This finds concrete expression at the empirical level as a number of entanglement relations among states, parts of states or organizations and groups in civil society.

The research theme's overarching aim is to study the disparate tensions that are created during processes of social transformation, at different speeds and in different directions. The main focus is the relationship of change to the political, simply defined as the content and the form of politics, the struggles over what is the sphere of the political, as well as the aspects of the soft tissue of social life that are connected to the political and include the intangibles and imponderables of the public scene such as habits, common values, trust, social networks and social capital. The political is studied in relation to two major, critical junctures (contingencies and critical junctures). The first juncture deals with the expansion of space in the political, social and economic context through increased interwovenness in European and global institutions and organizations. The second deals with the historical aspects of change, in which contemporaneous society is seen in a temporal, sequential, and path-dependent context. At the intersecting points of these junctures, new organizational and institutional boundaries, new interpretations of reality and ideas about the shape and content of politics are created at the same time that old or reinvented traditions and perceptions of the social reality become relevant once again.

All of Europe shares a common experience regarding these dissimilar pressures, namely the fact that that new and disparate boundaries between and within states, societal spheres, groups and interests have been created. The simultaneousness of several change processes, the historic compactness in the social transformations, and their unusual clarity make this area extremely interesting for studies of social change.

 

Contact:

Apostolis Papakostas, apostolis.papakostas@sh.se

Kjetil Duvold, kjetil.duvold@sh.se

Vassilis Petsinis, vassilis.petsinis@sh.se