Please introduce yourself !
Hello everyone, my name is Matej Mikašinović-Komšo, I am 22 years old and I come from Croatia. I am currently finishing my fourth year of undergraduate studies of Political Science at the University of Zagreb.
The reason for my ISC64 application was that not only did I find the topics and the very location of the conference to be interesting, but that I was also intrigued by the concept of the conference - specifically, the way in which the focus is placed on students, and their mutual work, discussions, and planning for various solutions to difficult problems, instead of just relying on lectures! This is, in my opinion, a refreshing way of participating in a conference.
What I hope to experience at the conference is a busy week filled with discussions and teamwork, and I hope that my ideas and participation will be important and helpful for not only my team, but to everyone else as well!
What do you think about your table topic: Democracy and Global Order ?
My table topic, Democracy and Global Order, is, in my opinion, one of the most important topics of our age. We can see for ourselves that our contemporary democracies are being plagued by various different problems, for which there are no simple and clear solutions. In that sense, I believe that the organizers of the conference selected a really great topic, because there is much that can be said and discussed in it! What is really important for this topic is the fact that, although we call every democratic system a democracy, there are in fact different versions of democracies all around the world, each with its very own specifics, positives, and negative sides. Therefore, a diverse group of participants, which come from different parts of the world, is required when dealing with the problems of democracy, in order to get a full sense of the scope of the problems and potential solutions. Due to that, I am glad that I can bring to the discussions my own perspective on all the problems which we will be touching upon at the conference!
So far, in our topic, we have had two meetings in Japan, in which we discussed the meaning of all of our important terms with which we will be dealing with (such as democracy and populism for example), as well as specifying various problems of our contemporary democracies with which we will be tackling. So far, environmental problems (such as climate change) were debated and discussed at the two study sessions in Japan. The next step is for every participant of the topic to choose their own global problems which they will be researching. The problems are diverse - mine, for example, are populism in the USA and importance of national democracies in a globalised EU. With our topics selected, we will soon start preparing data and information on them.
Our table leader, Ruxandr Ioana Florea, has so far been extremely helpful and polite, always being ready to help us with any questions we had, while also keeping everyone informed on the current development in our topics discussions, which is quite helpful for us foreign participants who do not have the opportunity to join and participate in the study session discussions in Japan personally.
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