Keywords: Centre for Advanced Study; CAS; CAS-Sofia; Newsletter; CAS Newsletter; CAS Newsletter 2015-2016
Articles, pictures and interviews can be reprinted only with the consent of Centre for Advanced Study Sofia (CAS - Sofia). Any citations should be duly acknowledged.
More...
Keywords: Centre for Advanced Study; CAS; CAS-Sofia; Newsletter; CAS Newsletter; CAS Newsletter 2014-2015
Articles, pictures and interviews can be reprinted only with the consent of Centre for Advanced Study Sofia (CAS - Sofia). Any citations should be duly acknowledged.
More...
Keywords: Centre for Advanced Study; CAS; CAS-Sofia; Newsletter; CAS Newsletter; CAS Newsletter 2012-2013
Articles, pictures and interviews can be reprinted only with the consent of Centre for Advanced Study Sofia (CAS - Sofia). Any citations should be duly acknowledged.
More...
Keywords: Centre for Advanced Study; CAS; CAS-Sofia; Newsletter; CAS Newsletter; CAS Newsletter 2010
Articles, pictures and interviews can be reprinted only with the consent of Centre for Advanced Study Sofia (CAS - Sofia). Any citations should be duly acknowledged.
More...
Keywords: Centre for Advanced Study; CAS; CAS-Sofia; Newsletter; CAS Newsletter; CAS Newsletter 2006
Articles, pictures and interviews can be reprinted only with the consent of Centre for Advanced Study Sofia (CAS - Sofia). Any citations should be duly acknowledged.
More...
Keywords: Centre for Advanced Study; CAS; CAS-Sofia; Newsletter; CAS Newsletter; CAS Newsletter 2004
Articles, pictures and interviews can be reprinted only with the consent of Centre for Advanced Study Sofia (CAS - Sofia). Any citations should be duly acknowledged.
More...
Keywords: Centre for Advanced Study; CAS; CAS-Sofia; Newsletter; CAS Newsletter; CAS Newsletter 2002
Articles, pictures and interviews can be reprinted only with the consent of Centre for Advanced Study Sofia (CAS - Sofia). Any citations should be duly acknowledged.
More...
Keywords: Centre for Advanced Study; CAS; CAS-Sofia; Newsletter; CAS Newsletter; CAS Newsletter 2002
Articles, pictures and interviews can be reprinted only with the consent of Centre for Advanced Study Sofia (CAS - Sofia). Any citations should be duly acknowledged.
More...
Keywords: second hand textile market;
The massive use of second-hand clothes is one of the many innovations practiced by Bulgarian consumers over the last decade. The first shops for secondhand clothes, mostly of West European origin, appeared immediately after the fall of the socialist regime in 1989. At the beginning, they were located in back streets, backyards, modest spaces, and the information about them circulated among informal consumer networks. Slowly, the shops gained in profitability and respectability, and ten years later we find them in central streets, the heart of the towns, under neon shop-signs announcing their existence with a specific modest dignity or humor. Buying and using second-hand clothes to such an extent is a relatively new phenomenon in Bulgaria and it has encountered specific obstacles, related to local tradition. For many Bulgarians, using clothes previously belonging to another implied either a close personal relationship to the prior owner or lower social standing, with a variety of shades between these positions. At least at the beginning, buying and wearing second-hand clothes was far from an anonymous, impersonal transaction. It involved intense work of symbolic appropriation and quite often, it led to refl ection on the relationship between old and new owner. Almost inevitably, this led to analysis of the imagined West Europeans who used to don these clothes and the new Bulgarian owners, similarities and dissimilarities between them, and the symbolic links between Bulgarian customers and their imagined Western counterparts.
More...
In this text I would not reflect upon different approaches towards migration; many books deal with this issue (to point just a few: Chow R. 1993; Baubock R. 1994; Cesarani D. and M. Fulbrook 1996; Appadurai 1996; Massey et all, 1998; Brettell and Hollifi eld 2000; Wallace and Stola 2001). Here I want to focus on a specific type of migration – temporary migration and its influence upon the self-perception of temporary migrants. My paper is based on a qualitative study of Bulgarian gastarbeiters in Western European countries that are members of the EU.
More...
When drafting my research proposal nearly a year ago, I had decided to put the stress on the factors that drive, in my humble opinion, Bulgarian economic and social development during the Interwar period. In that research proposal I was contesting the conventional wisdom of correlating Bulgarian economic development to just a few key factors, the state and the investment banks (Gerschenkron, 1966). Moreover, it was my belief that other social structures had so far been omitted in the yet sluggish debate on Bulgaria’s effort towards modernization. Via my research I intended to insert other variables in the equation which Fukuyama (1995) calls ‘intermediate structures of sociability’ – the large corporations, the different forms of social activism and the political parties.
More...
Any survey on publications in the field of political studies would inevitably show that analysis concentrates rather on leaders, elections and crises than on institutions and inter-institutional relations. This is because institutions are perceived as an already existing framework, as something given. Institutions and relations between them change so rarely and/or so slowly that in many cases these changes could be ignored in a short-term analysis. As it came out from my search for secondary literature especially rare are studies on the head-of-state institution. This article tries to demonstrate that such a study can be a helpful tool for the analysis of the establishment of democratic regimes in former communist countries. It can be revealing in terms of understanding authoritarian, paternalist and populist traditions in post-communist societies and their manifestation on the highest level of the political system in the recent decades. The study focuses on the evolution of the head-of-state institution in the Southeast European post-communist states (Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, the successor states of former Yugoslavia), considering other post-communist countries as controlling cases.
More...
The aim of this paper is to identify the incentives of the institutional trust on the regional levels of two neighboring areas along the Danube. The approach is a comparative one; two border zones from northern Bulgaria and southern Romania, having a certain similarity as regards historical past and social organization, are juxtaposed. The research took place both at the level of these circumscribed geographical areas and in particular localities. The hypothesis was that the networks of social trust have a strong infl uence upon the civic and political commitments. By the term ‘commitment’ I mean the social reliability for roles and position takings in the frame of the local institutions (mayoralty, political parties, civic and cultural associations).
More...
Keywords: Civil society; Czech Republic; Non-democratic regimes; Slow emancipation; 1989; Legal environments; CSO;
This study focuses on the key aspects of Czech civil society two decades after the revolution of 1989. More particularly, we explore a particular function of civil society – the political, representative, contentious, or advocacy function – and deliberately leave aside the others. In other words, we stress the “political” sense of the concept of civil society that was proposed and developed by many thinkers (for overview see Keane 1998; Cohen, Arato 1999; Kaldor 2003). This study acknowledges that the concept is inextricably linked to the notion of political order or democracy and that its political dimensionis a key aspect that distinguishes this social sphere from the state, family, or economy. Some of the contemporary normative perspectives on civil society propose an ideal type of civil sphere that prevents the powers of the state and the market from invading the lives of citizens (e.g., Habermas, Skocpol, Ehrenberg).
More...
Keywords: Centre for Advanced Study Sofia Newsletter
Articles, pictures and interviews can be reprinted only with the consent of the Centre for Advanced Studies Sofia
More...
Keywords: Centre for Advanced Study Sofia
Articles, pictures and interviews can be reprinted only with the consent of the Centre for Advanced Study Sofia
More...
Keywords: Centre for Advanced Study Sofia Newsletter
Articles, pictures and interviews can be reprinted only with the consent of the Centre for Advanced Study Sofia
More...
Keywords: career growth; women scientists; Bulgarian Academy of Sciences; communism
The object of the paper is the development of Bulgarian science during the totalitari-an period (1945-1989), but its subject is the scientific career of the habilitated women, working in the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS) – the largest scientific organiza-tion in the country at that time. The aim is to explore the opportunities for vertical social (scientific) mobility and the existence of a “glass ceiling” for women’s scientific careers at the BAS. The research uses the social history approach, creating a collec-tive portrait and identifying major trends in the study period, using historical analysis of archival and published documents and content analysis of a prosopographic data-base containing biographies of habilitated women from the institutes and the labora-tories of the BAS.
More...
Keywords: Populism; political theory; comparative politics; political discourse; political identity;
Populist discourse is notoriously hard to pinpoint, molding itself on a great variety of national circumstances. In every instance, however, one element always remains present, namely the opposition between the people and the inimical Other. The Other has been a constant for populists from Juan Peron to Donald Trump. The present article argues that despite the importance placed upon “the people” within scholarship on populism, the inimical Other is presently the key concept through which populism is defined. Placing a negative term as central to the populist phenomenon, the article will then show the importance of the inimical Other in historical terms. Unlike those who abide by the discursive rules of liberal democracy, which pacify friend-enemy distinctions, populists embrace a foundational Manichean opposition that is reminiscent of defunct ideologies such as fascism, Nazism, and communism.
More...
