Europe is experiencing a steady democratic decline. The trend is discernable in the EU’s old member states, in its new democracies in the Eastern borderland, and in the developing democracies of the Eastern Partnership. A recent manifestation of the phenomenon is the 2024 parliamentary election in Georgia.
“We’ve seen an election marred by ‘voting irregularities’, to put it mildly, that resulted in an unexpected victory for the pro-Russian Georgian Dream party,” says the research project’s Principal Investigator, Michael Molavi. “The four opposition parties are refusing to recognise the result and condemning it as falsified. The EU has likewise declared the election invalid and called for a new election that is actually free and fair. As have hundreds of thousands of Georgian protestors who are bravely taking to the streets and who are now being met by brutal and violent police suppression.”
The deterioration of democracy creates social and political polarisation, directly affecting protest cultures and how citizens engage with their political regimes. Among several projected findings, the research will illuminate the capacities and constraints of protest cultures in countries with different qualities of democracy.
The researchers will examine the repertoires and framing of protestors and the role of citizens across generations in these cultures. The methods used by authorities to challenge protest cultures will also be examined – as will mainstream and social media’s role in triggering or questioning protest cultures. Finally, the researchers will explore the influence of current patterns of protest cultures on the state of democracy in the target countries.
“It’s a hugely important topic of research given the challenging times in which we are living,” says Isabel Schoultz. “There’s excitement to get a project of this scale up and running, but also a clear sense of responsibility given what’s at stake in Europe today.”
The researchers expect the project to strengthen protestors’ capacity to innovate and encourage cross-movement solidarity. Hopefully, it can help facilitate dialogue between protestors, political parties, and media representatives and inspire policy recommendations at national and EU levels.
The 3-year project, “Protest as a Democracy Test: Protest Culture under Transformation and as a Transformative Power”, starts in January 2025 and features a consortium of partners from Spain, Romania, Georgia, Portugal, Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Poland.
Horizon Europe is the key funding programme of the European Union and has granted the project close to 3 million EUR. The project is based and coordinated out of the Sociology of Law Department at Lund University.
