CIVICA Research Blog

Justice systems across Europe are increasingly becoming ‘digitised’, with greater use of technology in the administration of the law. But does this process have a downside? Drawing on experiences in Italy and the UK, Giulia Gentile and Giovanni De Gregorio argue that over-reliance on private technology companies risks undermining the ‘publicness’ of justice systems.

Alexandru Moise, Research Fellow at the EUI department of political and social sciences, describes his work in the CIVICA research project WELDECO - Welfare, democracy, and populism under the COVID-19 crisis.

Study co-authored by Hertie School and Bocconi researchers shows how some corporations try to bypass EU regulation.

The 4th conference of the Romanian Network of Migration Studies (RoMig) is announcing a call for papers for the upcoming RoMig 2023 on the theme of Migration dialogues: Engaging research, policy and civil society. This event is organised as part of the Societies in Transition, Crises of Earth thematic group.

Professor Iyiola Solanke visited the Hertie School as part of the CIVICA Research Excellence Tours, giving a talk on how to centre Black women in EU equality law.

Marion Lieutaud is Research Fellow in Computational Social Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Thanks to the CIVICA Research Postdoctoral Mobility Scheme, she stayed for 3 months in the Sciences Po - CRIS laboratory.

From October through December of 2022, EUI Max Weber postdoctoral fellow Gozde Kilic was embedded at CEU in Vienna as part of CIVICA’s postdoctoral mobility program, which offers postdoctoral researchers from across the alliance the opportunity to visit other CIVICA member institutions to advance their research.

In an online workshop held on 7 March 2023, a group of researchers presented their work on the CIVICA Research Project STEADFAST. Silvia Pianta, Visiting Fellow at the European University Institute’s Max Weber Programme, organised the event and gave a presentation on the role of food demand in climate change mitigation. The event was a joint effort between CIVICA members Bocconi University, Central European University, and the European University Institute (EUI).

The outcomes of the EPO-WG project, funded by CIVICA Research, do not end with the study of political polarisation in Europe; a new network of computational social scientists is also emerging.

CIVICA Research Excellence Tours are designed to develop the scientific identity of the CIVICA alliance within the global academic community. During these visits, leading scholars present their research, share their expertise, and meet with faculty and early-stage researchers at the host institutions.

Postdoc Ivo Gruev to lead the CIVICA-funded study examining democratic backsliding in East Central Europe.

Silvia Griselda took advantage of the CIVICA Research Postdoctoral Mobility Scheme opportunity to refine her research with a stay at the London School of Economics and Political Science

The European University alliance CIVICA, to which the EUI belongs, announced in late 2022 the winners of funding after the latest call for collaborative research projects.

Télio Cravo is investigating the complex interplay between global mining, gold standards, and slavery. His research, and a CIVICA Research mobility scheme, has brought him from the EUI Max Weber Programme and the History Department, to the Centre for History at Sciences Po.

WELDECO is a collaborative research project of CIVICA Members: CEU, Bocconi, EUI and LSE

The Stockholm School of Economics hosted the CIVICA Doctoral Conference from 30 November to 2 December 2022. The conference offered early-stage researchers from CIVICA institutions an opportunity to get involved in various feedback sessions, talks, and hands-on academic practice training workshops to prepare them for their academic job market.

The team of the research project “When the Law is Silent: Hate Crime Prosecution and Implicit Bias in Law Enforcement Agencies (SILAW)” – one of the winners of the CIVICA’s first call for collaborative research proposals – presented the preliminary results of research in Oxford last October.

The LSE Data Science Institute hosted a research hackathon in November 2022 that provided participants with the chance to explore the environmental crises of wildfires and drought in Europe. Professor Ken Benoit (LSE) explains what happened.

Written by Kamil Jonski, a participant of the Research Hackathon on “Democracy in the 21st century” and a graduate of the SGH Warsaw School of Economics, this article presents the outcome of one of the discussions that were held.

“I would advise being very open with your network about your ambitions and where you want to take your career, it is how advice and opportunities can be given to you.”

Eleven collaborative projects selected for funding to address CIVICA’s four core themes.

On 6-7 October, researchers and faculty from across CIVICA institutions and beyond gathered at the European University Institute (EUI) for the first in-person workshop organised in the context of the alliance’s Data-Driven Technologies for the Social Sciences research area.

Researchers at CEU and Bocconi reinforced their contacts thanks to CIVICA Research and are now planning to conduct joint projects on the spread of transmissible diseases

Catherine Lefèvre, EUI Max Weber Fellow at the History Department, is the winner of the poster competition hosted by the Central European University (CEU) in the framework of the first CIVICA Research Conference. The event took place on 1-2 September at the CEU’s Budapest campus

Riccardo Zecchina is a theoretical physicist and the Head of the new Department of Computing Sciences at Bocconi University in Milan.

Federica Querin, Max Weber Fellow at EUI, shares her experience at Bocconi's Dondena Centre through the CIVICA Postdoctoral Mobility Scheme.

The 'Digital Trade Integration' research project draws on the expertise and experience of academics and practitioners from the CIVICA alliance and beyond. They are now on their way towards delivering a dataset covering digital trade regulations in 94 countries.

Scholars from across the CIVICA European university alliance met on 16-17 June at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence to discuss how politicisation of the EU judiciary affects the European constitutional order.

The shift to ‘open’ working across the social sciences as a discipline group entails a welcome but demanding cultural change with three false starts, according to Patrick Dunleavy.

The Historical Archives of the European Union at the EUI, along with CIVICA partners, carried out a survey for CIVICA Research on those institutions’ archives services, to identify complementarities in collections, and explore further collaboration.

Organised by institutional partners and hosted by CEU, the recent CIVICA Research Collaborative Hackathon under the CIVICA theme ‘Democracy in the 21st Century’ explored the measurement of ‘democracy with adjectives’.

Giulia Gentile is Italian, from Naples, but she arrives to the EUI from the UK. A law fellow at LSE, Giulia has returned to Italy as a visiting fellow scholar at the EUI through the CIVICA postdoctoral mobility scheme.

SNSPA launched the Academic Advance Research, a research hub on instruments dedicated to social sciences researchers, with the aim of creating an academic network of excellence.

The new CIVICA Research Excellence Tours kick off at Sciences Po and consecutively at the EUI with the talk "Governance for transformative change: Lessons from the EU’s sustainability transition" by Assistant Professor Jerneja Penca (EMUNI).

As part of the CIVICA Research STEADFAST project, Valentina Bosetti (Bocconi University) and Silvia Pianta (EUI), jointly with Elina Brutschin (IIASA), are investigating the role of changing dietary habits in mitigating global warming.

SNSPA hosts event highlighting results from a CIVICA Research project focused on antisemitism in Romanian, Bulgarian, and German judicial systems.

CEU hosted Sciences Po Research Fellow Bruno Cautres to teach the first workshop of CIVICA Research’s Innovative Research Methods Workshop Series.

A unique partnership under CIVICA Research aims to examine ideologies and attitudes to issues of public debate.

The EmoMap project, coordinated by Nicoletta Balbo, brings together scholars from Bocconi University, Hertie School and CEU to analyse the formation and evolution of emotions during such a stressful time.

The CIVICA Research project aims to inform decisions on national and international migration policy.

Flavia and Bastien, PhD candidates at Sciences Po, explain how the CIVICA Research doctoral conference helped them prepare for the professional academic market.

Fifteen PhD candidates from across the alliance met at the EUI for a training conference on how to prepare for the job market.

In the first edition, you can learn more about CIVICA Research, meet some of our researchers, and discover research initiatives, opportunities and events from across the alliance.

SNSPA's Andrei Țăranu visited the Hertie School in Berlin to explore existing and new ties within CIVICA and CIVICA Research.

The LSE Data Science Institute hosted a research hackathon in December 2021 to find out why societies have had such different experiences of COVID. Ken Benoit (LSE) explains what happened.

LSE's Patrick Dunleavy sets out initial ideas to foster a cultural shift towards open social science, explored in a current CIVICA Research project.

In the first CIVICA Research open science roundtable, researchers and staff from the alliance discussed how to promote and deepen open science practices.

The two researchers discuss current and upcoming CIVICA Research highlights and opportunities, and what the project brings to researchers across the alliance.