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News & Reflections

A record of the conferences, symposia, and public lectures at which TDE Institute researchers present current work, alongside short essays and commentary from TDE researchers and partners on the questions shaping our lines of inquiry.

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Reflections & Dispatches

Short essays, field notes, research opinions and commentary by TDE Institute researchers and partners. Follow the link to continue reading.

  1. 05
    Democracy Beyond the Nation

    Patriarchal Paralysis — Thirty Years After Bosnia

    Multilateral organizations have not failed women in armed conflicts through incompetence or under–resourcing. They have failed them through design. Thirty years after the mass rape camps of Bosnia, the international response has translated condemnation into verbal force, but not into budgets, rapid intervention, or concrete protection. The gap is not bureaucratic friction — it is procedural patriarchy: a system that weaponizes administrative process to absorb feminist demands while resources flow elsewhere.

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  2. 04
    Justice, Corruption & Democracy

    When Extremes Embrace — Carlyle and the Logic of Catch–All Extremism

    A Victorian sage who could be claimed simultaneously by conservatives and socialists, reactionaries and progressives, was not misread. He was the first instance of a recurring pattern. A 1983 article argues that Thomas Carlyle is the structural signature of a distinct ideological type — catch–all extremism: not ideological erosion but ideological formation, a deliberate cohabitation of contradictions that resists left–right classification and whose appeal is strongest when societies feel lost between two worlds.

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  3. 03
    Justice, Corruption & Democracy

    Public Funding, Parties, and the Quiet End of Mass Membership

    Public party funding was sold as a cure for democratic corruption. The reality is far more complicated — and far more instructive. In 1954 Costa Rica legislated political parties into public funding; by 1969 Israel followed. Across Finland, Austria, Italy, Sweden, and West Germany the same pattern emerged: once parties were guaranteed public income, they no longer needed mass membership, dues, or grassroots activism — and the participatory scaffolding of democratic life began to recede.

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  4. 02
    Borders, Bodies & Democracy

    Compassionate Abandonment

    When the organizations trying to protect people are the very thing that allows governments to abandon them, the effects on democracy run deeper than just the mere analysis of immigration policies. Taking Serbia as a case study (2021–2026), we examine how the EU externalization of migration policy, the new immigrant humanitarian infrastructure, and a governance void that has been designed to deny basic human rights, sustain a system that rules through absence.

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  5. 01
    Democracy Devouring Itself

    Democracy Is Devouring Itself — and It Always Was

    The argument that made a room full of political scientists shift in their seats has turned out to be a forecast. Six years on from Rosenberg's 2019 paper, with far–right parties governing or surging across the US, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, France, and Italy, his claim no longer sounds provocative.

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Upcoming Events

Where We'll Be

Conferences, symposia, and public lectures at which TDE Institute researchers present current work. Newest first.

Jun
13
2026
Can Democracy Be Taught? — TDE Annual Conference Symposium
AME 2026 Conference  ·  Madrid, Spain
TDE Institute convenes a dialogic roundtable at the AME 2026 Conference in Madrid, bringing together TDE researchers and partners — including specialists from UC Irvine, Rider University, Rey Juan Carlos University (a leading authority on public ethics and democratic governance) and the University of Murcia (specialist in political corruption and democratic accountability). Together they interrogate whether democratic values, practices, and critical civic dispositions can be intentionally cultivated — and what the consequences are if they cannot.
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Jun
12
2026
Compassionate Abandonment: How Humanitarian Organizations Enable Migration Policies of Control
Canary Islands Symposium — Refugees & Migrants in Our Common Home  ·  Universidad de La Laguna, Campus Guajara, Tenerife  ·  12–13 June 2026
TDE Institute presents research at this international symposium held in solidarity with migrant and refugee communities at one of Europe's most critical transit points. The event, coinciding with Pope Leo XIV's visit to the Canary Islands, convenes a global community of scholars and practitioners at the University of La Laguna to bear witness, build community, and translate solidarity into concrete action for compassionate systems change.
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May
27
2026
Governing the Void: The EU Pact on Asylum and the Creation of Rightlessness
ADiM–IntoME Migration Conference 2026  ·  University of Tuscia, Viterbo, Italy  ·  27–29 May 2026
TDE Institute presents research at the conference "The Right to Asylum and Its Crisis: Challenges and Prospects Under the EU Pact," organised by the Academy of Law and Migration (ADiM) and the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence on the Integration of Migrants in Europe (IntoME). The paper examines how the EU Pact on Asylum and Migration produces zones of juridical exception — spaces in which the right to protection exists in name while being systematically denied in practice.
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Apr
15
2026
The Sensemaking Burden: Why Do Refugee Voluntary Return Programs Fail?
Reimagining Refugee Protection: 75 Years and Forward  ·  Ankara, Turkey  ·  15–17 April 2026
TDE Institute presents research at this international conference co–organised by the TED University Department of Political Science and International Relations (PSIR) and the Sussex Centre for Migration Research (SCMR), University of Sussex. The paper challenges the technocratic assumptions underpinning return program design and examines why displaced persons systematically reject programs constructed without their meaningful participation.
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Feb
26
2026
If I cannot go back home, who am I? Syrian Refugees and the Limits of International Return Programs
CGPACS–UCI, Social Sciences Tower #777  ·  Irvine, California  ·  12:00–13:30
TDE Institute presents research examining the structural failures of voluntary return programs for Syrian refugees. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Serbia and across EU reception contexts, this lecture interrogates the gap between international protection frameworks and the lived reality of those displaced — and asks what it means to belong when return has become impossible.
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