REDEMOS Working paper: Democratic progress, stasis, regression and authoritarianisation in the EU’s eastern neighbourhood

The REDEMOS working paper edited by Mădălina Dobrescu and Ragnar Weilandt, entitled “Democratic progress, stasis, regression, and authoritarianisation in the EU’s eastern neighbourhood,” offers pivotal insights into the region’s political evolution over a span of 12 years.

The paper provides for an in-depth stocktaking of democracy building efforts and failures in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine between 2010 and 2022. The democratic and autocratic trajectories of these six EU eastern neighbourhood countries examined point to the critical role of the demos in bringing about democratic change, sustaining democratic progress and deterring or reverting democratic regression, in particular when these processes are simultaneously supported by political elites and organised civil societies.

The working paper features the following contributors: Mădălina Dobrescu, Tobias Schumacher and Ragnar Weilandt (all NTNU, Trondheim), Mikayel Hovhannisyan (Yerevan State University), Marianne Kneuer and Sergiu Buscaneanu (both TU Dresden), as well as Kakha Gogolashvili (Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies, Tbilisi).

 

Read the full paper here or download it here.