Gilles Van Hamme wins ERC fellowship

Gilles Van Hamme, lecturer in economic and political geography, has been awarded an ERC Synergy Grant for his CLOSER project: "Political systems and social cleavages in the post-Ottoman space of the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region".

The Middle East and North Africa region - known by its English acronym MENA - is experiencing chronic instability, linked to the difficulty political systems have in arbitrating conflicts and divisions within society. One of the reasons for this instability is the weakness of political parties, which play an essential role in channelling social demands.

Based on the cleavage theory developed in Western Europe, Gilles Van Hamme - IGEAT, Faculty of Science - proposes to study partisan systems, adopting a comparative approach between several countries in the region. This is the CLOSER project, supported by the European Research Council - ERC Synergy Grant - Breaking with a "culturalist" approach that assumes the uniqueness of the regional context, the aim is instead to systematically and comparatively test the relevance of cleavage theory, while highlighting the differences in origin and nature of cleavages as they have developed in this area.

To achieve a better understanding of the region’s open or latent conflicts, the project will combine a historical approach focusing on the genealogy of cleavages, a political approach - which seeks to describe the structuring oppositions in the political field - and a socio-geographical approach - which aims to identify the social bases of the various political currents using the tools of geography and electoral sociology.this research project therefore aims to achieve a better understanding of the conditions of stability in the MENA region, but also to develop a theoretical framework that can extract the theory of cleavages from its original geographical area.