RESEARCH

Marie Curie Individual Fellowship

The Marie Curie IF project called ‘Spatialities of Europeanization in Western Balkans’ (EURoWEB) tackles the overlooked spatial dimension of Europeanization in the Balkans, by focusing on cities, inter-urban networks and urban epistemic communities. It presents original research about the participation of urban actors from Balkans capital cities in European inter-urban networks. To understand how these networks work, how European urban policies flow through these networks and how they impact the Balkans, I am using a mix of affiliation network analysis and interviews with the network members.

From 24 – 25 November 2022, together with my colleague Dorian Jano, we organized a workshop about Europeanization and urban transformation in Southeast Europe at the University of Graz. We aimed to initiate a dialogue between Southeast European and Urban studies scholars to build new vocabularies, methodologies and approaches for studying urban dynamics in the region. Dorian and I are currently preparing the special issue based on this workshop for the Southeast European and Black Sea Studies Journal.

Based on the result of EURoWEB project I am preparing a monograph titled „Spaces of Europeanization in Balkans: Cities, Networks and Urban Epistemic Communities“, under a contract with Routledge. The book is expected to come out in 2024.

This book tackles the overlooked spatial dimension of Europeanization in the Balkans, by focusing on cities, inter-urban networks and urban epistemic communities. It presents original research about the participation of urban actors from Balkans capital cities in European inter-urban networks. By employing a new mixed-method framework, based on Affiliation Network Analysis and expert interviews, the research tracks the circulation of European urban knowledge and policies and their subsequent impacts in the Balkans. While the quantitative analysis confirms the affiliations of Balkans cities in various European networks, the qualitative analysis indicates their variegated influence due to the socio-economic and political context, the hierarchical character of the networks and policy transfer as well as the transformations of Europe and its urban models. Against the backdrop of the existing state and conflict-centred literature on (failures) of European integration in the region, this book offers a fresh multispatial and relational look at the Europeanization that is taking place through direct cooperation on the inter-urban level.