International cultural-relations organisations increasingly present culture as a resource for climate transition, yet climate language does not itself demonstrate environmental transformation. This article examines how environmental sustainability became an explicit climate agenda within the European Union National Institutes for Culture (EUNIC) between 2016 and 2026 and what form of institutionalisation followed. It conducts a longitudinal critical document analysis of 33 EUNIC, EU and EU–EUNIC policy, governance, programme and reporting documents, supplemented by a targeted robustness test of eight documents from four EUNIC member institutes. The analysis traces policy layering from developmental sustainability to strategic mainstreaming and distinguishes discursive, programmatic, operational and environmental-accountability dimensions. At network level, culturalising the green transition advanced more rapidly than common operational standards and environmental-accountability rules. Member-level evidence, however, shows substantial greening through emissions targets, travel restrictions, procurement rules and sustainability reporting. The resulting pattern is therefore not simple policy–practice decoupling but vertically fragmented institutionalisation: climate responsibility is formalised across multiple governance levels without being aggregated into comparable network-wide performance. This configuration reveals a trade-off between common accountability, member autonomy and the mutuality valued in international cultural relations, suggesting a proportionate model based on minimum environmental disclosure, adaptable member-level implementation and clearer partner authority.
Introduction: Research on populist attitudes increasingly treats anti-elitism and people-centrism as distinct components, but the substantive social implications of that distinction remain less clear. This article asks whether the two validated ESS10 dimensions are embedded in different institutional and symbolic relations: distance from political institutions for anti-elitism and markers of national belonging for people-centrism. Methods: Using European Social Survey Round 10 data from 31 European societies, the study reconstructs the Anti-Elitism and People-Centrism dimensions validated by Dolci and Melli (2026), documents their item content and measurement properties, and estimates parallel country-fixed-effects models for standardised factor scores. Formal coefficient-difference tests and targeted robustness checks assess whether their social profiles differ. Results: Anti-elitism and people-centrism are related but only modestly. Institutional distrust and low political interest are much more strongly associated with anti-elitism. National attachment is more strongly associated with people-centrism, and majority-group belonging shows the same directional contrast with lower precision. Immigration closure and threat have small positive zero-order correlations with people-centrism but no independent positive associations in the adjusted specifications. The central contrasts are robust to alternative scoring, weighting, survey-mode checks, country exclusions, and a larger-sample specification that omits household income. Discussions/Conclusions: The findings reveal differentiated institutional and symbolic profiles, showing how Anti-Elitism and People-Centrism are embedded in distinct configurations of political distance and social belonging. People-Centrism is associated more clearly with national belonging than with immigration exclusion once broader social and political correlates are taken into account. This differentiation gives substantive meaning to the distinction between the two validated dimensions, while the ESS10 indicators capture only specific aspects of these broader constructs.
The article examines the reinforcement of border control mechanisms and increasing adoption of surveillance technologies in the EU member states of Greece, Italy and Spain. This reinforcement of borders aligns with the securitisation of migration prevalent across Europe and these member states can be seen as principal actors due to their spatial position. This article situates these member states and their border policing and surveillance technologies within the broader literature of border management, securitisation of migration and the European migration dynamics. The article charts out the existing framework of border policing, giving significant attention to the national authorities and argues that both border policing and surveillance technologies have been enhanced in these states. A comparative assessment of these countries’ border mechanisms is also embedded alongside contestations from a normative perspective.
This article examines how populism reshapes civil society by exploiting tensions embedded within professional organisations. Drawing on scholarship that conceptualises civil society as an inherently paradoxical sphere, this article specifies three organisational tensions through which populist repertoires operate: autonomy versus dependency, cooperation versus dissent, and inclusion versus exclusion. While existing research has focused largely on populist movements, democratic backsliding or anti-populist mobilisation, we shift attention to professionalised civil society organisations occupying an ambivalent position between state partnership and political advocacy. Using qualitative interviews with Czech organisations working with migrants, refugees and minority groups, we show how populist actors selectively target CSOs representing migrants and human rights, portraying them as elite intermediaries disconnected from ‘ordinary people’. In the Czech Republic’s context of moderated populism, however, these pressures do not result in systematic repression but instead produce an environment in which organisations must balance rhetorical contestation with continued cooperation and institutional dependence on the state. The article argues for a relational understanding of populism and civil society, demonstrating how populist repertoires exploit existing tensions within civil society rather than simply opposing, co-opting or capturing it.
This paper attempts to deploy - and adapt - the classical concept of charisma in the context of contemporary populism. The current wave of populisms of various kinds in Western representative democracies throws up challenges for political sociology in understanding how leaders seek to legitimize themselves; for instance through eccentric, often loud-mouthed, highly-opinionated behaviour, or what has been called ‘bad manners’. In deploying and extending the concept of charisma, the paper seeks to understand some of these developments; seeing in them not so much the expression of particular kinds of disposition on the part of such leaders, but as counter-tendencies to ‘establishment’, liberal, representative kinds of politics, and as signalling strategies for demonstrating what is here called idiot power.
