Lessons of Protest Wave in Europe

About this grant

The project goal is to better understand the causes and implications for civil society development of recent citizen protests, demonstrations, and discontent in Europe generally and, in particular, Central and Eastern Europe. To this end, the Bulgaria-based Centre for Liberal Strategies Foundation will study a wide range of approaches and practices to defining civic activism and measuring its impact and will propose a methodology for monitoring civic activism. In addition, the grantee will coordinate an international team of experienced researchers and practitioners from six countries — Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Russia, Spain, and Turkey — where the experiences of recent, strong protest movements provide valuable parallels and contrasts for the researchers. The grantee will host six roundtables in each of the participating countries, during which the key research questions will be debated. The discussions will be summarized in a final report, which will be widely publicized. Established in 1994, the grantee is an independent think tank whose mission is to carry out activities which promote public debate and exercise influence over decisionmaking processes. During the past grant period, the grantee developed and published research papers on the mass civic protests in Bulgaria, Russia, Spain, Turkey, and Ukraine and organized series of workshops and public events to discuss and publicize the research findings.