Units

REPI Recherche et Études en Politique Internationale

REPI is a research unit, mainly dedicated to research and studies in international politics at the Université libre de Bruxelles. It is linked to the Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences. REPI fosters fundamental research in the field of international relations and aims at providing a high quality framework for the research in this field (PhD dissertations, publications, conferences...). Depending on available resources, members of REPI can also provide specific expertise for national and international institutions. Furthermore, the research centre encourages the dissemination of knowledge in international relations to a larger audience and represents a convenient space for discussing the teaching of international relations within the university.  REPI also organises seminars and summer schools for professionals and young scholars.

Director : Christian Olsson

Center for the Study of Politics

The Cevipol (Centre d'Etude de la Vie Politique) is a research center of the Philosophy and Social Sciences Department of the Université libre de Bruxelles. It specializes in political sociology and comparative politics.  Research within the Cevipol focuses on political life, institutions, actors, and the norms and resources of democratic systems. The processes of action, mobilisation, and legitimation are examined with both qualitative and quantitative methods, from a contemporary perspective that takes into account the long view.  While consistently opening fresh empirical debates, the Cevipol updates traditional themes of political science: the distribution of power and resources among social groups, the different forms of authority, elite recruitment, conflicts between interests, identity or memory, and the weight of norms and values. 

Four thematic axes structure the intellectual identity of the Cevipol 
- Parties, Elections, and Representation
- European integration: redefining communities, sovereignties, and values in conflict
- Identities, societies, powers in comparison. A qualitative approach of political systems 
- Sport and Politics

Projetcs

(Re)imagining the nation in the age of the Anthropocene: a comparative study of "green nationalism" in China, Singapore and Taiwan

The acceleration of climate change has revealed a presumably surprising link between environmental discourse and nationalist movements that immediately caught researchers' attention. Since the early 2000s,
so-called eco-nationalism has been studied from different angles and in different contexts. However, outside of a European and predominantly democratic context, the impact of eco-nationalism remains understudied. This project addresses this gap in the literature by comparing the convergence of environmental rhetoric and nationalism in the legitimation strategies and national identity construction of three different political regimes in predominantly Chinese-dominated societies: China, Singapore, and Taiwan. Through a comparative perspective and a qualitative research design, this project intends to shed new light on the emergence of green nationalism - a form of nationalism that supports national sustainability - under authoritarian, hybrid, and democratic regimes, respectively China, Singapore, and Taiwan. The aim, then, is to understand the extent to which nations of different political systems in the Sinophone world cultivate and possibly co-opt environmental discourses in order to achieve broader goals of national identity and international legitimacy. From a theoretical point of view, the project will focus on the concept of green nationalism and a constructivist perspective of "imagined communities" – a term coined by Benedict Anderson (2006). Foregrounding on the relationship between environmental discourses and claims to legitimacy, the project aims to fill a gap in the literature on the impact of green nationalism outside of the European context and in different political regimes, a topic that has not previously been explored in the literature.