Liberal democracy is under strain. Polarisation is intensifying, trust in institutions is eroding, and the political space for civic action is increasingly contested. At the same time, citizen participation has gained new momentum, and many European cities — Amsterdam among them — are experimenting with more participatory forms of governance.

Amsterdam is at once a platform and a context for democratic contestation. Some civic actors are primarily locally oriented, advancing neighbourhood-level or city-wide demands; others use the city as a site of struggle in conflicts that are fundamentally national or transnational in character — around migration, climate, Palestine, or policing. The municipality must navigate both, while simultaneously positioning itself in relation to a national political landscape that has grown more polarised and has introduced more restrictive measures toward protest and civil society. How Amsterdam responds to these pressures and how civic actors interpret and respond to the municipality's choices is itself a key question the project seeks to understand.

The project takes an interpretive approach to examine the relational, procedural, and substantive dimensions of these dynamics. It asks how local politicians, administrators, activists, and civil society actors make sense of each other, interpret each other's actions, and construct competing stories and frames about democratic roles and expectations. Crucially, the project does not presuppose which issue domains will prove most contentious. Instead, it follows tensions where they are actually mounting, allowing the substantive stakes of democratic contestation to emerge from the research itself. Particular attention goes to how social movement and civil society organisations navigate the tension between institutional engagement and autonomous contestation: between the pull of access and resources on the one hand, and the risk of co-optation on the other.

The central question guiding the project is: How do Amsterdam's municipal government and local civic actors negotiate the boundaries of local democracy, and under what conditions do their interactions move between cooperation and conflict?

The PhD project will be supervised by dr. Conny Roggeband, dr. Imrat Verhoeven, and dr. Sander van Haperen. Applicants are invited to develop a research proposal based on this project outline; please use the template referenced below (under “Application process and contact information”). The proposal allows you to specify and elaborate how you intend to address the questions posed in this advertisement.