Participatory Democratic Innovations in Southeast Europe: How to Engage in Flawed Democracies [Minkštas viršelis]

List of Tables

List of Figures

List of Contributors

Acknowledgments

1 Why Do We Need Participatory Democratic Innovations in Southeast Europe?

IRENA FIKET, VUJO ILI, EDOMIR MARKOV AND GAZELA PUDAR DRAKO

PART 1

Context of the Participatory Democratic Innovations in Southeast Europe

2 Social Movements, Active Citizenship and Democratic Innovation: An
Overview

NENAD MARKOVIKJ, IVAN DAMJANOVSKI AND ZORAN ILIEVSKI

3 Participation, Responsiveness, Interaction: The Importance of Epistemic
Checks-and-Balances for the Revitalization of Democratic Institutions

ANDRIJA O

4 Political Participation in Southeast Europe: A Scoping Review

VUJO ILI AND EDOMIR MARKOV

PART 2

Social Movements and Civil Society Experimentation

5 Towards the Democratization of Urban Planning: A Case Study of Three
Deliberative Forums in Belgrade

JOVANA TIMOTIJEVI AND IVA UKI

6 Heterotopia, Social Movements and Democratic Innovation: The Case of AKC
Metelkova Mesto in Ljubljana, Slovenia

NATHAN SIEGRIST

7 Enacting Resistance, Performing Citizenship: Trajectories of Political
Subjectification in the Post-Democratic Condition

BOJAN BAA

8 Agonist Reading of Social Movements in Illiberal Democracies: The Case of
The Social Movement for Truth and Justice

JASMIN HASANOVI, VALIDA REPOVAC NIKI AND EMINA ADILOVI

PART 3

Towards Institutional Politics

9 Yugoslav Self-Management as a Model of Participatory Municipal Governance?
Local Communities in Belgrade in the 1980s

MLADEN OSTOJI

10 Norming Participatory Practices of Movement Parties in Southeast Europe

IRENA FIKET, GAZELA PUDAR DRAKO AND JELENA VASILJEVI

11 Democratic Innovations in an Illiberal Landscape: Three Ideas from Hungary
ESZTER KOVĮCS SZITKAY, DĮNIEL OROSS AND BOLDIZSĮR SZENTGĮLI-TÓTH

Index

List of Tables

4.1 The geographic focus of the articles about political participation in SEE
20102022

5.1 Overview of design elements of the three deliberative forums

10.1 Internal party democracy index for Zelenolevi front and MOEMO!

10.2 Comparison of members rights in the statutes of Zelenolevi front and
MOEMO!

10.3 Organizational structure of Zelenolevi front and MOEMO!

10.4 Decision making of Zelenolevi front and MOEMO!

11.1 Topics and questions of National Consultations

11.2 Transformation of National Consultation from deliberative practice to
plebiscitary instrument

List of Contributors

Emina Adilovi is a Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Social
Science Research, Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Sarajevo in
Bosnia and Herzegovina. Her area of interests include information and
communication sciences, cultural studies, narratology, knowledge
organization, content analysis and digital publishing. From 2015 to 2019 she
worked for several publishing houses and as a theater producer. Since 2022,
she has been employed as an external associate at the International Burch
University (IBU). She won the Kemal Bakari Award for activism in helping
the users of public library services become information literate. Emina has
published various scientific articles and research in monographic and serial
publications.

Bojan Baa is a Marie Skodowska-Curie Fellow at the Department of Sociology
and Work Science, University of Gothenburg, and a Research Associate at the
Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Montenegro. His research on
civil society, social movements, and contentious politics has been published
in a variety of peer-reviewed outlets, including Sociology, Antipode,
International Political Sociology, Europe-Asia Studies, among several others.
His current research examines the relationship between grassroots and elite
expressions of populism during turbulent times and, since the outbreak of the
COVID-19 pandemic, the intersection of populism, pseudoscientism, and
conspiracism in the digital public sphere. In recognition of his
contributions to the field of postsocialist studies, Baa was awarded the
2022 Routledge Area Studies Interdisciplinarity Award.

Iva uki graduated from the Faculty of Architecture of the University of
Belgrade where she also obtained her PhD in urban planning. The areas of her
research include urban planning and urban commons, which she pursues through
intersecting academic and practice-based perspectives. In 2011, she
co-founded the collective Ministry of Space, which aims to contribute to the
democratic and just development of cities. uki actively works with the
community supporting local initiatives in their efforts to address spatial
issues and contribute to socio-political change in line with the principles
of social justice. When it comes to her academic career, uki is engaged as
a guest lecturer and/or researcher at many Universities in Europe and abroad
such as TU Berlin, ETH, MIT, Oxford, etc. She is a member of the Advisory
board of the Faculty of Applied Arts in Vienna, the board of the Guerrilla
Foundation in Germany, the board of the Trag Foundation and the Chair of the
board of Jelena anti Foundation, both in Serbia.

Ivan Damjanovski (PhD) is a Professor at the Department of Political Science,
Faculty of Law, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje. Currently, he
also serves as Chair of the Institute for Political Science, Media, and
Communication at the Faculty of Law. He is also an associate researcher at
the think-tank Institute for Democracy Societas Civilis Skopje. He has
previously been engaged as an academic guest at the Center for Comparative
and International Studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in
Zurich (ETH). His research and academic interests are focused on
democratization, Europeanisation, EU enlargement, differentiated integration,
EU integration theory and ethnic identity politics.

Irena Fiket is a Senior Research Fellow and academic coordinator of the
Laboratory for Active Citizenship at the Institute for Philosophy and Social
Theory, University of Belgrade. Her current research interests lie in
deliberative democracy, citizens participation, democratic innovations,
social movements and Western Balkans. She published a book on those topics,
in addition to numerous book chapters and articles in journals such as
Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, PACO- Partecipazione e Conflitto,
Italian Political Science Review, Javnost The Public, European Union
Politics, and others. She has been involved in numerous international
research projects and was the academic coordinator of Jean Monnet Network
Active Citizenship: Promoting and Advancing Innovative Democratic Practices
in The Western Balkans.

Jasmin Hasanovi is a Senior Teaching Assistant at the Department for
Political Science at the Faculty of Political Science, University of Sarajevo
in Bosnia and Herzegovina. His area of expertise emphasizes political
philosophy and critical political theory, social and political movements, as
well as the relations between arts and politics, cyberpolitics, and
geopolitics. He is engaged in courses on Basics of Philosophy, Political
Philosophy, Theories of Democracy and Human Rights, Geopolitics,
International Security and Energy Security. Currently, he is working on his
PhD thesis on the epistemological and ontological problem of the idea of
emancipation in contemporary political theory.

Vujo Ili is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social
Theory at the University of Belgrade. He holds a PhD in Political Science
from the Central European University in Budapest. His main areas of interest
include participation in political processes, from elections and democratic
institutions to political conflicts and violence. He has received several
awards, including Central European Universitys Award for Best Dissertation
in 2020 and an award from the Association for the Study of Nationalities for
the best doctoral paper in
2016. His articles have appeared in Southeast
European and Black Sea Studies, Contemporary Southeastern Europe, Serbian
Political Thought, and Philosophy and Society. He has also contributed
chapters to several books, including Undermining Democracy: Processes and
Institutions in Serbia 2010-2020. Vujo is also a Policy and Research Advisor
at the citizen association Crta, where he is developing election observation
and survey methodology and conducts its annual Citizen Engagement survey.

Zoran Ilievski (PhD) is a tenured professor at the Political Science
Department at the Faculty of Law at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in
Skopje. He has worked on a number of research projects with the University of
Graz, LSE, European Academy of Bolzano and the University of Zurich, as well
as leading a number of EU research and teaching projects in the framework of
TEMPUS, FP6, FP7, and the Swiss SCOPES program. Since 2008 he led
institutional development projects at his Faculty. The initial project
established the first MA program in the country on EU Institutions and
Policies taught in English, while the latter established the first joint
degree program in the country, together with the Universities of Graz,
Zagreb, and Belgrade, focusing on Southeast European studies. He is leading
the Southeast European Office of the Global Council for Tolerance and Peace.
He has published on topics of comparative ethnic conflict management,
international relations and European integration.

Eszter Kovįcs Szitkay obtained her law degree in 2017 from the University of
Pécs Faculty of Law. After working as a junior associate at a law firm, she
started her PhD studies in 2019 at the University of Public Service Doctoral
School of Law Enforcement; her research topic is access to justice. Since
2020, she has been a junior research fellow at the Centre for Social Sciences
Institute for Legal Studies, and from 2021 she is an assistant editor for
Hungarian Journal of Legal Studies. Besides her PhD studies, she takes part
in the following research projects: Legal approaches to operationalize
nationality and ethnicity (in this project she is also a research assistant)
and Potential risks and opportunities in the regulation and application of
Artificial Intelligence (134962 and 138965 Hungarian National Research and
Innovation Grants and the Artificial Intelligence National Laboratory
Program). She has domestic and foreign publications a few are forthcoming
in Hungarian and English (some with Andrįs L. Pap), and was also a co-editor
of an edited volume. In 2022, she was a visiting short-term scholar at the
New York University School of Law with two of her colleagues. Her research
interest include access to justice in its theoretical and practical aspects,
conceptualization of race and ethnicity, law enforcement, and democratic
innovations.

edomir Markov is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and
Social Theory, University of Belgrade. He holds a PhD in Journalism and Mass
Communication from Korea University. His research focuses on diverse topics
in the field of political communication, primarily those concerning the role
of source perceptions, media repertoires and discussion networks in
information gathering and processing. In his current projects, he deals with
the deliberative inquiry approach to audience-media relations, anti-press
hostility and democratic innovations in hybrid regimes. His work has appeared
in international peer-reviewed journals including Journalism, Journalism &
Mass Communication Quarterly and Journalism Practice.

Nenad Markovikj (PhD) is a tenured professor at the Political Science
Department at the Faculty of Law at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in
Skopje. He has a wealth of teaching experience as well as a mentoring
experience of PhD and MA theses students. He has a vast experience in
managing international projects and research experience including SCOPES,
Open Government Partnership, and Horizon 2020 projects. Experience in the NGO
sphere board member and researcher in the Institute for Democracy Societas
Civilis Skopje (IDSCS). He is founder and member of the Macedonian
Political Science Association (MPSA) as well as former head of the department
of political science at the Law Faculty Justinian I. He has published
numerous articles and book chapters in political theory, social capital,
political philosophy, nationalism, civil society, and political
culture/myth.

Dįniel Oross, PhD political scientist, graduated from the Institute of
Political Science of the Eötvös Lorįnd University in 2009 and received his
doctorate from Corvinus University of Budapest in
2015. Since 2011 he has
been a Research Fellow at the Institute of Political Science of the Centre
for Social Sciences. He was a member of the Steering Committee of COST Action
(CA17135 BE) Deliberative Constitution-making since 2018, served as
Vice-Chairman in
2022. He is an editorial member of the Studies in Political
Science and the Bibó Review of Law and Political Science. He gained teaching
experience as lecturer at the Political Science Section of Istvįn Bibó
College, and as a Fulbright Fellowship lecturer at Hartwick College (Oneonta,
NY, USA). His research topics include democratic innovations, political
participation, youth policy.

Mladen Ostoji completed his PhD at Queen Mary, University of London, in
2012. His doctoral research focused on transitional justice and
democratization in Serbia during the 2000s. He was a research fellow at
Central European University in Budapest in 2012-2013 and at New Europe
College in Bucharest in 2014, and worked as a Lecturer at Goldsmiths College
in London in
2017. Besides doing research, he has been working as a
consultant in the field of decentralization and local governance for state
institutions and development agencies in the Balkans and West Africa. His
current research interests focus on participatory and direct forms of local
governance. His contribution to this volume is based on research funded by
the Open Society Foundation in Serbia within the program Serbia and Global
Challenges: Towards More Fair and Democratic Public Policies.

Gazela Pudar Drako is a political sociologist, Senior Research Fellow and
the Director of the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of
Belgrade. She has been engaged as consultant and researcher in numerous
projects with international organizations. She serves as a member of
President Bidens Summit for Democracy Cohort for Deliberative Democracy and
Citizens Assemblies. Her fields of interest are deliberative democracy,
participatory democratic innovations, social movements and gender. She writes
on social engagement, particularly intellectuals, participatory innovations
and social movements.

Valida Repovac Niki is an Associate Professor at the Department of
Sociology at the Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Sarajevo. Her
research focuses on political sociology and political theory. She published a
book titled On Cosmopolitanism Theoretical Debates.

Nathan Siegrist is a PhD student in sociology at the University of
Gothenburg. His research interests are located at the nexus of social
movements, urban sociology and critical theory. Nathans PhD project seeks to
investigate how urban movements connected to squats and autonomous spaces
shape urban development in contemporary Europe. Drawing on social movement
theory and critical perspectives on neoliberal urbanization, he focuses
specifically on the interplay between co-optation and resistance in
grassroots movements capacity to enact social change. For these purposes, he
has a particular interest in current developments in Central and Eastern
Europe.

Andrija o (PhD, University of Belgrade) is a Research Fellow at the
University of Belgrade, Faculty of Philosophy, Institute of Philosophy. His
research focuses on an interdisciplinary approach to contemporary political
challenges, where he combines conceptual analysis and empirical perspectives.
The topics of his papers pertain mainly to deliberation, participation,
institutional and interpersonal trust, voting, civic education, the notion of
truth in politics, and the critical debates on research methodology and
research design. He has also written a book on Kant and a number of papers
pertaining to German idealism. He taught MA courses on these topics at the
Charles University in Prague in 2021 and
2023. He also taught undergraduate
courses on German Classical philosophy at the Department of Philosophy,
Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade for nine years.

Boldizsįr Szentgįli-Tóth is a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Social
Sciences, Institute for Legal Studies and also a researcher at the National
University of Public Service, Eotvos József Research Centre, Research
Institute of the Information Society. He obtained his PhD degree in February
2019. The topic of his thesis was the constitutional case law related to the
legislation with a qualified majority. His dissertation was also published as
a volume by the Eötvös Publisher and the English version is forthcoming. He
has published several articles in different constitutional law fields, in
Hungarian, English, and Spanish and in domestic and foreign (Portugal,
Romanian, Spanish, Slovakian, Slovenian, and Austrian) volumes and reviews.
He also edited a book together with Nora Chronowski from the latest
constitutional dilemmas of the principle of democracy. He took part in
several research projects, including OTKA No.
128796. led by Nóra Chronowski
from the normative content of the principle of democracy. He has published as
an author or co-author almost 130 academic pieces. At the same time, while he
has also presented the outcome of his researches several times in Hungary and
even elsewhere in Europe more than thirty times. He was invited to
participate as a speaker at the X. World Congress of Constitutional Law
(Seoul, June 2018) and at the 2018 African Congress of Constitutional Lawyers
(Botswana, October 2018).

Jovana Timotijevi is a researcher and activist with a background in
architecture, gender studies and political theory. Her work intersects these
areas, focusing on both democratization of spatial policies, and
spatialization of democracy and social justice. She has been involved in
research projects and educational programs in cooperation with the Faculty of
Architecture (Belgrade), Technische Universität (Berlin), Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, IZK Institute for Contemporary Art (Graz), etc.
Aside from being a member of the Ministry of Space Collective, she is
currently working on her PhD thesis at the Faculty of Political Sciences on
the spatial reading of radical democratic theory.

Jelena Vasiljevi is a Senior Research Associate at the Institute for
Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade. Her background is in
political anthropology and citizenship studies. Her expertise and research
interests include theories of citizenship, citizenship transformations in the
post-Yugoslav states, memory politics, civic engagement, and social movements
in Southeast Europe. Presently, she is primarily interested in theories and
practices of solidarity. She was a Research Fellow at the University of
Edinburgh, working on an ERC project on citizenship transformations in the
former Yugoslav states (CITSEE) and a Research Fellow at the Centre for South
East European Studies, University of Graz. She is currently involved, as a
national coordinator, in a Horizon 2020 project EnTrust. Enlightened trust:
An examination of trust and distrust in governance conditions, effects and
remedies. She is the author of the award-winning book The Anthropology of
Citizenship (in Serbian, 2016), and her articles have appeared in Nations and
Nationalism, Citizenship Studies, East European Politics and Societies among
other journals. She was an expert member of The Balkans in Europe Policy
Advisory Group (BiEPAG).

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the support and funding of the Erasmus+
Jean Monnet Programme in making this book possible through the project
Active Citizenship: Promoting and Advancing Innovative Democratic Practices
in the Western Balkans.

Irena Fiket is a Senior Research Fellow and academic coordinator of the Laboratory for Active Citizenship and Democratic Innovations at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade. Her current research interests lie in deliberative democracy, citizens participation, democratic innovations, social movements and the Western Balkans.

edomir Markov is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade. His current research deals with the deliberative inquiry approach to audience-media relations, anti-press hostility and democratic innovations in hybrid regimes.

Vujo Ili is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade. His research primarily deals with participation in political processes, from elections and democratic institutions to political conflicts and violence.

Gazela Pudar Drako is a Senior Research Fellow and the Director of the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade. Her fields of interest are deliberative democracy, participatory democratic innovations, social movements and gender.