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Phone number: +39-055-503131
Fax: +39-055-5031385
Email address: pablooke@syr.fi.it

Biographical Profile

Ph.D. in Social and Political Sciences, European University Institute, Florence. Blokker’s doctoral research was on ‘Modernity and its varieties: A historical sociological analysis of the Romanian modern experience’. He earned an MA in Political Science from the University of Amsterdam. He was research associate in the Joint European Master in Comparative Local Development, University of Trento, and has taught Economic Sociology at the faculty of Sociology, University of Trento, and International Relations and International Political Economy at the Political Science department of the University of Amsterdam.

Some of his publications include: 2006, 'L'ordine europeo post-allargamento. Europa "unita nella diversità?" ', in: Giovani Sociologi Italiani 2006, Associazione di Sociologia Italiana (AIS), at http://www.scriptaweb.it/; 2005, ‘Post-Communist Modernization, Transition Studies, and Diversity in Europe’, European Journal of Social Theory, 8(4): 503–525; 2005, ‘Populist Nationalism, Anti-Europeanism, Post-Nationalism, and the East-West Distinction’, in: ‘Confronting Memories: European “Bitter Experiences” and the Constitutionalisation Process’, Special Issue, co-edited with Christian Joerges, German Law Journal, 6(2); 2004, ‘Ideas, Culture, and History in Transition Studies’, Review Essay, in: Czech Sociological Review, vol. 40, no. 6; and, 2002, ‘Continuity in change: social consequences of economic reform in Romania’, in: A.E. Fernández Jilberto and M. Riethof (eds), Labour Relations in Development, London: Routledge.

Research interests

His research lies within the broad themes of Social and Political Theory, democracy and cultural diversity in Europe, Central and Eastern European modernities, and socio-economic transformation. His Ph.D. research was on theories of modernization and varieties of modernity in Europe, and focussed in a historical-sociological case-study on various projects of modernization in Romania since the early 19th century. In recent times, he has been working on democratization, cultural diversity, and multi-culturalism in the New Member States, as well as on regional diversity and local development in the former communist countries.