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NCCR Democracy


The ASCN programme supports a PhD research position within the framework of the NCCR Democracy (National Center of Competence in Research) project managed by the University of Zurich. Ms. Nino Abzianidze M.A. is working as research assistant for the project Institutional strategies for post-conflict democratization.

This project focuses on the challenge of democratization in post-civil war situations. In these situations, as a rule, both the polity and the demos are deeply contested: Civil war has already undermined the state's political institutions and there is no agreement as to what should constitute the popular unit on which democracy is based. Wherever the demos and its institutions are challenged, it will prove difficult to make majority decisions stick and the risk of recurrent conflict is likely to increase.

Within the project Nino Abzianidze tries to answer whether media-based mechanisms of identity-formation are likely to produce democratic outcomes, in post-conflict situations.