The facilitation of the expat vote was a recurrent issue in the Greek parliamentary agenda. In 2019, the Greek Parliament voted by an overwhelming majority a long overdue law which allowed Greeks of the diaspora to vote from their place of residence. 

In this seminar we supported that the fact that this change took place 44 years after the right was first introduced in the Greek Constitution, was not a mere chronological coincidence, but had to do with a number of combined conjunctural factors that led to a breakthrough reform in homeland-diaspora political relations. By tracing the party-political and wider social mobilizational and discursive dynamics, in this seminar we focused at the micro foundations of policy change. We argued that the post-2009 Greek economic crisis with its rising levels of emigration and a new political class acted as catalysts in the redefinition of homeland diaspora political engagement. 

Meet our speakers and chair

Othon Anastasakis (MA Columbia, PhD LSE) (@OAnastasakis) is the Director of South East European Studies at Oxford (SEESOX); Senior Research Fellow at St Antony’s College. He teaches “South East European politics and European integration” and “EU politics” in Oxford. He is currently the Principal Investigator of two projects: the Greek Diaspora Project at SEESOX and the Turkey’s Migration Diplomacy.  He is also an Adjunct Professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. His books include Revisiting a turbulent past: The Greek military dictatorship (with Lagos, Berghahn forthcoming 2021); The Legacy of Yugoslavia: Politics, economy and society (with Bennett, Madden and Merdzanovic, I.B. Tauris/Bloomsbury, 2020); Balkan legacies of the Great War: The past is never dead (with Madden and Roberts, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Reforming Greece: Sisyphean task or Herculean challenge? (with Singh, SEESOX 2012); In the shadow of Europe: Greeks and Turks in the era of post-nationalism (with Nicolaidis and Oktem, Brill, 2009); Greece in the Balkans: Memory, conflict and exchange (with Bechev and Vrousalis, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009). His research interests include: European politics; Migration and diaspora; Balkan and Greek party politics; South East European geopolitics; Russia and the Balkans.

Foteini Kalantzi is the A.G. Leventis Research Officer at the Diaspora Project in SEESOX, St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. Her work focuses on the Greek diaspora – homeland interrelationship. Her work also includes research on securitisation of migration in Europe, with a focus on Greece. She is one of researchers in the ‘Migration Diplomacy and Turkish-EU relations’ project of the Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership. Also, she is the secretary of the ‘International Politics of Migration, Refugees and Diaspora’ working group of British International Studies Association. She received her PhD in International Relations from University of Macedonia, Greece and carried out part of her research in Freie Universität Berlin. She holds an MA in International Political Economy from University of Warwick, UK, a BA in International and European Relations from Panteion University, Athens and a BSc in Economics from University of La Verne, California. She has teaching experience in International and European Relations, Economics and Ethics in social media at the Department of International Relations of Université de Strasbourg at City Unity College in Athens. She has been a research associate at the Hellenic Centre for European Studies (EKEM), and at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP). 

Spyros Economides is Associate Professor in International Relations and European Politics at the London School of Economics and Deputy Director of the Hellenic Observatory. He was a Research Associate of the Centre for Defence Studies at King's College and at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. He has also served as Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College, USA, and in the Faculties of Political Science at the Universities of Zagreb, Croatia and Belgrade, Serbia. He was also a Visiting Fellow at the EU Centre in Singapore. His current research concentrates the external relations and security policies of the EU; Europeanisation and foreign policy, and the EU’s relationship with the Western Balkans. Dr Economides is also a regular commentator in national and international media on issues relating to Greece and those of the Western Balkans. His latest publication is Economides and Sperling (eds.) EU Security Strategies: Extending the EU System of Security Governance (2018).

The twitter Hashtag for this event is: #LSEGreece

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The Hellenic Observatory (@HO_LSE) is internationally recognised as one of the premier research centres on contemporary Greece and Cyprus. It engages in a range of activities, including developing and supporting academic and policy-related research; organisation of conferences, seminars and workshops; academic exchange through visiting fellowships and internships; as well as teaching at the graduate level through LSE's European Institute.