Project Background
Located at the crossroad between the Muslim Middle East and Western Europe, Bulgaria faced new challenges after joining the European Union as a member state. Today, the country is involved in networks of previously inexperienced transnational relations, discourses, and influences where the impact of "public religions", particularly Christianity, Islam and the "New Religious Movements", is becoming more visible. Globally, the strongest expression found place in the resurgence of Islam and the world-wide spread of new Protestant-based evangelical movements. In Bulgaria, however, the "invasion" of preachers from various religious denominations did not result in the rise of a "free market of religions". On the contrary, there is a tendency of "return" to the traditional religions that makes the research of their participation in the public sphere an urgent and important need.
In Bulgaria, as in the whole region of Eastern Europe, the overcoming of some conventional theories of modernization and secularization is still a primary task. Some academic fields are still dominated by the concept of religion as part of an ideological superstructure doomed to passing away together with the social and economic formations at its basis. Just like many other "path-breaking" theories of the past, the notions of the "inevitable" processes of development impede the scholarly understanding of religious communities.
The theses about the existence of specific good neighbourly Christian-Muslim relations in the Bulgarian social experience defined as komşuluk, as well as the so-called Bulgarian ethnic model loudly promoted after 1989, need a re-consideration. Being questionable from an academic point of view, they also no longer contain a real potential for shaping public policies that may serve as the basis for a consistent Bulgarian strategy of diversity management. Official messages in the public sphere are chaotically shifting between liberal universalism and multicultural inclusivism. Therefore, the analysis necessitates a new type of conceptualization, a new comparative theoretical approach, and a new interdisciplinary methodology that the research team of this project has proposed.
Methods
The project’s methodology was innovative on both fundamental and empirical scientific levels and encompasses approaches ranging from history, cultural anthropology, and philosophy to sociology and ethnography. The project offered a comparative elucidation of under-researched contexts synchronically and diachronically – from Bulgaria through Greece to Russia. In accordance with its aims and scientific tasks, the project will be realized through both research and educational activities. The project envisaged as its end-product a final publication – a collective book containing selected results from the entire research and some subsequent scholarly discussions. The book was published by Brill.