From November 2017, Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory has been a partner on a five-year international scientific project Disobedient Democracy: A Comparative Analysis of Contentious Politics in European Semi-periphery. This research focuses on social movements in four cities on the European semi-periphery – Zagreb, Belgrade, Madrid and Lisbon – and its aim is to determine the ways in which contentious politics contribute to democracy. This project will also produce a comprehensive, publicly accessible database about protests and social movements in Portugal, Spain, Croatia and Serbia from 2000 to 2017, based on the analysis of the media content of two daily newspapers in each of these countries.
Disobedient Democracy is a project motivated by the current crisis of legitimacy of representative democracy and citizens’ lack of confidence in its institutions. The project studies the ways in which politics of protests improves democracy and it will offer new insights into the citizens’ possibilities to reclaim democratic politics. In addition, the goal of collecting and analyzing the data about protests and social movements is to improve the knowledge of the phenomenon of disobedience.
The Faculty of Political Sciences of the University of Zagreb is the lead institution, and other partners, next to the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, include also Universidad Complutense de Madrid and Nova University from Lisbon.
The project is funded by the Swiss National Scientific Foundation under the initiative PROMYS – Promotion of Young Scientists in Eastern Europe (PROMYS).