Armine Ishkanian is Associate Professor in the Department of Social Policy and the Executive Director of the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme at the International Inequalities Institute. Her research examines the relationship between civil society, democracy, development, and social transformation. She has examined how civil society organisations and social movements engage in policy processes and transformative politics in a number of countries including Armenia, Egypt, Greece, Russia, Turkey, and the UK.
Her current research is focused in two areas. The first examines the relationship between social movements and social policy, exploring how social movements engage with, contest, and seek to inform and shape social policies and the factors which enable or hinder their ability to influence policy shaping and outcomes. In examining how social movements engage in policy processes. Over the past decade, has examined a number of different types of mobilisations, including anti-austerity movements, pro-democracy mobilisations, and movements against gender-based violence. Since 2017, her research has focused on emergent forms of solidarity, care, and collective action in the context of migration in Europe. The second area of research builds on and extends her long-standing work on civil society in Armenia. Working with local partners, she is working on a project that critically examines the ways in which local and international civil society actors have been involved in peace building and development processes, the challenges of achieving peace in the region and the relationship between conflict and inequalities.
Armine’s research has been published in a wide range of journals including: Critical Social Policy, Democratization, Europe Asia Studies, Journal of Civil Society, Journal of International Development, Social Politics, Sociological Review, and Voluntas. She is the author of two books: Democracy Building and Civil Society in Armenia (2008) and The Big Society Debate: A New Agenda for Social Welfare? (co-edited with Simon Szreter 2012). In 2016 she received the Best Article Award from the International Society for Third Sector Research for her article “Surreptitious Symbiosis: Engagement Between Activists and NGOs” (published in the Voluntas and co-authored with Marlies Glasius).
Through her research she also engages with a number of foundations as a means of disseminating research findings and creating platforms for multi-stakeholder discussions. She is currently a member of the Advisory Committee of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Armenian Diaspora Survey project and has previously had research and knowledge exchange projects funded by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, the Heinrich Boell Stiftung, and the Robert Bosch Stiftung.
She welcomes enquiries from potential PhD students to work on topics in her areas of interest.