The POLITICO PhD programme builds on the success of the interdisciplinary researcher training provided by the University of Aberdeen’s Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society and the Rule of Law (CISRUL). The MSCA COFUND grant is enabling the expansion of the programme, improvement in the working conditions of recruited researchers, and the further development of multi-disciplinary and trans-sectoral partnerships, across the EU and beyond.
The POLITICO programme builds on previous CISRUL efforts to understand better the political concepts that inspire and are invoked by political actors in the world today, which demonstrated the need to train a generation of researchers in multi-disciplinary and comparative approaches to the key political concepts through which we understand and act on the world around us. When the Arab Spring protestors called for ‘democracy’, for example, Western policy-makers focused largely on electoral reform, yet CISRUL researchers showed the protestors understood ‘democracy’ to include social justice, which has been largely ignored. Through POLITICO, 2 cohorts of 6 high-quality international Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) have the opportunity to propose and develop their own research projects around the theme of how political concepts are deployed in the world. POLITICO ESRs look to understand how political principles have been fostered historically, debated philosophically and in politics, fought over by social movements, codified in law, transmitted through education and the media, and lived out in everyday life.
For example, competing notions of ‘the people’ were at stake in the referenda on the European constitution, arguably culminating in the Brexit vote, yet media writers, policy makers and scholars alike struggle to articulate what ‘the people’ means in different contexts. This is the focus of 2 of the POLITICO ESRs. Another ESR focuses on what ‘secularism’ means in different times and places, and especially whether secularism has a Christian bias - that is, whether the norms of appearance and behaviour considered secular are harder for non-Christians to meet. Beyond Europe, international development actors frequently call for building ‘civil society’ in authoritarian countries, and one POLITICO ESR is addressing how ‘civil society’ is understood in Vietnam, and with what consequences.
In doing so, the POLITICO ESRs are taking the contextual study of political concepts beyond intellectual history and political theory, as well as beyond Western Europe and North America on which most scholarship focuses. By analysing principles that are cited by political actors and commentators across the world, the ESRs will achieve a better understanding of current political processes. They will also help to refresh the vocabulary of social and political theory, inform media and scholarly debate, and design better policy and movement strategies.
