ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

"The current project aims at offering the first comprehensive interpretation and reconstruction of the historiographical traditions in the Mediterranean from the fourth to the eighth centuries AD, the crucial transitional period from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. In particular, it advances the hypothesis that the historiography of this period should be understood as ‘post-imperial’, in the sense that the literary, cultural, religious and political traditions of the Roman Empire remained the point of reference at a time when that empire had, by the seventh century, lost its grip on the West and large portions of the East. New realities were thus still understood within a traditional framework and described with long-lived categories – a situation that generated fundamental tensions within late ancient historiography but also spurred great creativity in the genre. In order to be able to test this hypothesis, the project will make new sources available (especially regarding fragmentary Early Byzantine, Syriac, and late Latin historiography), increase the accessibility of existing sources through the creation of an online database, and explore different philological methodologies and interpretative models through a series of specifically targeted studies. Emphasing the shared cultural heritage instead of cultural and political fragmentation, the interpretation will especially focus on the continuation of the rhetorical tradition in late Antiquity, the incarnation of meaning in geographical space, and intercultural contacts across the Mediterranean. It thus hopes not only to establish a new paradigm for our understanding of late antique historiography but also set the study of this field on an improved methodological footing."

1 446 600 €

Start date: 2013-01-01, End date: 2017-12-31

Land is a nexus for crucial societal and environmental challenges including food security, access to water, land degradation, biodiversity loss, and climate change. Development of solutions to balance these tradeoffs and synergies is currently hindered by the lack of theories explaining the conditions under which different pathways of land change occur and lead to different outcomes, integrating human and environmental aspects. This project will develop and test integrated middle-range theories explaining the linkages between three of the major processes in land systems, i.e., (i) land use intensification and expansion, (ii) land use displacement and trade, and (iii) land use transitions or regime shifts. The work will focus on the emerging agricultural frontier of Southern African dry forests and savannas, which is a threatened and understudied region, and its linkages with distant places. To overcome current limitations, the project builds on (i) experience in empirical, place-based studies, (ii) strong knowledge of social sciences and human-environment theories, (iii) rigorous inductive and deductive approaches to develop and test theories, and (iv) new ways to analyze linkages between distant social-ecological systems. We will analyze: (i) The strategic field of actors’ coalitions, institutions and distant linkages in emerging frontiers; (ii) Links between land use displacement, leakage, and local land changes; (iii) Pathways of agricultural expansion and intensification in tropical landscapes; and (iv) The conditions for transformative governance of land systems to foster resilient landscapes that sustain ecosystem services and livelihoods. These results will then be integrated to move towards the next generation of land system science, which will be able to develop, test and be guided by theoretical models. This will contribute to more relevant insights for social-ecological systems broadly and for sustainability and other social and natural sciences.

1 498 420 €

Start date: 2016-05-01, End date: 2021-04-30

The negative employment and social developments across Europe since the start of the crisis, coupled with increased fiscal constraints and changing migration patterns, have led to increasing depictions of EU and third-country immigrants as ‘abusers’ of their social protection systems. Member States have accordingly sought reduce migrants’ ability to access social protection benefits, despite the fact that they are disproportionately at risk of poverty and social exclusion. This project looks at the different strategies that migrants have to access social protection within (post) crisis Europe and does so by explicitly integrating social policy and migration studies’ approaches on the phenomenon. More precisely, it aims to study transnational social protection, that we define as migrants’ cross-border strategies to cope with social risks in areas such as health, long-term care, pensions or unemployment that combine entitlements to host and home state-based public welfare policies and market-, family- and community-based practices. This study thus consists in, first, identifying the social protection policies and programs that home countries make accessible to their citizens abroad, and then compiling this information into an online database. We will then aggregate the results of the database into a Transnational Social Protection Index (TSPIx) in order to determine the overall level of engagement of each state with citizens abroad in a comparative way. Second, on the basis of the results of the index, we will select case studies of migrants from two EU and two non-EU countries that vary in their level of engagement in providing social protection to their citizens abroad. We will then undertake multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork to qualitatively assess the informal social protection strategies used by migrants and examine their interaction with formal host and home state social protection provision.

1 306 718 €

Start date: 2016-11-01, End date: 2021-10-31

MMS-II pursues the hypothesis that the Mamluk sultanate was a cultural product constructed in the interaction between state formation and historiography. MMS-II follows up from the ERC-project MMS' focus on the social production of power networks in the Syro-Egyptian sultanate between the 1410s and 1460s, but it does so by directing the themes of political history and Arabic historiography towards entirely new, unexplored horizons. Current understanding of the late medieval Middle East continues to rely heavily on the rich Arabic historiographical production of the period. However, the particular nature, impact and value of this highly politicized historiography remains hugely underexplored and underestimated. MMS-II aims to remedy this, by arguing with and beyond instead of against or outside of this historiography’s subjectivities. It wants to understand its texts as products of particular socio-cultural practices and, at the same time, as a particular type of actors in such practices. Analytically, state formation will be prioritised as one extremely relevant patterned set of effects of such practices. Heuristically, the project will focus on practices related to claims of historical truth and order, asking how Arabic historiographical texts written between the 1410s and the 1460s related to the regularly changing social orders that were produced around the different sultans of these decades. My main hypothesis is that of these texts' active participation in the construction of a particular social memory of one longstanding sultanate of military slaves (‘Mamlukisation’). MMS-II has three specific objectives: the creation of a reference tool for Arabic historiographical texts from the period 1410-1470; the in-depth study of particular sets of these texts; the analysis of political vocabularies in these texts. By thus exploring the inter-subjective re/production of Arabic historiography MMS-II will generate a welcome cultural turn in late medieval Islamic history.

2 000 000 €

Start date: 2017-01-01, End date: 2021-12-31