Close
A week at the International Council for Central and East European Studies World Congress
By Lisa Walters, on 14 August 2025
By Alesia Mankouskaya, PhD candidate at UCL SSEES. Alesia is currently pursuing her PhD under the supervision of Professor Richard Butterwick-Pawlikowski.
Being a doctoral student at UCL SSEES brings many hidden advantages, and one of them was the opportunity to attend the largest international gathering of scholars simply by taking the tube and walking into the premises of the alma mater.
Held only once every five years, the ICCEES World Congress is the largest international forum for scholars focusing on Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, the Baltics, Russia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. The previous Congress was held in Canada, and it felt like a homecoming of sorts, since the founding Congress took place there almost fifty years ago. With the general theme of ‘Bridging National and Global Perspectives’, the last World Congress was hosted by Concordia University and the Canadian Association of Slavists.
Bringing Nyugat to Life: A Student Exhibition at the SSEES Library
By Lisa Walters, on 1 May 2025
By Hayley Anderson. Hayley is a fourth-year European Social and Political Studies student and one of the Student Ambassadors at the UCL Europe Institute for 2024/25. With her specialism in Hungarian and History, she has focussed her research on the experiences and identities of communities in Eastern Slovakia and the wider Central East Europe region. She is also a Student Associate for the UCL Platform for Linguistic and Epistemic Justice (PLEJ)
As a student of Hungarian and History, SSEES’s library collection is one which I find myself using regularly. However, it wasn’t until we had a language class dedicated to exploring the Hungarian section of the library that I realised just how sprawling this collection is. In the course of an hour, we tracked a timeline of translated fiction and historical sources, frequently finding overlap with the literatures and cultures of the surrounding countries. But there was one section which particularly piqued our curiosity, the Nyugat literary journal. Of course, the bold advertisements and illustrations which adorn the pages of the paper were eye-catching and refreshing amongst a sea of text. But there was also something exemplified within this hundred-year-old journal that reflected our own multilingual experiences at SSEES.
Bringing actors back in: The key take-away from a symposium on crisis and institutional change
By Lisa Walters, on 27 March 2025
By Dr Elodie Douarin, Associate Professor in Economics and Gerhard Schnyder, Professor of International Management & Political Economy, Institute for International Management, Loughborough University London.
What do hurricane Katrina, a sovereign debt crisis in Greece, military coups, and credit crunches have in common? They all cause crises that may fundamentally challenge established institutional, economic and political orders. While the ‘permacrisis’ our world increasingly seems to be engulfed in is certainly no cause for joy, for social scientists interested in institutions, it offers an opportunity, because crises open up a window to observe the interplay between formal institutions (like laws and regulations) and informal institutions (like social norms and cultural values) and their joint response to stressing factors. It allows us therefore to better understand the relationship between two spheres of human activity that are too often presented as opposed or alternative orders.
An illustration of crises including a hurricane, financial crisis, coup d’etat, with global impact visuals.
Loving Like Aitmatov
By Lisa Walters, on 20 January 2025
Written by Ksenia Sizonova, PhD candidate, UCL SSEES
Aitmatov’s lines are music. They must be heard.
Their resonating waves carry the mystery of love and divine anxiety…’
M. Gapyrov [1]
Discourses about the Kyrgyz author Chyngyz Aitmatov’s legacy are often centered around his coining of the term ‘mankurt’ — an enslaved person deprived of their memory through torture. Originally described in the 1980 novel The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years, the word ‘mankurt’ has acquired a life of its own, prominently featuring in national identity debates not only in Kyrgyzstan and other Central Asian states but in many societies of the former Soviet Union [2].
Calin Georgescu: Romania’s latest Medical Populist
By Lisa Walters, on 3 December 2024
By Jack Dean, PhD candidate
With the first round of the election having been explored on the SSEES Research Blog, the question that stood out to me was “Who is Calin Georgescu?”. Whilst most discussions in the media thus far center around the pro-Russia stances offered, it is worth exploring the Georgescu’s rhetoric relating to conspiracies and healthcare. I argue that Calin Georgescu is the latest Romanian political actor to utilize medical populism in the years since the onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic and suggest that Georgescu represents the latest iteration of a post-Pandemic, post-fact norm for the country.
The 2024 Romanian Elections: A political earthquake and its aftershocks?
By Lisa Walters, on 29 November 2024
By Dr Daniel Brett, Lecturer in Social and Political Science, UCL SSEES
The first round of the Romanian elections has produced something of a surprising result. The victory by the little known, party-less extreme far right candidate Calin Georgescu has caused a great deal of shock among some Romanians and commentators. However, the result is less surprising than we might think given Romanian politics over the last five years. That the election was won by a member of the far right is unsurprising, that it was Georgescu rather than the more well known AUR (Alliance for the Union of Romanians) leader George Simion is surprising.
Unpacking the Global History of Monocultures
By Lisa Walters, on 14 November 2024
Dr Volodymyr Kulikov, Lecturer in Ukrainian History, reflects on a workshop held at UCL SSEES on 1 November 2024.
Walking down the aisles of a supermarket, you might think that variety defines modern agriculture. Rows of packaged foods suggest a wealth of choices, but behind this illusion lies a different reality: monocultures dominate global food production. Single-crop farming now underpins much of our agricultural system, building on the economies of scale that benefit consumers and makes agrochemical producers happy. Monoculture farming clears land for a single crop, meticulously killing anything that might compete with it. This approach, however, degrades soils and creates a breeding ground for diseases and pests that spread rapidly through one species. By putting all their eggs in one basket, producers risk losing everything to extreme weather events or diseases, reflecting the fragility of monoculture.
Czech presidential election: the oligarch or the general?
By Sean L Hanley, on 20 January 2023
Czechs again seem set to reject populism for moderate steady-as-you-go leadership, leaving bigger reform debates for another day, argues Seán Hanley.
_Petr_Pavel.jpg)
Petr Pavel [Photo: Martin Strachoň, CC BY-SA 4.0]
At first glance, the result looks puzzling. Voters in one of post-communist Central Europe’s most socially liberal democracies have opted for an unlikely-looking choice between an oligarch and a general. Conventional party-political candidates and issues were largely absent from the campaign which centred on personalities, particularly, on the divisive figure of Babiš. Opponents see the billionaire ex-PM, who was acquitted by a court of EU subsidy fraud in the long-running Storks Nest case mid-way through the campaign, as a corrupt populist with strong authoritarian leanings.
But the contest also reveals underlying continuities in Czech politics. Originally elected to parliament on an anti-corruption platform and promises to ‘run the state like a firm’, Babiš has long since shifted towards a loose social populism promising big public spending, generous pensions, and hikes in public sector salaries, which has seen him swallow up the electorate of Czechia’s once strong parties of the traditional left.
This was amply demonstrated in the first-round. Babiš promised to ‘help people’ and fend off belt tightening or taxes rises the current centre-right government may resort to cope with Czechia’s strained post-Covid public finances. Analysis of first round-voting patterns confirm that Babiš’s vote was strongest in poorer regions and smaller localities with lower standards of living and educational attainment, and higher levels of unemployment and consumer debt. Read the rest of this entry »