Kick-off meeting – 14-18 January 2019, London

POPREBEL Consortium hold its kick-off meeting at UCL, London, with the participation of the representative of the European Commission Jarkko Siren (REA Project Officer). During the five-day workshop all the work packages were presented by the partner universities, and the Edgeryders‘ team also introduced its cutting-edge methodology in “online cultural anthropology”.

About the POPREBEL Consortium

Institute of World Economy is the part of the UCL-led consortium which has won a large Horizon 2020 three-year research project entitled ‘Populist rebellion against modernity in 21st-century Eastern Europe: neo-traditionalism and neo-feudalism’ (POPREBEL).

This is the second largest project on the rise of populism in Central and Eastern Europe that the consortium led by UCL SSEES has won, following the award of EUR 3,500,000 to fund an Innovative Training Network on ‘Delayed Transformational Fatigue in Central and Eastern Europe: Responding to the Rise of Illiberalism/Populism’ (FATIGUE). Corvinus University of Budapest is the member of this consortium, too.

The aim of POPREBEL is to take stock of the recent rise of populism – in its various forms – in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), including the Western Balkans. Its trajectory is not just interesting in and of itself: it is also the harbinger of a possible future for the continent as a whole. It is urgent for West Europeans to look into the CEE mirror, just as it is urgent for the CEE region to understand itself. We describe the phenomenon, create a typology of its various manifestations, reconstruct trajectories of its growth and decline, investigate its causes, interpret its meanings, diagnose its consequences and propose policy solutions. Our focus is on the CEE region but we will engage in comparisons with populisms in other parts of the world, particularly Western Europe.

The project’s research teams, ranging from experts in economics to cultural studies, will rely on various methods but at the centre of the whole enterprise is a novel method of online ethnography that will generate a massive, original database to be analysed by all partners.