News from the CEU Democracy Institute

In the 18th edition of the Democracy Bulletin, your quarterly newsletter from the CEU Democracy Institute (DI), we are spotlighting our accomplishments and publications from the past months, including takeaways from our annual conference and important updates about our programs.

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HIGHLIGHTS

Excessive Wealth Concentration and Democracy: Our Annual Conference

Our Annual Conference tackled one of the most urgent yet under-discussed questions of our time: how excessive wealth undermines democratic governance. It focused on three central questions, with two panels devoted to each: How does excessive wealth harm democracy? Can hyper-wealth produce public goods? How can we contain excessive wealth? Recordings of every panel are available to re-watch here.

Budapest Forum 2025: Building Sustainable Democracies

The Budapest Forum returned also this year. Organized again by the Municipality of Budapest, Political Capital, and us, it examined the growing role of geopolitics in shaping international relations, the shifting dynamics of transatlantic cooperation, the transformation of the global economic landscape, and the increasingly urgent questions surrounding war and peace. It also explored how democratic societies can respond to the complex challenges they face in this evolving geopolitical environment.

Alexander Bor Awarded Prestigious ERC Starting Grant for Groundbreaking Democracy Research

We are proud to announce that our Post-doctoral Researcher Alexander Bor has been awarded the European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant for his project INFODEM – Intuitive Foundations of Democratic Norms. The project will receive EUR 1.5 million over five years under the ERC Starting Grant scheme, supporting cutting-edge early-career researchers across Europe. It will examine a simple but powerful idea: while citizens often express support for democracy, they rarely reflect on its principles with careful reasoning. Instead, they rely on moral gut feelings about fairness, cooperation, and peaceful conflict resolution. The research will identify which democratic norms resonate intuitively with citizens and which norms require reinforcement through education and public debate.

Laszlo Bruszt Awarded Professor Emeritus Title

Our Founding Co-Director Laszlo Bruszt has been appointed to the rank of Professor Emeritus. The CEU Senate conferred the title of Professor Emeritus to him as of August 1, 2025.

Daniel Hegedus Testified in US Congress

Our Research Affiliate Daniel Hegedus has testified before the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission of the U.S. House of Representatives on the threats that anti-NGO laws pose to democracy and fundamental rights. HE was invited to give testimony for a hearing on laws outside the United States that have introduced restrictive regulations on NGOs. The hearing was called in response to concerns that such legislation imposes unjustified transparency requirements or limits foreign funding of NGOs, measures criticized as authoritarian tools to stigmatize civil society or to restrict freedom of expression and association.

Dimitry Kochenov at Event in European Parliament

Dimitry Kochenov, the Lead Researcher of the DI's Rule of Law Workgroup, spoke in the European Parliament at an event organized by the Apatride Network at the invitation of MEP Yana Toom. The session was organized on statelessness, and it was the first time a stateless-led organization had held an event in the European Parliament.

Our Leadership Academy Launched 2025 Program with New Cohort of Changemakers

The CEU Democracy Institute Leadership Academy (DILA) 2025 program commenced in September, gathering a cohort of 19 exceptional public leaders from the Czech Republic, Croatia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. This unique training is designed to equip mid-career professionals from politics, civil society, and policy experts with the strategic skills to advance democratic change across Central and Eastern Europe. The opening session in Budapest set the stage for the three-month program, blending deep theoretical insights with practical leadership development.

First-Ever Masterclass for Women Concluded Successfully

We have successfully completed our inaugural Masterclass for Women program. The ten-month leadership initiative, designed to address gender inequality in Hungarian public life, concluded with 21 fellows receiving their certificates in a celebratory ceremony. The program equipped early and mid-career women from politics, media, public administration, and think tanks with the knowledge and skills to navigate and lead in male-dominated fields.

Context Program Successfully Concluded Second Semester

The Context Program, our joint project with the Independent Art Department, offering free courses in Hungarian for university students from any field, wrapped up its second semester. Students coming from nearly 25 different areas of study representing more than 10 universities participated in the program, which this semester covered topics including the institutional context of Hungarian art and contemporary culture; the social context of the body; performative resistance in the student protests in Serbia, and many more.

DI at ECPR General Conference

Several DI researchers participated in this year's general conference of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) in Thessaloniki, Greece. They presented their research, participated in panel discussions, and chaired roundtables.

RESEARCH

DE- AND RE-DEMOCRATIZATION

Workshop on Countering Far Right Influence

The Workgroup kicked off the new academic year with a two-day workshop under the Democratic Expeditions project. It sought to identify and evaluate the most effective mechanisms to counter the far-right’s influence, focusing on comparative insights from Europe and Latin America. Participants from roughly 15 universities engaged in seven panel discussions exploring both theory and practice.

Who Are the Enemies of Democracy?

The annual workshop of the Workgroup was organized within the framework of the Politics of Polarization project and focused on the “enemies of democracy.” Participants explored topics such as democratic commitment, vigilance, authoritarian practices, ideological profiles, anti-authoritarian opposition, deep state and deep civil society, cross-national actor traces, and citizen perspectives.

DEMOCRACY IN HISTORY

Workshop on Convergence Between Far-Right and Far-Left Movements

The two-day interdisciplinary workshop was aimed at identifying convergences, alignments, entanglements and ambiguities between the seemingly opposing political practices and discourses of the far-, new-, and alt-right and -left spectrum. It also provided an opportunity for early-career researchers and senior scholars to present their related research and to engage in debates and incorporate perspectives of the North/South, South/South, Global South/"Global East" synergies.

New Book: Utopia and Democracy. Theories, Practices, Fictions

The volume, stemming from the research project Democracy in East Central European Utopianism, edited by Senior Visiting Researcher Zsolt Cziganyik and Post-doctoral Researcher Iva Dimovska, provides a comprehensive review of the relationship between utopia and democracy, challenging the tendency in Western scholarship to assume that an ideal society is inherently democratic.

ENVIRONMENT AND DEMOCRACY

Follow-up to the REAL DEAL Project

Efforts are underway to establish the Citizens Deliberation Academy and Observatory as a follow-up to the Horizon REAL DEAL project, which concluded its three-year action earlier this year. The consortium has eight current members, a combination of research and civil society organizations. The research partners include European University Institute, Technical University Berlin, and Research Institute for Sustainability.

Stephen Stec at UN Workshop

Stephen Stec, the Workgroup’s lead researcher, participated in the two-day Joint UNEP-WMO Consultative Workshop and Science-Policy Dialogue on Solar Radiation Modification, which brought together key experts, researchers and practitioners working on SRM as well as UN Member States and international coalitions and organizations and aimed at consideration of the contentious issue of democratic governance of geoengineering. In June, Stec concluded his term after seven years as representative of the UNEP Science and Technology Major Group.

INEQUALITIES

New Project Application

With support from the DI, our Research Affiliate Olena Fedyuk prepared and submitted an application for the CERV-2025-CITIZENS-REM-TRANSITION call titled RE:MEMBER: Commemoration as an Act of Citizenship and System Change in the Rising Culture of Remembrance in War-time Ukraine. Bringing together Ukrainian artists, activists, and researchers, the project focuses on commemoration practices in wartime Ukraine and their democratizing potential. It aims to contribute to a shared European memory space grounded in pluralism, solidarity, and fundamental rights, and to provide a platform for discussing a shared European future.

CIVICA Supports Research Visit at the EUI

As part of the CIVICA-supported faculty short visit program, our Post-doctoral Researcher Gabor Petri visited the European University Institute (EUI). His visit, hosted by Professor Monika Baar, placed disability studies and the lived experiences of disabled people at the center of academic discussion. In a talk, he presented findings from a participatory study on the changing position of disability movements in countries facing democratic erosion. He also led a workshop introducing the key ideas and principles of disability studies, a multidisciplinary field pioneered by disabled activists and academics.

RULE OF LAW

Article on EU Enlargement Law Applicability in Ukraine

A paper by Dimitry Kochenov, the Workgroup’s lead researcher, and Post-doctoral Researcher Elena Basheska on EU Enlargement law vis-à-vis Ukraine, was published in Ukrainian by NaUKMA Research Papers. Law. The paper was originally published in English in the European Journal of Risk Regulation.

Article on EU Citizenship's New Essentialism

Dimitry Kochenov authored an article with Guillermo Iniguez exploring the watering down of the principle of solidarity by the European Court of Justice. It was published in the European Law Review, a leading journal in the field of EU law.

PODCASTS

Balazs Trencsenyi on His Latest Book

Our Research Affiliate Balazs Trencsenyi talked about his book Intellectuals and the Crisis of Politics in the Interwar Period and Beyond: A Transnational History, which offers a sweeping re-narration of modern European intellectual history through the lens of “crisis.”

Levente Littvay and Alexander Bor in Borderless Knowledge Series

Our Senior Visiting Researcher Levente Littvay discussed the impact AI has on social science research, while our Post-doctoral Researcher Alexander Bor talked the impact of fake news on political behavior in the Borderless Knowledge podcast series, hosted by our Post-doctoral Researcher Balint Mikola.

Peter Kreko in Vienna Coffee House Podcast

Our Research Affiliate Peter Kreko joined Ivan Vejvoda in his Vienna Coffee House Conversations podcast to talk about the post-Enlightenment era in Hungary.

Why Don’t We Learn from the Past?

The latest episode of the Protecting Academia at Risk podcast focuses on the pressing question of why we do not learn from the past.

REVIEW OF DEMOCRACY

The Review of Democracy (RevDem) is our online journal to discuss, analyze, reflect on, and develop possible solutions to the challenges to democracy across the globe today. Check its most important publications from recent weeks:

Capitalism’s Democracy: Competition and Resilience in Twenty-First Century

In an episode of the special series produced in partnership with the Journal of Democracy, Semuhi Sinanoglu and Lucan Way reflect on capitalism’s enduring imperfections while presenting it as a plausible (if contested) force for democratic change worldwide.

From Competitive Authoritarian to Hegemonic: The Decline of Turkish Democracy and the Prospects for Its Revival

In a special two-part podcast, Berk Esen unpacks how Turkey’s competitive authoritarian regime is veering toward full autocracy and then explains how Turkey’s opposition is pushing back against an increasingly hegemonic regime.

What Does Moldova’s 2025 Election Say about its Democracy?

Moldova’s latest parliamentary elections reveal deep tensions beneath the surface. Anastasia Felcher explores how geopolitical fears, economic hardship, and questions about democratic transparency continue to shape the country’s fragile future, despite promises of EU integration and reform.

China’s Hybrid Ideological Convergence within BRICS

The power transition from the liberal Global North to the increasingly assertive Global South signals a shift from a unipolar to a multipolar international system, where emerging economies have the opportunity to contribute more significantly to shaping the global order. Giullia Neagu analyzes how China plays a pivotal role in this context.

Colonial Roots and Continuities in Europe’s Migration System

Janine Silga analyzes the colonial roots of the European migration system, highlights the continuities between the system before and after the formal end of colonialism, and discusses possible ways to overcome coloniality in EU law.

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