PIONEER is an Alliance of European Universities dedicated to SDG 11 'Sustainable Cities and Communities', addressing the need for cities to become inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. The alliance brings together 10 impact-driven universities, including an associated Swiss partner, and covers 32 cities and 16 regions across Europe. By bringing together academics, public institutions, private organisations and citizens in our orchestration framework, we will develop joint challenge-based education, impact-driven research and innovation co-creation initiatives that contribute to many European, regional and urban agendas, such as the EU Green Deal and the 'Fit for 55' package. To this end, PIONEER will also be a facilitator of inter-institutional learning and a tool for institutional change. We will achieve this ambition through strategic integration at the institutional level: gradually aligning our individual strategies and institutional trajectories, building a common development strategy to become truly international institutions integrated in a federal framework.This framework will be inspired by the European Union, with a strong strategic centre that draws on and supports the diversity and autonomy of our partners to build a flexible and complementary academic ecosystem, while working together on a common strategy and development path. Committed to spreading European values and promoting inclusion and diversity, the PIONEER Open Campus will offer seamless mobility for students and unique leadership development opportunities for staff. Our Knowledge Hub will enable member universities and over 40 associated partners from regional ecosystems to work together on matters concerning SDG11.

The project aims at developing the framework for a database of biographical interviews to veterans of the Portuguese Colonial War

The period that followed the end of the Cold War and the fall of the communist regimes of the Soviet Union and eastern and central Europe has been one of profound transformations in the international order. In a context of accentuated uncertainty and ‘fuzziness’, most countries have been redefining their strategic orientations, rethinking defense policies and reshaping military organisations. In the face of a clear lack of empirically based research covering recent developments in this field in Portugal, this project aims at a global description and understanding of the transformations that have been occurring within the Portuguese Armed Forces and its relation with society during the past one and a half decades.

This project will involve the new problems associated with political and social participation, such as the rising trend in electoral abstention, political disaffection, the new forms of participation and the broadening of the democratic deliberation process. It will involve empirical EXPERIMENTATION in Portugal but we shall try to contextualize these questions within the European sphere, giving special attention to a comparison with Spain (an agreement exists with the researchers in CAES at Complutense University). Let us examine the different research lines: 1. The rising trend of electoral abstention in Portugal and other European countries. The explanations provided by the literature on the subject indicate the disappearance of political anchors (party and ?left/right? identities), the lack of interest in politics, growing individualism and, on the other hand, narrowing social and political divergences. It is useful to examine these explanations in depth, particularly the lack of interest in politics, and to explore others: globalization and withdrawal of the state from intervention, which has a tendency to neutralize the play in politics; the political parties? difficulties in transposing social problems to the political arena; and the way the parties themselves operate on an internal level and in their relations with the citizens and the media. It is also of interest to consider the cases of female political participation and the youth. 2. An analysis of the involvement of the agents in the voluntary associations and its democratic effects. The hypothesis to be tested: to ascertain if the different effects of association involvement (civic virtues, participative capacities, social trust, political integration) depend on the type of association in question. 3. An analysis of the change in political values and the implications: for the political behaviour of individuals and, possibly, the orientation of the parties. Have new security threats affected attitudes to...

This project proposes a sociological research on the Portuguese emigration and emigrants in the Plata-Basin region (Southern Brazil, the Pampas and Litoral regions in Argentina, and Uruguay). The relevance of the study is emphasised by two features of the Portuguese migration flows that differ from global international trends: first, emigration is not a circumstantial but rather a structural characteristic of the Portuguese society (Godinho, 1978), in the sense that it is a persistent historical pattern; second, the country has a notable specificity if compared to other national contexts: it is both an immigration and emigration country. Recent data show that emigration flows not only co-exist with new immigration waves, but have even been intensified in recent years. Considering the social and political impact of migratory flows, the project sets two main objectives: first, to develop an analysis of the conditions that framed the Portuguese emigration to the Plata-Basin region during the last half-century, and to depict a sociological 'portrait' of those emigrant communities, some of which have been mostly ignored until now (namely those in Argentina and Uruguay); second, to focus on socio-cultural identities with a view to investigating their relation with the life trajectories of the emigrants. In order to achieve these objectives, the project is methodologically based on a mixed design. It aims at conciliating the analysis of statistical data and documents from a variety of sources at an aggregate level (statistical series, legislation, public policies, etc.) with a survey of the Portuguese associations in the region, complemented with in-depth case studies of biographical trajectories (life-histories).

Comparative research on the process of women's military recruitment and the policies, which have development in the different European Union countries regarding their participation in the Armed Forces.