Three researchers from the Social Sciences Research Center - Amer Kurtović, Hrustan Šišić, and Aldina Husejinović - presented research at the CEEISA-ISA Joint International Conference 2024, from June 18th - 21st, in Rijeka, Croatia.
The conference, titled “Knowing the global-local: Imagining pasts, debating futures”, brought together over a thousand scholars from all over the world and sought to unpack the politics of knowledge and policy processes in the making of the global-local.
Altogether, four papers were presented: “How Towns Twin?: Empirical Evidence from Bosnia and Herzegovina”, “Scientific Knowledge in Policymaking: The Role of Academia in Agenda Setting in Bosnia and Herzegovina”, “Freeing Public Information: Testing Freedom of Information Requests to Develop a Scientific Database” and “The Western Balkans at the United Nations: An Analysis of UNGA Voting Congruence”.
In their paper, “How Towns Twin?: Empirical Evidence from Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Kurtović and Šišić used social network analysis to explore how towns in Bosnia and Herzegovina twin with their international counterparts, including through membership in inter-city association, specifically focusing on the questions of how a twinning agenda is set, how the negotiations process unfolds, and how a twinning agreement is operationalized.
Furthermore, Kurtović presented research on the role academics as holders of scientific knowledge play in the agenda setting process, through both formal means such as structured consultations and informal ones such as media appearances as well as the permeance of academics as politicians and politicians and academics.
Husejinović and Kurtović in their paper titled “Freeing Public Information: Testing Freedom of Information Requests to Develop a Scientific Database” used freedom of information requests towards over 200 institutions at the state and entity-level governments to collect metadata and test this method of data collection as a reliable method by which to gather scientifically-usable public data in a very complex and fraught institutional system and understand patterns and potential disparities in the complete process of requesting information, thus contributing to enhancing overall transparency, accountability and citizen empowerment.
Kurtović also presented research analyzing 30 years of votes in the UN General Assembly by Western Balkans countries, juxtaposing their voting patterns to various explanatory factors such as domestic political change, financial flows, foreign aid, interstate rivalry, leader changes, sanctions, and trade flows to develop a typology of the causes of voting behavior of Western Balkans states in order to explain their behavior compared to each other, EU member states, and the permanent five members of the UN Security Council.
In addition, Kurtović served as a discussant on a panel discussing Refugees and Migration, where he provided comments on papers.
Lastly, Kurtović was also elected interim secretary of the newly formed post-Yugoslav section of the Central and East European International Studies Association, along with Ana Bojinović Fenko of the University of Ljubljana as the chair of teaching collaboration and Nemanja Džuverović of the University of Belgrade as the chair of research collaboration.
The abstracts can be found here.