Open Research Repository
The Open Research Repository (ORR) is the official institutional repository of the Central European University. The repository provides access to the research output of the CEU community by collecting open access versions of scholarly works authored or co-authored by CEU faculty and students.
For more information, please contact us at: scholcom@ceu.edu
Recent Submissions
Publication No one needs to teach Macedonians what Europe is: Macedonian opinion makers’ defensive Europeanization of the past amid Bulgaria-North Macedonia bilateral dispute(2025-09-25)This article examines how Macedonian opinion makers engage in the Europeanization of memory to justify North Macedonia’s Europeanness amid the bilateral dispute with Bulgaria. Drawing on a Discourse-Historical Approach-informed analysis of 43 opinion pieces from 2019 to 2023, the study demonstrates how national narratives are recontextualized, either aligning with or challenging the EU memory regime. By invoking antifascism and Yugoslav socialist modernity, opinion makers construct a European identity based on local historical legacies through what the article conceptualizes as defensive Europeanization via justification. The latter concept highlights how memory actors resist hegemonic narratives, suggesting an alternative understanding of (EU)rope. As a result, the article proposes a new lens by which Europeanization and European identity can be comprehended.Item Geopolitics on a Shoestring? Unpacking the EU'S Geopolitical External Assistance to Central Asia(2025-09-11)The paper examines how the European Union's (EU) increasingly emphasised geopolitical ambitions are reflected in the practice of its external assistance policy. An analysis of EU documents around various policy initiatives and funding instruments reveals that in the Commission's understanding, geopolitical external assistance increases EU market power, is well resourced financially, focuses on strategic sectors that create long-term dependencies and downplays normative considerations. We examine how these characteristics actually play out in the EU's post-2021 external funding for Central Asia. There is indeed an emphasis on market power, and a shift in sectors is also evident, away from those associated with poverty reduction towards ones like green and digital technologies. Normative issues are relatively absent. However, a stark reduction in resources glaringly contradicts a more geopolitical approach. The EU argues that this shortfall will be more than compensated by private sector investments, funded by national and multilateral development banks. Yet this is by no means guaranteed, and involving actors like the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in leveraging private investments creates additional dilemmas. The findings highlight the challenges that the EU faces in becoming a more geopolitical actor in the context of scarce financial resources and competing priorities.Item Causal coherence improves episodic memory of dynamic events(2026-01)“Episodes” in memory are formed by the experience of dynamic events that unfold over time. However, just because a series of events unfold sequentially does not mean that they are related. Sequences can have a high degree of causal coherence, each event connecting to the next through a cause-and-effect relationship, or be a fragmented series of unrelated occurrences. Are causally coherent events remembered better? And if coherence leads to better recall, which attributes of episodic memories are particularly affected by it? Past work has investigated similar questions by manipulating the causal structure of language-based, narrative stimuli. In this study, across three experiments, we used dynamic visual stimuli showing unfamiliar events to test the effect of causal structure on episodic recall in a cued memory task. Experiment 1 found that the order of three-part causally coherent sequences of events is better remembered than that of fragmented events. Experiment 2 extended this finding to longer sequences and further demonstrated that causal structure is not confounded with low-level characteristics of the stimuli: Reversing the order of coherent stimuli led to task performances indistinguishable from those on fragmented stimuli. Experiment 3 replicated the results of improved order recall from the previous experiments and additionally showed that recall of causally relevant details of coherent stimuli is superior to recall for details of focal events in fragmented sequences. In sum, these findings show that the episodic memory system is sensitive to the causal structure of events and suggest coherence usually leads to better recall.Item An option space approach to wood use:Providing structural timber for buildings while safeguarding forest integrity(2025-10-17)Wood use is crucial for climate-change mitigation, but strategies range from increasing harvest to conserving forests. To reconcile contradictions, we conceptualize an option space that considers both social and ecological thresholds. We couple the material flow model RECC and the forest model CRAFT to quantify the option space for wood use in the global building sector and current forest areas from 2020 to 2050. We juxtapose four demand scenarios with four supply scenarios that meet material and ecosystem service thresholds, respectively. In 12 of the 16 resulting scenario combinations, supply exceeds demand. They differ in regional self-sufficiency (6–9 out of ten world regions), average primary wood availability beyond structural timber use (0.2–1.4 GtCyr−1), and overall climate impacts (2.0–8.0 GtCO2eqyr−1). Substantially increasing wood intensity in buildings within ecological limits is only feasible in a low floorspace scenario with increasing circularity, emphasizing the need for nuance in claims regarding the sustainability of wood use.Item Spatio-temporal visual statistical learning in context(2025-09-19)Visual Statistical Learning (VSL) is classically investigated in a restricted format, either as temporal or spatial VSL, and void of any effect or bias due to context. However, in real-world environments, spatial patterns unfold over time, leading to a fundamental intertwining between spatial and temporal regularities. In addition, their interpretation is heavily influenced by contextual information through internal biases encoded at different scales. Using a novel spatio-temporal VSL setup, we explored this interdependence between time, space, and biases by moving spatially defined patterns in and out of participants' views over time in the presence or absence of occluders. First, we replicated the classical VSL results in such a mixed setup. Next, we obtained evidence that purely temporal statistics can be used for learning spatial patterns through internal inference. Finally, we found that motion-defined and occlusion-related context jointly and strongly modulated which temporal and spatial regularities were automatically learned from the same visual input. Overall, our findings expand the conceptualization of VSL from a mechanistic recorder of low-level spatial and temporal co-occurrence statistics of single visual elements to a complex interpretive process that integrates low-level spatio-temporal information with higher-level internal biases to infer the general underlying structure of the environment.
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