About IIRAS

On the 18th of February 2022, the BBU Senate officially approved the restructuring and the renaming of the European Research Institute (ERI). The new name of the European Research Institute is Institute of International Relations and Aria Studies (IIRAS). The name change is part of a larger rebranding process, which coincides with a strategic refocus and reinvigoration of IIRAS’s resources. The Faculty of European Studies started its activity under the name of “School of Higher European Comparative Studies” in 1993. In May 1995 the official name of the institution became Faculty of European Studies. ERI was created as a result of UBB’s Senate Decision dating from 13.05.2003. In 2016, ERI received the stats of a research-development and innovation unit of excellence operating within the Faculty of European Studies. ERI’s activity is financially supported from the Faculty’s extra-budgetary resources and its research grants. ERI is part of the strategic research infrastructure of Babes-Bolyai University (UBB r-platform) and is included in the distributed network of units of excellence within the Institute of Advanced Studies in Science and Technology (STAR-UBB). The scientific activity of the Institute has been carried out through numerous national and international scientific grants, various high impact studies in the European research field and not only, many of them being published at Foundation for European Studies Publishing House (EFES), in prestigious national publishing houses such as Cluj University Press, POLIROM and international ones such as NOMOS (Germany), HARMATTAN (France), Cambridge Scholars Publishing (England), etc. A special part of ERI’s activity was dedicated to the Institute’s conferences which were organized with a relatively constant periodicity and succeeded to gather numerous personalities from the academic and public sectors including guests from prestigious universities with whom the Institute developed strong partnerships. The Institute together with the Faculty of European Studies organize annually the “Disintegration and Integration in East-Central Europe” International Conference (DIECE)” as well as its special editions. The activity carried out within the research groups of the Institute involves both doctoral students of the Doctoral School “European Paradigm” and master students of the Faculty of European Studies. Among the most recent ERI institutional partnerships are those concluded with: – Jean Monnet Cross-border Franco-German Center (University of Strasbourg); – The Institute of Political Studies of Aix-en-Provence (Marseille) – Université Paris-Est Créteil (Paris) – Gordon College of Education (Haifa) Starting with 2012, the Institute has a research unit specific to it and a library with an impressive number of volumes including specific endowments for advanced research. The 50 members of the Institute include professors, researchers, PhD and Postdoctoral students from Romania and abroad each of them being assigned to a specific research group. The Committee of the Regions archive was donated by the European Commission to the Institute / Faculty and it contains digitized documents of great importance for conducting research in the field of European Studies. The archive is unique in Romania and Central Eastern Europe. Beginning with 2020, the DIGI-Regio archive was included in the r-UBB platform as an element of strategic research infrastructure. The Institute publishes together with the Faculty the journals: On-line Journal Modeling the New Europe, Synergies Roumanie, Studia Europaea. The synthesis of the research activity of the last years confirms the dynamism and the value of the research activities within the Institute.

The activity of the Institute of International Relations and Area Studies
for the period 2016-2020: