2018 ECPR General Conference

The 2018 ECPR General Conference was held at Universität Hamburg on August 22-25. This year the conference featured 78 Sections, 520 Panels and over 2,300 Papers. The varied programme included Roundtables and Featured Panels addressing topical or contentious themes and creating the platform for lively discussion and exchange of ideas. A Plenary Lecture "Normativity and Reality: Thinking Politically About Politics" was delivered by German philosopher and political theorist Rainer Forst. ECPR’s General Conference remains Europe's largest annual gathering of political scientists with scholars from throughout the world and at all stages of their career.

Associate professors of Irkutsk State University Elizaveta Matveeva and Lyudmila Igumnova presented the results of their research at the conference. The paper of Elizaveta Matveeva analyses a variety of actors involved in the process of European identity construction in Italy and a variety of European identity frames they offer to the Italian general public. Her paper "Where’s Democracy? Whose is the Culture?": Spatial Dimensioning of Civic and Cultural European Identity Frames in Italian Online Public Discourses" was presented at the panel "Challenges of European Identification".

The paper of Lyudmila Igumnova explores Russia-related official statements of the European External Action Service and aims to distinguish the elements of normative, soft and transformative power in EU's official communications to Moscow to specify what type of power the EU exercises in Russia. Her  paper "Official Communications of the European External Action Service with Russia: Crafting the Image of Normative Power Europe" was presented at the panel "The European Union in the International Arena".