ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

The proposed research entails an ethnographic study of two contemporary cases of post-conflict reconciliation: one, the Bosnian case, where international intervention ended conflict in a stalemate and went on to instigate a decade-long process of transition; and the other, the Spanish case, where a nationally-contrived pact of silence introduced an overnight transition after Franco's death a pact now being broken nearly seventy years after the country's civil war concluded. Both societies witnessed massive violations of international humanitarian law. Both societies are presently exhuming, identifying and re-burying their dead. But their trajectories of transitional justice could not have been more different. This project will investigate how Law shapes cultural memories of wartime atrocity in these contrasting scenarios. How do criminal prosecutions, constitutional reforms, and international rights mechanisms, provide or obfuscate the scales into which histories of violent conflict are framed? Does the systematic re-structuring of legislative and judicial infrastructure stifle recognition of past abuses or does it create the conditions through which such pasts can be confronted? How does Law shape or inflect the cultural politics of memory and memorialisation? And most importantly, how should legal activity be weighted, prioritised and sequenced with other, extra-legal components of peace-building initiatives? The ultimate goal of this project will be to mobilise the findings from the two field-sites to suggest a more nuanced assessment of Law s place in transitional justice. Arguing that disparate historical, cultural and legal contexts require equally distinct approaches towards social healing, the research aims to produce a Post-Conflict Action Framework an architecture of questions and concerns, which, once answered, would point towards context-specific designs for transitional justice programmes in the future.

1 420 000 €

Start date: 2009-09-01, End date: 2013-08-31

At a time when the discourse on constitutionalism has come to focus on the constitutionalisation processes at the European and global level, this project will turn the spotlight on national constitutions. It embarks on an analysis and rethinking of the role and future of national constitutions in the context where decision-making has increasingly shifted to transnational level. The project will have three objectives. The first objective is concerned with the role of constitutions internally within the state: the project assesses how credible the content of constitutions remains given the realities of European integration. To this end, it will undertake a comprehensive, comparative and issue-based analysis of EU-related amendments in national constitutions. The second objective concerns the role of constitutions externally with regard to European integration. While national constitutions have increasingly been regarded as a manifestation of sovereignty, and therefore representing values that are often viewed as parochial, the project will turn the focus on other values contained in the constitutions, such as protection of rights and the rule of law. It will explore constitutional courts’ judgements articulating the rights and values that mandate upholding at supranational level, and assess the responsiveness of the European Court of Justice with regard to such concerns. The third objective applies experiences from the EU context to the new research area of global governance. The project aims to assess whether the constitutional provisions on international treaties suffice to reflect the sheer extent to which decision-making has shifted to international institutions and global regulatory networks. It will also explore how constitutions could respond to the problems increasingly highlighted in the context of global governance in relation to legitimacy, democratic control, accountability and the rule of law.

1 230 958 €

Start date: 2012-01-01, End date: 2018-12-31

This groundbreaking multi-methods political science study investigates the transnational mobilization of conflict-generated diasporas in Europe and its impact on polities experiencing contested sovereignty in the Balkans, the Caucasus, and the Middle East. Four researchers study how diasporas mobilize when a specific aspect of sovereignty is contested in the original homeland: The PI focuses on the emergence of new states (Kosovo, Nagorno-Karabakh, Palestine). The Post-doc focuses on a secessionist movement (Kurdish separatism in Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan). The two Ph.D. students focus on challenges to sovereignty stemming from international military intervention (Iraq) and long-term international governance of a weak state (Bosnia-Herzegovina). Since the scholarly field of diasporas and conflicts still lacks theoretical rigor, this study brings a much needed systematization and innovates in several ways. First, it uses a sequential qualitative and quantitative analysis and multi-sited research techniques that have not been utilized so far. Second, the team seeks to develop a typological theory to incorporate in a single framework: 1) diasporic identities, 2) conditions providing political opportunity structures for transnational mobilization, 3) causal mechanisms concatenating in mobilization processes, and 4) transnational diaspora networks, penetrating various local and global institutions. The study further focuses on five levels of analysis: 1) the attitudes of individuals, 2) characteristics of specific groups, 3) five nation-states with different migrant incorporation regimes (France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the UK), 4) supranational EU and global institutions penetrated by diaspora networks, 5) and patterns of mobilization specific to a certain region. The project also conducts a cross-country representative survey across 25 country-groups, creating a much needed quantitative dataset, sensitive both to transnationalism and specific context.

1 498 771 €

Start date: 2012-02-01, End date: 2017-09-30

"Media reporting on the economy is never far from controversy. Academic economists and the public regularly find journalists at fault in their interpretation of events and prescription of solutions. Past scholarship has sought to locate the biases of journalists in political and institutional contexts. This project takes a novel approach by studying “economic journalism” as a site for the production of public economic knowledge. The practices of journalists are examined to reveal how they parse competing claims of expertise by academic economists, other social scientists and by laymen. The second half of the twentieth century was witness to increased homogeneity in academic economics and interdependence of national economies, yet the content and style of “economic journalism” has remained distinctive across nations. This project sets out to understand how and why media representation of economic knowledge has remained distinctively different even while the content and style of economics converged internationally. The project aims to understand this differentiation by focusing on three international economic controversies: the reconstruction debate post 1945, the monetary and oil crisis of the 1970s, and the current economic crisis; across five nations: USA, UK, France, Argentina, and Brazil. It combines archival research, oral history, ethnographic observation, content and textual analysis of media, to identify media representations of economic expertise and reveal how they are shaped by historical and cultural contexts. Cultural standards of trust, the history and economics of the media, and the history of economics and social movements explain the emergence of distinct national genres of “economic journalism.” The project offers a original perspective on how public knowledge of the economy is a iterative process engaging journalists, academics and laymen and explores its implications for the possibilities of public support for economic actions and policies."

1 458 041 €

Start date: 2012-01-01, End date: 2016-12-31

DNA sequence and epigenetic chromatin maps are important in understanding how genomes are regulated. However, these maps are linear and do not account for the three-dimensional context within which the genome functions in the cell. The spatial organisation of the genome in the nucleus is not random and is conserved in evolution, implying that it is under functional selection. This proposal aims to determine the functional significance of positioning specific genome regions at the edge of the nucleus in mammalian cells. The nuclear periphery has conventionally been considered as a zone of inactive chromatin and transcriptional repression. Several regulatory gene loci move away from the nuclear periphery as they are activated during differentiation. Novel approaches, developed by ourselves and others, that allow genomic regions to be relocated from the centre of the nucleus to the periphery, have directly shown that proximity to the nuclear edge can down-regulate human gene expression. We propose to dissect the pathways that mediate this spatially-defined transcriptional regulation, to determine what features make certain genes susceptible to it, to establish the functional consequences of preventing gene repositioning during differentiation, and to examine defects of the periphery found in premature ageing. A neglected hypothesis is that positioning of inactive chromatin against the nuclear periphery is a mechanism to minimize DNA damage on sequences in the nuclear centre. We will determine whether mutation rate is altered when loci are repositioned towards the nuclear periphery. By experimentally remodelling the spatial organisation of the genome, this proposal goes beyond the current descriptive phase of 3D nuclear organisation, into an understanding of its functional consequences on multiple aspects of genome function. It will also aid in understanding human diseases characterised by alterations of the nuclear periphery.

1 701 090 €

Start date: 2010-03-01, End date: 2016-02-29

How successful are current initiatives at furthering a fairer globalization? Employing women’s equitable integration into the labor market as a paradigmatic case, this proposal suggests ways to examine the impact of global governance structures on key labor market and other indicators. Research in this project so far has shown that for an adequate assessment of women’s equity it is not sufficient to merely look at their labor market position but an examination of indicators such as political participation, physical integrity and reproductive rights is now integrated. Triangulating quantitative and qualitative methodologies on the macro-, meso- and micro- levels of aggregation, this research addresses three current world society lacunas: (1) Implementation: On the country level, quantitative data assess the impact of international norms from 1958 to 2005 on key labor market indicators of women relative to those of men: differences in unemployment rates by professions and gender wage differentials in the manufacturing sector descriptively. The data also tracks the trade-off that women make between fertility and labor market participation in the non-agricultural sectors analytically. (2) Mechanisms: On the organizational level, qualitative interviews in four countries illuminate how world norms stipulated by the United Nations and world regional norms put forth by the Organizations of American States are adapted and utilized by social movement actors in Latin America: Peru, Brazil, Argentina and Chile. In addition, to interviewing governmental representatives and social movement actors in non-governmental organizations as originally foreseen, I interviewed the heads of the Inter-American Court and key personnel in the Inter-American Commission. Relevant legal documents are currently being coded as these legal decisions and recommendations proved to be a key mechanism for the evolution of discriminated groups, particularly women. (3) Diversity: On the individual level, large quantitative household data analyze differences within nations regarding gender equity attitudes and their (un)intended labor market and fertility effects in Peru, Brazil, Argentina and Chile. This analysis is now supplemented by analyzing the other key socio-structural and attitudinal dimensions of gender equity such as political participation, physical integrity and reproductive rights.

1 090 409 €

Start date: 2009-12-01, End date: 2016-11-30

The greatest differences between mammals are size. As well, the large evolutionary expansion of the cerebral cortex is a defining feature humans. Despite this, much remains to be learnt about the developmental and evolutionary factors controlling organ and organism size. This is in marked contrast to the exquisite detail in which developmental patterning has been defined in model organisms. The identification of genes for human disorders of extreme growth failure (microcephalic primordial dwarfism) provides a means to gain new insights into the regulation of human brain and body size. I have identified eight genes regulating cerebral cortex volume and organism size, all of which encode fundamental components of cell machinery regulating cell division. This proposal aims to ascertain the genes causing the other 85% of primordial dwarfism, and define their cellular and developmental functions. The central hypothesis for the proposed work is that such primordial dwarfism and microcephaly genes are components of common cellular pathway(s) relevant to organ and organism growth. I propose to pursue complementary approaches involving human disease gene identification, cell biology studies, and model organisms, to address this hypothesis and further define the pathogenesis of these conditions. These cross-disciplinary studies will contribute to our understanding of vertebrate growth regulation and help us understand how the human brain evolved. They may provide insights into neural stem cell division relevant to brain repair. Finally and not least, regulation of DNA replication, centrosome function and DNA damage response signalling are key cellular processes perturbed in many important human diseases, from developmental disorders to cancer.

1 499 666 €

Start date: 2012-11-01, End date: 2018-07-31

The central research question of our project is: what impact does the increasingly non-liberal orientation of the government of the Russian Federation have on the Russian doctrine and practice of international law? As the West and Russia hope to further build their relationship on international law, is it still the same international law that they are talking about? We aim to provide systematic empirical evidence on the use and conceptualization of international law in the Russian Federation. But we intend to go further than that. The project has also a wider theoretical ambition since we intend to analyze the situation in Russia as an example of something beyond Russia itself, namely from the viewpoint of the question of how non-liberal States understand and practice international law. Whether non-liberal States 'behave worse' in respect to international law than liberal States is one of the most important debates in the post-Cold War international legal theory. To combine these two questions - Russia and how non-liberal States relate to international law - promises ground-breaking new insights. Our method includes, beside obvious classical tools of international legal research, using IR theories of constructivism and liberalism. Moreover, we will conduct interviews with Russian judges, politicians and legal academicians in order to get a more nuanced and realistic view on the conceptualization and use of international law in Russia. Besides the PI, the research team includes two post-doc scholars at the Faculty of Law of Tartu University. Three doctoral student positions are also foreseen in the project.

500 000 €

Start date: 2009-09-01, End date: 2014-08-31

This research investigates ways in which third sector advice agencies are becoming new sites for the emergence of legal consciousness, bringing together theoretical perspectives on social policy and the sociology of translation with legal consciousness methods. It will develop understandings of legal consciousness as not simply individual practices (a form of ‘legal capability’) but as the potential for collective, political action through cultural practices of institutions that mediate between citizens and the formal institutions and practices of law. Advice agencies rather than professional lawyers are becoming key actors in legal arenas, particularly for citizens with precarious relationships to rights. Such organisations perform multiple roles. Through casework they translate complex legal structures, opening doors to enable citizens to pursue their own rights. Casework then allows agencies to see into the lives of ‘ordinary people’, forming the basis for interventions in social policy. Through re-presenting personal grievances of multiple clients as matters of public concern, they can illuminate ways in which policies and practices of powerful institutions create injustices, how mechanisms meant to enable access to justice can instead throw up barriers to justice. The research is an in-depth study of the institutional practices of UK advice organisations. It focuses principally on Citizens Advice, the leading UK advice organisation, now part of European and international networks of citizens advice services. Through case studies it will investigate ways in which advice agencies can transform people’s subjective experience of law into objective understandings of everyday injustices, thus creating a dialogue which empowers citizens and governmental processes. A study of the most long-established of the citizens advice organisations can provide a window for European policy makers and legislators through which they can understand better the social action of law.

1 029 298 €

Start date: 2012-04-01, End date: 2016-03-31

"In recent breakthrough publications, I developed quantitative models of accurate chemo-sensing in biological cells, as well as obtained important insights into how cells engulf and eat other cells and particles. The novelty of these works is the merging of the natural sciences of physics and biology for discovering general, overarching principles in biology. Now I propose to bring my research to a new level by tackling host-pathogen interactions, irrespective of established disciplinary boundaries. While individual signalling pathways are often well characterised in different cell types, an integrative view is largely missing. For instance, the chemical environments of pathogens are generally uncharacterised such as occurring in complex bacterial communities in an host organism. Furthermore, the strategies of how our immune cells sense and hunt their bacterial prey remain unknown. Specifically, how do they sense minute chemical signatures left by bacteria? Once an immune cell encounters a bacterium, what are the determinants of successful engulfment and destruction of the pathogen? To address these questions, I will investigate how bacteria perceive their environment with cell-surface receptors, including what chemical stimuli and gradients their sensory systems have adapted to by evolution. I will identify the strategies of cells for achieving highly accurate sensing, and study the dependence of engulfment on bacterial cell shape, stiffness, and ligand density. Answering these questions is of fundamental importance since it would identify how infections arise, spread and are cleared, with pharmaceutical applications in near sight. To conduct this research, the ERC Starting Grant would allow me, by assembling a cutting-edge and creative research team, to consolidate my research interests into one major stream for maximal impact. I would finally establish myself as an independent researcher, who delivers predictive and quantitative biology in Europe."

1 343 230 €

Start date: 2012-01-01, End date: 2016-12-31

RAPT (Religion And Political Theory) aims to re-assess the foundations of the special nature of religion in legal and political theory, by reference to the growing body of multi-disciplinary literature about post secularism. Its main research question is: how can the special status of religion in secular politics and law be explained and justified? In western politics and law, religion has a special status. On the one hand, there is supposed to be a unique separation between the state and religion; and, on the other hand, the state gives special protection to religious beliefs and organizations qua religious. The religious neutrality of the state and respect for freedom of religion are the two salient features of the relationship between religion, law and politics. What is rarely noted is that these features rely on a distinctive understanding of religion, born out of the particular trajectory of western secularisation. One upshot of long-standing, protracted struggles between religious and political authorities is that, in western society at least, religion is seen as importantly and relevantly distinct from other spheres of human and social life. So, instead of presenting the problem in a simplistically dichotomous fashion (‘secular’ versus ‘religious’ or ‘post-secular’), RAPT sees religion itself as the contested term in the debate between secularism and its critics. The central hypothesis of RAPT is that the ‘specialness’ of religion is defensible in light of important political and legal ideals, but that it needs to be substantially modified and refined in response to philosophical, anthropological, historical, political and sociological post-secular critiques. To demonstrate this, RAPT is divided into three complementary projects: A Typology of the Political-Legal Construction of Religion; An Analytical Assessment of the Post-Secular Critique and A Normative Reformulation of Secularity and Religion.

1 200 000 €

Start date: 2012-01-01, End date: 2016-12-31

The proposed project aims to study 'remnants' from past atrocities in contemporary Turkey and its associated migrant and diaspora communities elsewhere. 'Remnants' are conceptualized as multiplex phenomena which have an enduring effect in the after-life of persons and communities which were once associated with them. These may be material remains in the form of houses, temples, and other forms of built and spatial structure once used and inhabited by communities that were displaced, deported, ethnically cleansed, or exterminated. They may also be immaterial affects, in the form of memory or the imagination as associated with past atrocities, such as accounts of haunting and/or loss in the aftermath of violence. 'Remnants' figure in subjective worlds in embodied forms, where contemporary inhabitants of Turkey have begun to claim Armenian, Greek, or Kurdish ancestry. They are also 'political' insofar as they constitute the context for ongoing inter-communitarian relations in and outside Turkey, relations which sometimes take 'legal' and 'economic' forms. This project proposes to ethnographically study 'remnants' in Turkey and its diaspora communities at a time when Turkey is being challenged to face its past of mass atrocities. We propose to actualize this research by focusing on four key city-sites (Tunceli-Elazig, Mardin, Diyarbakir-Batman, and Antakya) in Turkey's under-studied south and south Eastern regions, relevant from the point of view of the mass atrocities targeting Armenians, Assyrian-Syriacs, Alevis, Kurds and other local communities which this project aims to focus on. The project will be composed of four ethnographic sub-projects in these sites and their respective diasporas outside Turkey (Syria, Cyprus, Germany, Sweden) composed of migrants, deportees, survivors, or refugees from the sites of mass atrocity. The project will employ innovative methodologies in ethnographic and archival research in addressing the aftermath of violence in Turkey.

1 398 013 €

Start date: 2012-01-01, End date: 2016-12-31

"Genome-wide association studies of complex traits have identified many common variant associations, but a substantial heritability gap remains. The field is shifting towards the study of low frequency and rare variants, hypothesised to have larger effects. The study of these variants can be empowered by focusing on isolated populations, in which rare variants may have increased in frequency and linkage disequilibrium tends to be extended. This work will focus on three isolated populations, each with information on a wide array of anthropometric, cardiometabolic, biochemical, haematological and diet-related traits. Anogia is a mountainous village on the island of Crete with high levels of longevity; the Pomak villages are a set of religiously isolated mountainous villages in the North of Greece and Korcula is an isolated Adriatic Sea island, all with high levels of cardiometabolic and psychiatric disease. 1,000 to 1,500 individuals from each of these populations will be typed on genome-wide chips before the start of this project. Sequencing is very efficient in isolated populations, because variants found in a few samples will be shared by others, supporting accurate imputation. We will whole-genome sequence 200 individuals from each of these populations and will access all variation down to 1% frequency and ~40% of variants with frequency 0.1% to 1% for the first time. We will impute identified variants into the full set of genome-wide typed samples, and will test for association with the collected traits, initially focusing on cardiometabolic phenotypes. We will validate associations by direct genotyping in the discovery set and will seek replication in further isolated and outbred populations. Using cutting-edge high-throughput sequencing technologies and novel analytical tools, this work is uniquely poised to usher in the new era of next-generation genetic studies and identify robust associations with disease-related complex traits."

1 477 932 €

Start date: 2012-06-01, End date: 2017-05-31

The last few years have witnessed an explosive increase in the use of social networking sites. Today there are over 500 million on Facebook, and 100 million on QQ - the Chinese equivalent, as well as Orkut and Twitter. The primary purpose of this research project is to determine the nature of these sites and assess the challenge they represent to assumptions at the core of social science with regard to the decline in social relations, including the degree to which these sites have been appropriated to alleviate the negative impact of this decline. It will also focus on trends including the shift to older and less affluent users, and key consequences such as the impact on migrants and on separated families which rely on such communications. It will assess recent academic debates regarding the consequence of social networks for political action and activism, the nature of privacy and the public domain. But the research method is holistic and the seven proposed books will include a general re-thinking of core social science theory in the light of this phenomenon as well as monographs on more specific trends in usage and an overall assessment of social and welfare implications. Research has mainly been on the earlier users, mainly college students and focused on the US. But recent trends suggest future growth in older populations and in middle income regions such as Brazil and Turkey. The research consists of 15 months intensive ethnographic participation and observation, appropriate given the intimate nature of these communications. There will be seven ethnographies all based in small town sites. Some aimed at demographic breadth in China, India, Brazil and Turkey others at depth in Romania, Trinidad and the UK. The study will also include long term online participation in the social networking sites themselves with 150 informants from each country. The intensity of ethnographic depth will be matched by a commitment to comparative analysis and generalisation.

2 475 376 €

Start date: 2012-05-01, End date: 2017-04-30

Telomeres have long been known to play crucial roles in protecting chromosome ends from attrition and fusion and thus safeguarding genome stability, but their complete functional repertoire has yet to be fully understood. Among the fundamental roles of telomeres is their role in meiosis, the process by which parental genomes are recombined and halved, allowing the generation of genetic diversity via sexual reproduction. As cells progress from mitotic to meiotic cycles, telomere functions change radically as all telomeres gather to a small region of the nuclear periphery near the centrosome to form the telomere bouquet . While this bouquet is widely conserved, the challenges of manipulating meiosis in most eukaryotes has made bouquet function a matter of speculation until recently. We utilize the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe as a model to study telomeres, as this organism provides a powerful combination of genetic manipulability and striking conservation of chromosomal structure/function with human. Recently, we made the unexpected discovery that the bouquet controls the behavior of meiotic centrosomes and spindles. Furthermore, we find that the bouquet is required not only for proper spindle formation, but also for attachment of meiotic chromosomes to the spindle via their centromeres. Using molecular genetics, quantitative live analysis and biochemistry, we propose to define the mechanisms by which the gathered telomeres control spindle behavior. We will also investigate what aspect of the telomere confers proper centromere-spindle attachment and what goes wrong at centromeres in cells lacking the bouquet. These studies will illuminate mechanisms of communication between chromosomes and the spindle apparatus that should be widely conserved among eukaryotes.

1 451 943 €

Start date: 2010-06-01, End date: 2015-05-31

"What are the gender dynamics of institutional change? Changing institutions is a fundamental part of the task of lessening gender inequality and yet the gender dynamics of institutional change are still poorly understood. Feminist scholars have long been interested in how to achieve the social, economic and political changes that will lessen inequality. Huge changes in some women's social and economic status have occurred in many part of the world in the last fifty years. Nonetheless multiple and intersecting unequal power relations as well as male domination remain commonplace in many institutional arenas – including judicial and political systems - despite measures such as quotas and equality legislation. Improving our understanding of institutional change is therefore a key undertaking for feminist, if not all, social science as well as a public policy priority. Crucially this institutional analysis will provide an important meso level link between the (sometimes unhelpful) overarching analyses of macro structures such as patriarchy and the more micro-level analysis of the actions and strategies of individual actors and groups that have often predominated. Such an approach will allow scholars to develop better explanatory frameworks while at the same time maintaining historical and contextual specificity. The programme will open new research agendas that systematically investigate how institutional change is gendered, why some forms of change appear more successful than others and how and why informal institutions operate in gendered ways. The outcomes will be of use to both academics and practitioners who want to ensure that gender equity concerns can be more effectively embedded in institutions and processes of institutional design and reform."

2 166 090 €

Start date: 2012-06-01, End date: 2017-05-31