ABOUT RAMSES

Since 2005, St Antony's College has been a part of RAMSES2, a Network of Excellence on Mediterranean Studies funded by the European Commission under the 6th Framework Programme. Oxford's contribution to RAMSES2 is a collaborative endeavour of the European Studies Centre and the Middle East Centre, which is run by SEESOX. Launched and coordinated by the Maison Mediteranienne de Sciences de l'Homme in Aix-en-Provence, RAMSES2 involves 36 academic institutions from Western Europe, the Balkans and the Middle East researching the history, societies and current politics of the wider Mediterranean area. Its ambition is to create a new field of Mediterranean studies by bringing together the hitherto disparate scholarship on the different littoral subregions and countries. Through its activities, the network seeks to supplement the efforts of the European Union to bolster cross-Mediterranean integration via the Barcelona Process, the newly-instituted Neigbourhood Policy as well as the enlargement framework covering now the Balkans and Turkey. RAMSES2 investigates the Mediterranean as a geo-historical space marked by various patterns of exchange and cross-fertilisation in order to transcend the socio-political, economic and cultural fractures characterising it at present.

The spirit of RAMSES2 is to maximise exchanges within the network. Interested faculty and students are encouraged to follow the project's activities and contact Dimitar Bechev, the academic coordinator. 

Within RAMSES2, St Antony's coordinates a work package dealing with borders, conflicts and memories in the Mediterranean. It examines, from a comparative perspective, the experience of wider South East Europe (the Balkans, Turkey and Cyprus), the Middle East and North Africa. The research will focus on three main axes:

• The (de)legitimising discourses on borders in South East Europe and the wider Mediterranean;
• The impact of imperial legacies and memories on border conflicts;
• The transformation and resolution of border conflicts.

Some issues of interest include nation-building, the multiple uses of imperial past by successor states, the linkage between pre-national social configurations and early 21st century transnational phenomena, EU policies on conflict transformation, comparative democratisation.

The European Studies Centre is running together with its RAMSES2 partners a seminar series on Europe and the Mediterranean. It will be followed by thematic interdisciplinary workshops which will be instrumental for launching a working paper series. The final outcome of the work package activities will be several edited volumes structured along the research axes. Individual academics from Oxford will also contribute to the research activities in other work packages under RAMSES2 dealing with topics such as political regimes in the Mediterranean, economic integration, and civil societies.

The RAMSES2 sub-project run by St Antony's brings together a group of scholars from the European Studies Centre, the Middle East Centre, Maison Francaise and the Department of Politics and International Relations. The steering committee includes Dimitar Bechev,  Raffaella Del Sarto, Kalypso Nicolaidis (Chair), Kerem Oktem, Alexis Tadie, Leila Vignal and Michael Willis. Other academics associated with the project include Othon Anastasakis, Richard Caplan, Eugene Rogan and Philip Robins.