07/06/2025
🎤 We were honored to welcome Professor Lavinia Stan from St. Francis Xavier University, Canada, as keynote speaker at IECS 2025.
Prof. Stan is a globally recognized expert in comparative politics and the ERA Chair Holder at Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, where she leads a Europe project focused on the dynamics between State, Church, and Body Politics, while promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in the social sciences. She has authored and edited 18 books, and numerous articles and reports on transitional justice, democratization, and post-communist transformations in Central and Eastern Europe. A former President of the Society for Romanian Studies, she now serves as Editor-in-Chief of 📘 East European Politics and Societies and 📗 Women’s Studies International Forum (Elsevier).
Her keynote speech, titled “Women’s Disempowerment and Democratic Backsliding,” delivered a powerful and timely analysis of current global trends:
❝ In December 2023, a World Politics article reviewed the state of democratic backsliding in the world and noted that from 1990 through 2025 nearly 40 countries have experienced periods of democratic backsliding across all regions of the world. Democratic backsliding is happening in rich countries that previously appeared economically secure against an erosion of democratic safeguards. These findings echo previous reports which showed that the number of liberal democracies has decreased, whereas autocrats have taken control of some electoral democracies during the past 15 years. Leading research platforms like V-Dem and Freedom House have warned about the global retreat of democracy. Scholars have documented erosion of democratic institutions, norms, and safeguards in new and old democracies ranging from Poland, Serbia and Hungary in Central and Eastern Europe, to Turkey in the Middle East, Benin and Malawi in Africa, India and South Korea in Asia, as well as Venezuela and the United States. Through executive aggrandizing, plebiscitary override, elite collusion, or autogolpe (self-coup), democracies can fall prey to actors eager to undermine them. The global rise in populism and political polarization, often relying on the activation of nationalism or the cultivation of religious and cultural rifts, are also associated with an erosion of the quality of democracy and democratic safeguards in nominally democratic systems. Democratic backsliding has led to women’s disempowerment. From restrictions on abortion in Poland and the United States to Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention, women have been disempowered by this recent democratic backsliding. ❞
Organized by Facultatea de Stiinte Economice - Universitatea Lucian Blaga din Sibiu
