The Department of Global and Development Studies organizes a public lecture series connected to its Jean Monnet Module "EUGlobDev—The EU's Global and Development Dimensions," at which guest speakers from Albania, Ecuador, Germany, and Tanzania reflect on thematic or methodological issues that can broaden the horizon of teaching international and EU studies at ELTE.  

At each session, a guest speaker from a partner university and a professor from ELTE's Department of Global and Development Studies start a conversation, to which other professors and students can join. These exchanges provide an opportunity to explore how our EU-related courses can better reflect Europe's global responsibilities.

Lectures

Friederike Trotier (University of Passau, Germany): Knowledge Production and Field Expertise: Encounters between Europe and Asia

Date: from 4 p.m. on October 7, 2026

Discussant: Béla Soltész (ELTE)

Venue: 0.87 (Marx Hall)

In Development Studies, knowledge production and field encounters are not perceived as neutral but as embedded in structural and epistemic inequalities. This talk connects approaches of critical knowledge production with concrete situations of encounters and cooperations between Europe and Asia to shed light on dynamics, shifting hierarchies, benefits and challenges that shape these encounters. Critical knowledge production in Development Studies stresses the situatedness of relational processes in intercultural encounters and questions the creation of development knowledge, i.e., who creates it, which voices are included and which are excluded, what agendas they serve and how critical knowledge and practice is produced. Development research, teaching, policy and practice are scrutinised to uncover the underlying webs of power. This approach encourages new and reflective forms of knowledge production to overcome existing inequalities. The examples given in this talk draw from cooperation projects between the University of Passau, Germany, and educational institutions in Indonesia. They serve as starting point to discuss different forms of cooperation in teaching and research and to reflect on the opportunities and challenges when taking critical knowledge production as a guiding principle. 

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Jubjana Vila (EPOKA University, Albania): Contesting Development: Protest, Westernization, and Albania’s Path towards the European Union

Date: from 2 p.m. on 13 October 13, 2026

Discussants: Laura Kromják (ELTE), Emina Veljović (International University of Sarajevo)

Venue: 0.100C (Zsuzsa Ferge Faculty Council Room)

Albania’s post-communist transformation has been closely connected to its aspiration to align with the European political, economic, and social standards.  European integration has served not only as a foreign-policy objective, but also as a key framework for domestic development, institutional reform, modernization, and alignment with the West. This lecture offers an overview of Albania’s EU path, from the early post-communist transition to candidate status and the current active accession negotiations. It examines the interplay between EU conditionality, institutional reforms, economic transformation, democratization, and changing social expectations throughout this process. At the same time, it highlights the distinction between formal progress in the accession process and the more complex question of substantive transformation within Albanian society and institutions. The lecture concludes with an analysis of recent domestic developments in Albania, focusing on popular protests and civic contestation to better understand evolving public attitudes towards governance, development and Europeanization. Overall, the Albanian experience provides a broader perspective on the opportunities, limits, and dynamics associated with EU integration as a transformative process. 

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Paul Japhet (University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania): Healthcare Financing in Developing Countries: What Is Really Needed for Keeping Africans Healthy?

Date: from 2 p.m. on October 20, 2026

Discussant: Klára Fóti (ELTE)

Venue: 0.100C (Zsuzsa Ferge Faculty Council Room)

Healthcare financing is central to achieving Universal Health Coverage (UHC), improving population health and protecting households from catastrophic health expenditure. However, many African health systems face a persistent financing challenge: governments are expected to expand access to quality healthcare while fiscal space remains constrained, out-of-pocket expenditure is substantial, and external financing is increasingly uncertain. The challenge is therefore not simply how much countries spend on health, but how healthcare is financed, pooled, allocated and translated into equitable and effective services. This presentation examines what African countries need to finance to keep their populations healthy, drawing on experiences from developing countries, particularly in East Africa, including Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda and Burundi. These countries continue to face challenges associated with reliance on out-of-pocket payments, which can expose households to catastrophic expenditure and deepen poverty. The presentation reframing the question from “How can Africans pay for healthcare?” to “How can African societies collectively finance health as a public and developmental good?” Finally, keeping Africans healthy requires financing not only healthcare services, but also the health systems, social conditions and public institutions that make good health possible.

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Diana Pacheco (Casa Grande University, Ecuador): Reading Between the Frames: Methodologies for Exploring Social Struggles through South American Documentary Films

Date: from 4 p.m. on October 20, 2026

Discussants: Katalin Turai (ELTE), Nejla Omić (International University of Sarajevo)

Venue: 0.100C (Zsuzsa Ferge Faculty Council Room)

How can we read a documentary not only as a representation of a social struggle, but also as a particular way of producing knowledge about that struggle? This lecture proposes a methodological approach to documentary cinema that considers films as audiovisual constructions shaped by specific historical, political, and production contexts. Through selected examples from ethnographic cinema, New Latin American Cinema, Third Cinema, and community filmmaking, it examines different relationships between filmmakers, subjects, and the social realities being represented. Films such as Fernando Birri’s Tire dié will be used to introduce the idea of documentary as a form of social research, while Third Cinema and community-based practices will allow discussion of cinema as political intervention and collective production. The presentation also proposes analytical strategies that connect film form with production processes, authorship, participation, and political context. By “reading between the frames,” we are encouraged to ask not only what a film represents, but who produces its images, how they are constructed, whose voices are present or absent, and what forms of knowledge they make possible. The aim is to develop a critical and contextual approach to documentary cinema as a means of understanding social struggles in South America.

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Patrick Mlinga (University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania): Why Development Policies Succeed or Fail: Lessons from Tanzania and the Global South

Date: from 4 p.m. on October 21, 2026

Discussant: Kálmán Dezséri (ELTE)

Venue: 0.100C (Zsuzsa Ferge Faculty Council Room)

Why do far-reaching development policies produce transformative results in some contexts while falling short in others? In this lecture, I examine this enduring question through Tanzania’s development experience, while drawing connections with broader debates across the Global South. I reflect on Tanzania’s successive development approaches, from state-led development and structural adjustment to decentralisation, industrialisation and the recently concluded Development Vision 2025, to explore what happens between the formulation of ambitious policies and their implementation in practice. I argue that development outcomes cannot be understood through policy design alone. Rather, they emerge from the interaction of political priorities, institutional capacity, bureaucratic coordination, financing, local implementation, state-society relations and the capacity to learn and adapt. Particular attention is given to local government and how transformative national development goals are negotiated, adapted and sometimes constrained by local institutions, resources and everyday realities. Drawing lessons from Tanzania and comparable experiences across the Global South, I question the simple distinction between policy ‘success’ and ‘failure’. Instead, I present development policy as a political, institutional and negotiated process, and consider what this means for designing policies that are transformative, implementable and responsive to changing realities.