Southeastern Europe in ERC Projects: Insights from an International Workshop in Rijeka
On 12 October 2026, at the Centre for Advanced Studies (CAS SEE) in Rijeka, representatives of nine ERC projects, including principal investigators (PIs), postdoctoral researchers, and PhD students, came together, perhaps for the first time in such a format, to discuss their respective experiences and the place of Southeastern Europe (SEE) within ERC-funded research. The international workshop, “Southeastern Europe in ERC Projects: Perspectives, Challenges, Scales,” took place in the Aula Magna of the University of Rijeka’s Rectorate. Hosted by the University of Rijeka, it was jointly organised by CAS SEE and the ERC projects OpenBorders and HumanEuroMed, in collaboration with Housing.YU, Revenant, Brokers of NAM, FeMMiWork, Mempop, Nepostrans, and Racial Socialism.
The discussions explored how ERC-funded research can challenge established narratives about SEE, a region often treated as exceptional, by placing it in dialogue with other areas, including Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and the Mediterranean. The workshop also offered a chance to reflect on research methodologies, interdisciplinary collaboration, and the challenges and opportunities of studying a region whose geographical boundaries remain open to debate.
The morning session: regions, scales and exceptionalism
The morning session opened with an introduction to the event by Sanja Bojanić (University of Rijeka), followed by presentations from the PIs, who engaged with the workshop’s central theme in a session chaired by Igor Duda (Housing.YU).
Presenting Revenant, Jeremy F. Walton introduced the concept of “inter-imperial legacies” in the post-Habsburg, post-tsarist, and post-Ottoman space. He argued that these legacies need to be theorised differently from collective memory and showed how their absence from public debate feeds restorative imperial nostalgia and right-wing appropriations of history. Borut Klabjan (OpenBorders) observed that, despite generating influential scholarship, Southeastern Europe has often remained confined within area studies and framed as an exceptional case. He proposed that SEE be seen less as a self-contained region and more as a “laboratory” for studying borders, sovereignty, mobility and the relationship between local agency and political power. In his view, regional knowledge should be the starting point of broader questions, not their endpoint.
Silvia Salvatici (HumanEuroMed) reflected on how her project defined a Southern European frame for the history of humanitarianism. The frame brings Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece and, in principle, Yugoslavia into one analytical space, and it highlights “ties of proximity” and more horizontal flows of aid. Brigitte Le Normand (FeMMiWork) approached geography through Yugoslavia’s attempts to move out of a “semi-peripheral” position in the global economy, through maritime shipping and labour migration. She also presented FeMMiWork’s integrated research design, which compares Yugoslav, Italian and Turkish women migrants in France and Germany.
Čarna Brković, PI of Racial Socialism, a project which began in November 2026, argued for “thinking laterally” across socialist and post-socialist contexts. Using solidarity fundraising in socialist Yugoslavia and its post-socialist successors as an example, she showed how a “definitional mismatch” arises when concepts such as humanitarianism, philanthropy, and crowdfunding, shaped by other welfare contexts, are applied to the region. She suggested engaging with different bodies of literature and paying attention to emic terms. Finally, Agustín Cosovschi (Brokers of Non-Alignment) described how his project rethinks the geography of non-alignment through biographies and networks. It places Southeastern Europe in a global process of post-imperial transformation and calls attention to the concrete places (apartments, cafés, university halls) where transnational politics took place. He also noted that the project had pushed him out of the single-country perspective in which he was trained.
The afternoon session: postdoctoral perspectives
The afternoon roundtable, chaired by Dr Katarina Kušić (University of Rijeka), gave the floor to four postdoctoral researchers, who spoke about their subprojects and about what it is like to work within the ERC frameworks.
Ivan Jeličić presented Nepostrans, which examined the transition from empire to nation-state across Central and Eastern Europe through local and regional case studies. He described the benefits and difficulties of an “umbrella” structure, the effects of COVID and of the political situation in Hungary on the project, and the problem of defining “the state” when looking at local actors in 1918.
Kevin Kenjar (Revenant) spoke about the value of working with anthropologists, theologians, musicologists and literary scholars, and about how an inter-imperial perspective undermines assumptions inherited from area studies, for example, the idea that the Ottoman Empire was merely an “Eastern” power in Europe. He focused on neglected monuments and minority sites that national narratives have silenced.
Marco Abram (OpenBorders) discussed mountaineering organisations along the Yugoslav-Italian-Austrian border. They developed cross-border practices that drew on Austro-Hungarian references while operating under military border control, complicating simple top-down accounts of Yugoslav socialism.
In my own contribution on Mempop, I described how a bottom-up ethnographic approach to memory and populism in post-imperial borderlands, with Istria and the memory of the foibe as my case, has led me to follow people, caves, practices and narratives across multiple sites and borders, thus away from treating the region as an exceptional case, a theme raised in Borut Klabjan’s morning presentation.
Discussion
The state. Several scholars asked why projects that adopt bottom-up and borderland approaches nonetheless remain tied to the state as an analytical framework. The panellists replied that borders complicate the question of “which state” in the first place. Interlocutors’ biographies cross state lines and political orientations shift over decades. Imperial and post-imperial states were often performative, tearing down and rebuilding symbols to appear functional. In Yugoslavia, the state sometimes withdrew and sometimes reappeared through border control. Maura Hametz (James Madison University), who was in the audience, noticed that many of the contributions of the day had turned on supranational or transnational frameworks. She suggested that it may be time to return to internationalism. Transnationalism looks across and beneath borders and internationalism, by contrast, accepts national borders and seeks to negotiate them from above. She offered this as a question for the group: whether it might offer a useful way of thinking about our projects, or whether research is already moving in that direction.
Representation in the ERC. Participants noted that the region is underrepresented among ERC applicants, even though many projects now study it. To address this underrepresentation, some argued that well-resourced projects can help redistribute opportunities by hiring researchers from and in the region and mentoring prospective applicants.
Managing ERC teams. Practical suggestions included:
- Hire people with prior expertise in the case area, while also mixing career stages and disciplinary or historiographical backgrounds.
- Meeting often, especially in person, and in small informal settings. Online meetings were generally judged less productive.
- Allowing researchers to shape their own research. Researchers stressed that this is crucial for team cohesion and retention, and that prospective PIs may need to design projects with the multi-sited nature of fieldwork in mind.
- Establish regular spaces for exchange, such as bi-weekly fieldwork meetings and cross-site trips, so comparison emerges organically from researchers’ own cases rather than being imposed through an overarching framework.
- Taking precarity seriously. A PhD researcher pointed out that doctoral work in a project can be lonely and that support networks matter. Several scholars noted that the project logic of ERC funding embeds precarity, which individual PIs cannot entirely resolve but should keep in mind when thinking about what happens after the project ends.
In this regard, I want to highlight another practical point from my experience that may help PIs and prospective PIs, institutions hosting ERC projects, postdoctoral researchers, and, to some extent, PhD students: the importance of creating synergies among researchers, research institutions, and ERC-funded projects.
The ERC project Mempop is based at the Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Prague. In early 2026, while conducting ethnographic fieldwork for Mempop in Trieste, I met Professor Borut Klabjan for the first time. A month later, the Institute of Ethnology advertised a mobility opportunity through its “Academy for the Future” programme, and I decided to spend September to December 2026 at the Science and Research Centre (ZRS) in Koper/Capodistria, Slovenia, where Borut Klabjan is Principal Research Associate. The stay allowed me to continue my research and to establish new collaborations. Knowing I would be in Istria in autumn, Klabjan told me in spring that he was organising a roundtable on ERC projects in Southeastern Europe and invited me to contribute as a postdoctoral researcher on Mempop. Had I not been in Koper for the mobility, I could not have attended the workshop, taken part in the discussion and met so many outstanding scholars and colleagues.
This is an excellent example of the synergies that can emerge between a researcher, a research institute, and an ERC project. It shows how institutional connections and mobility opportunities can facilitate participation in wider academic networks, creating exchange possibilities that might otherwise remain inaccessible. Research institutes hosting ERC projects, as well as PIs and researchers themselves, should bear this in mind and actively seek ways to connect local institutional resources with international research networks, fostering transnational and interdisciplinary collaboration.
Next steps
The workshop ended with concrete ideas to continue the conversation and respond to the exceptionalism and regional-framing questions raised in the morning. Participants proposed an annual meeting of ERC projects working on the region, combined with mentoring and training for prospective applicants, particularly from countries with lower application rates. They also considered using COST Actions to connect projects and foster a dialogue with the ERC to support networks of researchers and PIs from underrepresented countries.