CECOB,
il Centro per l’Europa Centro-Orientale e Balcanica (the Centre for
Central Eastern and Balkan Europe) has recently merged with the
Department of Political and Social Science at the University of Bologna.
Find information on CECOB’s establishment, accomplishments and history
below.
The Centre for Central-Eastern and Balkan Europe was
founded in 1996 by the University of Bologna and the Municipality of
Bologna, with the active participation of the European Union, the
Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Regional Government of Emilia
Romagna, the Municipalities of Forlì, Cesena and Cervia and the Carisbo
Foundation. In 2002 CECOB was reestablished as a consortium of the
University of Bologna and IECOB with Stefano Bianchini as its president
and Francesco Privitera as its director.
Like the board of IECOB, CECOB’s Academic Board was made up
of the extensive network of scholars that forms EBIN. The Centre also
relied on the contribution and participation thousands of alumni from
participating universities and other programmes. On the institutional
level, CECOB collaborated with the Central European Initiative (CEI) and
the Adriatic-Ionian Initiative (AII). CECOB carried out projects for
the Italian Institute for Foreign Trade (ICE), the Italian Diplomatic
Institute “Mario Toscano” (ISDI), the World Bank, the Food and
Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO), and the UNESCO Regional Bureau
for Science and Culture in Europe and North America (BRESCE), among
other international organisations.
CECOB’s connection to EBIN enabled it to work across disciplines and national boundaries to carry out research in politics, sociology, and economics. Taking advantage of this unique position, CECOB organised a number of international postgraduate training courses in human rights, economics, and environmental science with a special focus on the Balkan states and Eastern Europe