Social Change and Conflict (SCC)
Mission
The study of social change and conflict is conducted from a comparative perspective, be it diachronically across the trajectories of societies and social groups, or cross-sectionally across geographical units (e.g. nations, cities) and collective actors.
The programme aims to integrate theories on social movements and collective action, citizenship and immigration, public sphere and mass communication, and social capital and social networks. The projects within the programme study the impacts on (mainly European) societies of the transnationalization of social problems, and the concurrent processes of economic globalization and political supranationalization. The basic underlying idea is that the unequal distribution of the advantages and disadvantages of these denationalization tendencies, and the pressure on the rights, duties, and entitlements of national citizenship that they entail, give rise to the development of new socio-political cleavages.
The leading research question is how transnationalization alters the identities, resources, and strategies of various social groups and organized interests, and how this gives rise to new social cleavages and lines of political conflict. A wide range of methods is used, including surveys, content analysis, in-depth interviews, and social experiments.
At present, projects in the program cover four areas of empirical research:
- citizenship, immigration and cultural diversity,
- right-wing populism and xenophobia,
- conflicts around European integration and other forms of de-nationalization,
- collective action dilemmas and the social psychology of protest.
Conference Gender Equality
Phase of the research programme
Research school
National and International co-operation
Academic reputation
Programme members
Publications (Source: METIS VU)
