Center for European Studies

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Center for European Studies
3324 Turlington Hall
PO Box 117342
University of Florida
Gainesville, FL 32611
(352) 294-7142
(352) 392-8966 (fax)
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• Agenda
• Abstracts
• Participants

Abstracts

Muslim Migrants: Europe’s ‘New Jews’?

Esther Romeyn, CES

Italiani Nuovi? Second Generations, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Italy

Georgia Bianchi, CES and Sociology & Criminology

Drawing on her research, Georgia Bianchi examines the instances of everyday exclusion tied to the denial of citizenship to second generation children of immigrants in Italy. Patterns of political, social and economic marginalization are explored, as is the likelihood of extension of citizenship.

New Migration to Bulgaria:
Between the Minority Cause and the Migrant Rights

Maria Stoilkova, CES and Anthropology

Bulgaria is a region where ethno-cultural differences have been traditionally conceived through the minority politics of the ethnic populations living on the Balkans for centuries. However, in the recent years, especially after the country joined the EU in 2007, a new trend in mobility is taking shape this time directed towards the country. This new phenomenon of immigration with its complicated social background and the politics of identity, rights and belonging now open to global political resources, present a new challenge to the integrity of the Bulgarian nation. In this paper I problematize the broader biopolitical framework within which Otherness is being articulated and given expression in Bulgaria. My intellectual curiosity is driven by the concern whether more established forms of understanding and relating to Others and earlier minority politics in Bulgaria might shed some light on the way new immigrants assert their space in the larger Bulgarian society today. I focus on the cultural codes of belonging. In other words, I ask how society and the state in Bulgaria are understanding migration (and Otherness more generally) in the context of three key forces that have defined political and social life after communism: the “transitional” context, forces of neoliberal reform and globalization, and adjustments to the EU enlargement. Furthermore, I contend that these three forces have had a weighty effect on the patterning of ethnocultural differences, but also on the material, social and symbolic dimensions of citizenship and belonging more broadly.

Minority Rights Conditionality in Europe? The Impact of
Securitizing Minorities on Protection and Empowerment

David Galbreath, University of Bath

Minority rights conditionality has been seen by scholars as a key part of the EU enlargement process. While the focus on minority rights has largely been discussed in terms of democracy and even human rights, this article argues that conditionality was a result of the securitization of minorities rather than an agenda to protect or empower. In this paper, we look at the minority rights conditionality through the prisms of security, democracy and regional integration and examine how these narratives have been shaped by European organizations. In response to the conclusions of Paul Roe about the inability to desecuritize societal security, we look at whether these organizations have the ability to change the societal dynamics to make the desecuritization of societal security more likely to occur. Overall, we illustrate how the focus on regional stability has linked both democracy and regional integration to the securitization of minorities reinforcing a status quo rather than a mandate for protect and empowerment. The resulting conclusion is further evidence of the inability to desecuritize societal security.

Participants

Esther Romeyn

Esther Romeyn is a CES faculty member who received her Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Minnesota. She taught in the Interdisciplinary Humanities Program at Arizona State University from 1998 until 2005. Her main interests lie in Ethnic Studies, Cultural Studies, Performance Studies, Jewish Studies, Urban Studies, and cross-cultural psychology. Her publications are concerned specifically with immigrant acculturation as a process of cultural “translation” (or “mistranslation”); the performance of ethnic identity (in daily life, festivals, parades, and theater); and the shifting boundaries of “race” in American culture.

Georgia Bianchi

Georgia Bianchi, CES and Sociology & Criminology

Georgia Bianchi recently defended her dissertation, in Department of Sociology, Criminology and Law at UF, focusing on Italians’ willingness to extend citizenship to second generation immigrants. Georgia was born in Italy and grew up in both Italy and the United States, maintaining ties to both countries, and her research interests are in the areas of immigration, race, and citizenship. She currently teaches sociology at Santa Fe College.

Maria Stoilkova

Maria Stoilkova, CES and Anthropology

Maria Stoilkova holds a joint position with the Center for European Studies and the Department of Anthropology at UF. She earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology in 2004 from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Stoilkova specializes in international migration and transnationalism with an emphasis on Europe and Eastern Europe. She is currently working on a book manuscript exploring social processes in post-communist Bulgaria and the impact of neoliberal policies on citizenship and mobility. At the center of her explorations is the experience of migrant Bulgarian professionals following the collapse of the Cold War system, both in the US and at home. She has also worked on various other projects ranging from migration management in the post-communist Eurasian region to human trafficking (as part of a World bank team). Some of her publications include a focus on issues of social stratification in post-socialist Bulgaria, new immigration trends as well as demographic and reproductive politis.

David Galbreath

David Galbreath, University of Bath

Dr. Galbreath joined the University of Bath and the Department of European Studies and Modern Languages in September 2010 as Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations. Before coming to Bath, he was a senior lecturer at the University of Aberdeen in the Department of Politics and International Relations. He has two research areas. The first focuses on the protection and empowerment of minority rights as a source of security and democratic justice. He has just completed a Leverhulme Trust project entitled, “The European Minority Rights Regime: Interests, Power and Knowledge” with a resulting research monograph in the Palgrave European Union Politics series in 2011. His second research stream focuses on European security in a broad context from peacekeeping and inter-organisational cooperation to member-state responses to new regional challenges. Dr Galbreath is a non-resident Senior Research Associate at the European Centre for Minority Issues in Flensburg, Germany. He has worked with the US State Department, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the UK House of Commons Defence Select Committee. He is the Editor-in-Chief of European Security.