Welcome

Welcome to CEU’s Summer University, a very special postgraduate study-abroad opportunity in Budapest, one of the great capital cities in the heart of Europe.

The first application deadline (February 15) has expired. Please check the upcoming later deadlines as well as a few deadline extensions for some courses here .

Search Courses

Research-Intensive courses

Adaptive Thinking for Navigating the Anthropocene

At a time of well-documented, unavoidable and continuing global change adaptation has become a key concept in environmental and related social sciences, and also in policy processes on a variety of scales. Many sectors, such as forestry, biodiversity conservation, water management, agriculture, infrastructure development need information about the current state and future direction of ecosystem conditions, potential ecosystem-based adaptations, and relevant policies and governance mechanisms enabling such adaptations.

Advanced European Union Legal Practice

This advanced course is about the practice of European Union Law. Participants receive hands-on insider analysis about the functioning of the European Union. The program is designed to combine seminars on different topics as well as workshops supporting the issues addressed in these seminars or some aspects thereof. The Total Law™ method constitutes the backbone of the program and gives it its exceptional flavor.

Comparative Regionalisms: Changing Forms of Governance in Asia, Africa and the Americas and the Effects on the World Order

The course fosters new approaches to the study of regionalisms in Asia, Africa and the Americas. Building on, but seeking to go beyond the European experience the course examines the rise of regions after World War II and the resurgence of the idea in and from the 1980s. It considers the different interpretations, values and expectations assigned to ‘region’, from regional free trade agreements to security communities to supra-national integrative projects.

Managing Social Vulnerability: Welfare and Penal Systems in Comparative Perspective

This course will examine the welfare and penal systems as interconnected state approaches to social vulnerability. It will explore these state projects from a comparative and historical perspective, looking at how welfare states and penal systems evolved over time and across different global arenas. Conceptually, it will address how overlaps in these state systems may evidence the emergence of common forms of governance—and how those connote shifts in modes of state regulation, citizenship, and claims-making.

Polemos/Pulmus: Ways of Confrontation in Judaism, Paganism and Christianity in Late Antiquity

"Struggle is the father of all things", as the popular Greek saying has it, and religious or philosophical debates in Late Antiquity provide ample proof of this. The aspirations of religion to dominate space and time in our period invited various forms of rivalry, mostly precluding peace or even a dialogue for peace. The religious conflicts between, and within Christianity, Judaism and Paganism often involved political action and overt struggles – legislations, excommunications, persecutions, pogroms, revolts, or wars.

Power and Dynamics of Civil Resistance

This course is designed to provide an in-depth and multi-disciplinary perspective on civilian-based movements and campaigns that defend and obtain basic rights and justice around the world - from Egypt to Burma, from Zimbabwe to West Papua.The course will examine such questions as: What is civil resistance? What determines the success or failure of a civil resistance movement? How can educators, scholars and professionals better understand and analyze what elements are at work when civilians use nonviolent tactics?

Problems of the Self

The course aims to present the state of the art in research on the self from philosophy, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, sociology, and cognitive anthropology. Themes revolve around the nature of the self, as revealed through self-consciousness, body perception, action and joint action, and its embedding in society and culture. Historical and developmental perspectives provide other angles on the self. The course presents a unique opportunity for interdisciplinary discussion on the self from multiple perspectives.

The Politics of Citizenship

Recent years have seen an explosion of empirical and normative scholarly interest in citizenship across many disciplines. This course seeks to provide an overview of some of the main topical issues and scholarly perspectives in the social sciences, with special but not exclusive attention to citizenship in the law and politics of the states of Europe with a special focus on Eastern Europe. In addition to the overview the evolution of citizenship regimes, the course will offer an in-depth analysis of different normative frameworks and also analyse their policy implications.

The Roma in Europe - Debates on Comparative Analysis / Policy Strategy

There are approximately 6-10 million people in Europe who go under the broad label of Roma. Approximately one third of them live in enduring and transgenerational poverty. In the longue duree of modern European history the Romany peoples have been the losers of modernity. In the past few years the European Union has taken a growing interest in the plight of the largest European minority. In 2012 strategies for Romany integration are going to be presented by all national governments of the EU and all accession states.

Sub-Courses:

The Roma in Europe - Policy Strategy: a course for policy experts

The Roma in Europe - Policy Strategy: a course for policy experts with training in film documentation

The Roma in Europe - Comparative Analysis: a course for PhD students

The Roma in Europe - Comparative Analysis: a course for PhD students with training in film documentation

Policy and Training courses

Green Industry: Moving Towards the Industry of the Future

All trends in resource use and energy consumption indicate that current forms of industrial production are not sustainable in the long term. Many industrial production systems continue to be inefficient and wasteful and thereby threaten to overwhelm the assimilative capacity of our planet. In order to reverse these developments, industries need to radically improve their energy efficiency, reduce their resource consumption and curb the release of harmful by-products.

Human Rights and Drug Policy

The course aims to situate drug policies globally within a framework of fundamental human rights, and to assess the extent to which country and international drug policies fail to meet human rights standards. Discussion will focus partly on the identification and understanding of human rights including those that have their basis in international agreements and laws, and in part on evaluation and assessment of the gap between rights and practice in the implementation of drug policies in many countries and regions.

Human Rights Litigation

Human rights litigation is one of the methods by which civil society organizations can bring about social change. This course for human rights professionals will develop the skills and knowledge needed to successfully bring cases to the regional human rights systems and the UN Treaty bodies. Participants will be invited to provide information on concrete cases that they are involved in which will be discussed during the course.

Leadership and Management for Integrity

Raising integrity standards is increasingly recognised as an effective tool to foster development and strengthen legitimate democratic governance. This course, held for the eighth year, meets a need for critical and strategic approaches to successfully reform institutions to improve levels of governance and integrity.

Sub-Courses:

LMI - Doing Business with Integrity in Emerging Markets

LMI - Social Accountability: A Critical Review and the Way Forward

LMI - Strengthening Electoral Justice and Integrity

Mediation and Other Methods to Foster Democratic Dialogue

In a two-week course, the program facilitates the exchange of ideas and cooperative projects among mediation scholars, practitioners, trainers, and students in the East and West. In addition to providing an introduction to mediation, it provides a teaching and training template for scholars and practitioners from around the world to adapt for use in their home countries.

Mental Disability Law in Practice

This two-week applied legal practice course aims to strengthen the professional development of participants. Participants should be practising attorneys (members of the bar), lawyers holding a law degree and working on cases, or non-lawyers working in legal advocacy organisations, or in the human rights field.

Online Free Expression and Communication Policy Advocacy: a Toolkit for Media Development

Recent events in Egypt and Tunisia remind us that the development of the internet as a global, free and open resource stands at a perpetual crossroads. The dynamic and decentralized nature of the internet, and other new technologies, continually offers new avenues for open communication and free expression as well as new challenges and threats. The strategic use of digital technologies and information tools with the goal of empowering civil society and building capacity for an open society is critical.

Policies and Practices in Access to Digital Archives: Towards a New Research and Policy Agenda

This course is intended to serve as a bridge between archivists, curators, researchers, legal experts and policymakers whose work deals with digital records, cultural heritage collections and/or open data. Launching an itinerary to reform the political and statutory landscape by uniting the efforts of key stakeholders is one of the broad purposes of the course.

Sustainable Human Development: From International Frameworks to Regional Policies

The course is a continuation of the similar endeavor conducted in 2006-2011. The course will generally maintain its initial structure addressing major areas of sustainable human development from both academic and policy angle. The experience so far suggests that this combination of theoretical exposure and practical experience makes it unique and interesting for participants not just from Europe and CIS but also beyond the region.

Towards a Political Economy of Education

The global education landscape is changing rapidly. The last few decades have witnessed shifts in at least four major areas. First, there has been a growing trend of liberalization, marketization, commercialisation and privatisation of educational markets, and the penetration of market dialogue into debates on education. The liberalization of most markets has also called for a rethinking of the role of the government and the private sector in many areas, especially those that were traditionally taken to be the domain of the government.

Sub-Courses:

EDU - Regionalisation, Globalisation and Privatisation in Education

EDU - Innovative Financing Mechanisms for Quality Education

CEU Summer University

News & Stories

In the spotlight

Welcome

Search Courses

Research-Intensive courses

Policy and Training courses