The Center promotes comparative and interdisciplinary studies with a global perspective at the intersection of economics, sociology and international relations, simultaneously analyzing global and local dynamics and their interconnectedness. Our aim is to scrutinize historically evolving transnational linkages, persistent inequalities and conflicts between social groups, communities and various re
gions of the world. We are committed to research and training, which avoids pitfalls of Eurocentrism or any other ways of essentializations widespread in social sciences and humanities. Our work takes a critical stance to uncover entrenched ideas that justify established regimes of global governance that perpetuate forms of redistribution and inequalities. We are also committed to future oriented studies, in the sense that we would like to reflect on possible alternatives to prevailing governmental practices both on the local and the global level. The Research Center is especially interested in the following topics:
• global population dynamics
• international migration (various types of mobility in the context of local or global inequalities)
• development and persistence of global hierarchies and systems of inequalities
• recent development of East European societies including state socialist past
• the construction of identities in local and transnational contexts
• interrelatedness of local, national or global social or political discourses
• developmental policies
