Evaluation Committee​

Mauro Caselli,
Stefano Palestini,
Anna Casaglia

Presentations

14:00 - 14:30

PhD student: Bob Kasper J  Mertens 
Supervisor: Emanuele Massetti (UNITN), Co-Supervisor: Frank Caestecker (UGhent, BE)
Title: From Harmonization to Divergence: Evaluating the Impact of Bureaucracies on Asylum Decision-Making in Europe
Abstract:
The Common European Asylum System (CEAS), established in 1999, was intended to harmonise asylum practices across the EU. However, research showed that substantial differences between national systems and the outcomes of Refugee Status Determination (RSD) processes remained. This suggests that individual States still play a key role in implementing the international protection system. What is less understood is how asylum offices - the entities responsible for the RSD process - contribute to this variation and potentially challenge the objectives of CEAS. This PhD thesis seeks to determine whether national asylum offices have become more aligned over time due to harmonisation efforts or if divergence continues. The first part of the research will analyse a large number of cases over time to identify structural factors that influence the quality of asylum determinations. The second part will conduct in-depth case studies of a smaller selection of countries to compare their administrative structures and evaluate the EU's impact on their operations. By adopting a public administrative perspective, this research offers a novel approach to understanding Europe’s international protection system. The outcome of this thesis will add to the existing literature by providing a comparative analysis of how Europeanization influences the functioning of national asylum offices.

14:30 - 15:00

PhD student: Giovanni Tommaso Roberto 
Supervisor:  Matteo Borzaga (UNITN), Co-Supervisor: Louisa Parks (UNITN) 
Title: Southern Blights: Irregular Work in the Southern Italy Tomato Supply Chain and the CS3D
Abstract:
This research proposal will trace the potential impact of the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CS3D) on working conditions in the Italian tomato supply chain, a key sector in the European agri-food industry. The study will examine the evolution of human rights due diligence (HRDD) frameworks from international guidelines to national laws, particularly within the European Union. By reviewing and comparing legislative examples like UK's and Australia's Modern Slavery Acts and existing European HRDD laws, the research aims to identify a distinctly European approach to HRDD and its implications for labour rights.
Focusing on the agri-food sector, the study will assess this market’s structure, the role of large-scale distribution networks, and the challenges posed by fragmented supply chains. A case study on Southern Italy's tomato production will provide an in-depth analysis of the market structure, labour conditions, and the human rights violations within it, offering a context for evaluating CS3D's potential to improve labour practices.
Ultimately, this research aims to contribute to the ongoing debate on HRDD by providing insights into the effectiveness of the CS3D in a complex and critical sector of the European economy. The findings will have broader implications for understanding how top-down regulatory frameworks can be applied to fragmented supply chains to enhance labour rights and corporate accountability within the EU and beyond.

15:00 - 15:30

PhD student: Valeria Estefania Romano    
Supervisor: Giacomo Pallante (UNITN), Co-Supervisor: Ester Gallo (UNITN)
Title: Colonial Legacies and The Path to Development: The Impacts of Community-Based Natural Resource Management in Reducing Poverty and Inequality in El Petén, Guatemala
Abstract:
The impact of colonialism on development is widely recognized as a significant factor in economic and political performance throughout the developing world. Economic structures and institutions are a central component of the colonial legacy in Latin America, where reliance on the extraction of natural resources and the exploitation of indigenous labor continued to be a defining feature long after independence. The long-standing economic and social inequalities associated with the extractivist model, coupled with the environmental degradation it accelerates, have contributed greatly to the region's underdevelopment. Although there has been a paradigm shift that favors participatory and sustainable development frameworks over extractivism, there is an increasing need for empirical evidence of outcomes. This research will focus on evaluating the impact of a particular sustainable development framework on poverty and inequality reduction: Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM). Using a mixed-methods approach, this research aims to determine whether granting access and management rights to natural resources to rural communities, despite the structural and institutional legacy of colonialism, has an impact on the levels of poverty and inequality they experience. To this end, the region of El Petén, Guatemala, has been selected because it presents a number of historical particularities that can be exploited through the use of an Instrumental Variables approach to establish a causal explanation. Being El Petén an emblematic example of the application of CBNRM, this research will also rely on fieldwork and semi-structured interviews to gain an understanding of the role of participation opportunities in relation to the aforementioned inequalities.

15:30 - 16:00

PhD student: Sandro Nicolas Schraudolph
Supervisor:  Stefano Palestini (UNITN), Co-Supervisor: Mario Quaranta (UNITN)
Title: Bringing the War Home. Domestic Backlash to International Conflict
Abstract:
Domestic and international political events are oftentimes treated as separate spheres to a degree that a holistic analysis of interaction effects between them raises eyebrows by both International Relations (IR) scholars and Comparativists. Peter Gourvich’s (1978) overview of scholars treating them as innately interlinked and in constant interaction is a milestone in challenging these perceptions. Since then, Sociologists honed their understanding of domestic protests in the relatively new field of Social Movement Studies (SMS). At the same time mixed methods became popular in IR to overcome criticisms of relying on statistical correlation.
Incorporating these new elements, this research expands on existing social movement research by integrating the influence of foreign intervention into the dynamics of movement activity. Marrying domestic and international conflict fields allows the conceptualization of protest as backlash to foreign conflict. It combines SMS’s expertise on protests with IR’s focus on conflict impact. SMS offer insight into how movements adjust their actions in response to state action, while IR sub-schools provide grievance- and window of opportunity concepts that will help contextualize insurgent style mechanisms to stable domestic settings. The research focuses on the impact of foreign intervention on national cohesion.
Taking protest activity as a proxy for national cohesion, the general research question is: How is social movement behavior impacted by international conflict? Employing a mixed-methods approach, this study addresses gaps in existing research by considering the influence of international conflict on protest behavior in the domestic sphere. To cover more drastic forms of domestic backlash and confirm the validity of protest intensity as a measurement of domestic backlash, measurements of political violence will be looked at as a secondary dependent variable of international conflict process. After a big N exploratory quantitative analysis, this approach will be further supplemented with a process tracing approach along with two case studies. I posit that (1) inconsistency between communicated conflict goals and conflict progression exacerbates anti-government protests and can potentially lead to an increase in incidents of political violence. Pathways contributing to this effect include (2) casualty aversion, especially in cases of compulsory military service, (3) the conflict endeavor being supported by big parts of the political institutions and (4) regime types and policing styles channelling the repertoire of contention of social movements either towards political violence or mass protest.

16:00 - 16:30

PhD student: Chiara Serioli    
Supervisor:  Jens Woelk (UNITN) Co-Supervisor: Sondra Faccio (UNITN)
Title: Language and Power.  A Socio-Legal Comparison of Indigenous Political Rights
Abstract:
Since the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007) was adopted, attention on Indigenous political rights has undoubtedly grown. However, while the Declaration recognizes the right of Indigenous Peoples to fully participate in a State’s politics, how this right should be recognized and realized within domestic legislation remains unsolved, after almost twenty years. Disagreement determines inhomogeneous protection systems and ultimately affects how democratic pluralism is internally constructed and protected. While inhomogeneity can be explained by analyzing the type of legal mechanisms adopted by domestic legislation, this research unfolds inhomogeneity from a linguistic perspective, as it aims to answer (1.) how domestic legislations – specifically constitutions - linguistically frame Indigenous political rights; and (2.) how different framings affect the application of these rights. 
The questions are tackled through a socio-legal approach that combines comparative constitutional research and systematic use of content analysis. This research design benefits Indigenous and decolonization studies by crossing disciplines and focusing on content analysis, an overlooked research tool within legal studies. Finally, this research helps assess how democratic pluralism is conceptualized and translated into practice, especially when strategically vague phrases or colonial/power language are implied in legal texts. This is important due to the recurrent violations suffered by Indigenous Peoples despite wider international and domestic legal corpora. Thus, findings can unveil what actual guarantees are available to Indigenous Peoples today and where future and alternative interventions are needed to address representation imbalances.

16:30 - 17:00

PhD student: Daniele Stracquadanio
Supervisor:  Paolo Foradori (UNITN) Co-Supervisor: Stefano Benati (UNITN)
Title: Thawing and Stable Intrastate Frozen Conflicts: Understanding Evolutionary Dynamics and Pathways to Resolution
Abstract:
From Eastern Europe to South-East Asia, the post-WWII global order has been marked by “no peace, no war” settlements that some scholars have labelled as frozen conflicts. These situations often emerge from intrastate disputes, leading to the formation of de facto states -such as Kosovo or Taiwan- that lack widespread international recognition. The literature on the subject seems to be "frozen" itself, still unresolved in defining the concept, or limited to studying the issue with either single case studies or small-N comparisons. Therefore, this study seeks to contribute to the scholarship by addressing the phenomenon from a large-scale perspective. The objective is to provide a comprehensive examination of the dynamics underlying the development of intrastate frozen conflicts.
The analysis will explore three levels: 1) events that trigger violent escalations, 2) factors that stabilise the stalemate, and 3) conditions that facilitate the peaceful resolution of the issue. The research argues that both internal and external elements affect the evolution of frozen conflicts. Internally, emphasis will be placed on events such as leadership transitions and changes in parties’ relative power. Externally, the study will concentrate on alliance shifts, external patron support, third-party mediations, and peacekeeping operations.
Drawing on the conceptualisation elaborated by Ludvik and Smetana, the first part of the research conducts a large-N statistical analysis that splits frozen conflicts in single dyad years. The second part consists of a series of qualitative case studies aimed at depicting the causal pathway between the significant variables and conflict development. Overall, the research aims to enhance the understanding of disputes that pose some of the greatest challenges to the stability of the modern international community.

17:00 - 17:30

PhD student: Francesca Zambelli
Supervisor: Alessandra Russo (UNITN) Co-Supervisor: Paolo Foradori (UNITN)
Title: Local Ownership and Context-Sensitivity in EU External Action: EU Support to Security Sector Reform (SSR) in Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova
Abstract: To respond to the challenges of an increasingly hostile security environment and maintain agency on the global stage, the European Union (EU) has pledged to act decisively and adopt measures to strengthen its role as a security provider in its neighbourhoods and globally. By promoting the effectiveness and accountability of partner countries’ security actors and institutions, Security Sector Reform (SSR) aims at enhancing the societal cohesion and, ultimately, the resilience of the recipients. Therefore, SSR, alongside military and defence assistance, can be a valuable tool in the EU’s external security governance toolkit.
While Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova have received significant EU SSR support, this dimension has always been considered secondary to trade and economic goals, especially in the framework of the ENP-East and EaP lacking an actual security compact. The proposed research will review the support provided, assess its impact, and discuss avenues for improvement. It will particularly focus on the local dimension of the EU’s SSR support, as it allows us to better grasp the effectiveness of the EU action based on its actual impact on the ground. Using a combination of participatory and qualitative methodologies, enabling the involvement of domestic actors in the production of research, the project will examine whether and how the EU “practices what it preaches”, applying the norms of local ownership and context-sensitivity. It will assess whether these principles' current conceptualisation and operationalisation effectively promote positive and sustainable reform outcomes. The research will also reveal how local actors perceive and shape the EU’s support for SSR. It will thus emphasise the often-overlooked role of local agencies in determining the outcomes of externally supported SSR projects.
In such a crucial moment for the EU, when its role as a security and defence actor is being re-defined, the proposed research, by assessing the effectiveness of EU SSR actions in enhancing resilience and stability in Eastern neighbourhood countries, will determine whether the current SSR approach is instrumental to strengthening the EU’s role as a security provider or requires rethinking.

The previous conference was held on 10 October 2023.