Empirical Research on Protests and Social Movements in Central and Eastern Europe: Conference 2025

Empirical Research on Protests and Social Movements in Central and Eastern Europe: State of the Art

Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences (IFiS PAN)
72 Nowy Swiat, Warsaw, Poland

December 4 – 5, 2025

About

Major events in Europe over the last two decades — financial crises, rising populism, EU skepticism, pandemic, and war — and growing recognition of the rights of historically marginalized groups have encouraged a diversity of protests and social movements. These events and growing recognition of rights have changed the social and political landscape of the post-communist region of Europe.

Yet, research in political sociology on protest and social movements is dominated by Western perspectives and cases of the West. At the same time, technological innovations have created new methodological opportunities to analyze protest and social movements. As innovative empirical research on post-communist countries increases, there is a need and opportunity to catalyze this growing scholarship by bringing these scholars together to discuss the field’s state of the art.

Our international conference will host a mix of young researchers and established scholars to present and discuss the state of the art in empirical research on protest and social movements in post-communist Europe. We ask participants to present their original empirical research which includes qualitative, quantitative, or mixed method analysis of data that focus on post-communist countries of Europe. We intend for the event to spur new studies and foster research networks of scholars of and about the region on this important and timely topic.

This conference is funded by the National Science Centre (NCN), Poland (2021/43/B/HS6/01155) grant, “The Construction of Post-Pandemic Society: Covid-19 Street Protest in Poland” and the Polish Academy of Sciences, and a Project co-organized by the Polish Academy of Sciences, with the Committee on Sociology, PAN. We thank the Graduate School for Social Research and the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences, for rooms and organizational assistance.