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European Research Council Grant (EUR 1.5 million) Awarded to Dr Agnieszka Kubal
10 January 2022
Congratulations to Dr Agnieszka Kubal who has been awarded a prestigious ERC Starter Grant (EUR 1.5 million) for her project ‘Who are the humans behind Human Rights in Eastern Europe and Russia?’ (HuRiEE).
Congratulations to Dr Agnieszka Kubal, Lecturer in Sociology, who has been awarded a prestigious ERC Starter Grant (EUR 1.5 million) for her project ‘Who are the humans behind Human Rights in Eastern Europe and Russia?’ (HuRiEE). This five-year research will break new ground in studying the human rights mobilisation and activism in five countries of Eastern Europe– Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, and Russia – whose citizens bring more than fifty per cent of all the claims to the European Court of Human Rights. The project will also enrich the SSEES scholarly community with three exciting post-doctoral researchers: a political anthropologist, a quantitative sociologist, and a socio-legal scholar.
Dr Kubal speaks about her research: “When one looks at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), the first thing which strikes is that it is made of glass window panels recalling the long-standing metaphor of transparency of justice. With my research, I would like to reverse this metaphor and see each case, each complaint filed to the court as a window into a society, a lens through which we can capture broader social developments. How do claims-making before the ECtHR shape the lives of individuals and the development of societies in Eastern Europe and Russia? To address this main research question, I propose a paradigmatic shift from a law-first approach in human rights scholarship to the study of the ‘social life’ and the everyday mobilisation of the Convention, re-focusing from the law and onto the people – the humans behind the Human Rights – the applicants, lawyers, NGO activists, judges and state legal counsels in Eastern Europe and Russia.
The ultimate ambition for this project is to develop a brand-new theory of the relationship between human rights mobilisation, ECtHR’s legitimacy, and the development of societies under the conditions of ‘abusive constitutionalism’ (Russia), open military conflict (Ukraine), deep transformations (Romania) and democratic backsliding (Poland and Hungary). To this effect, I will de-westernize human rights discourses in the region and lean toward the premise of conflict, reciprocity and disjuncture as core theoretical notions underpinning the geopolitics of knowledge on Eastern Europe and the Convention system.”
Read more on how the ERC has awarded €619 million in its first research grants under Horizon Europe.