HISTORY AND BACKGROUND

The National Center of Social Research –ΕΚΚΕ- was established in 1959 under the auspices of UNESCO and is the only public institution in Greece dedicated to the social sciences. ΕΚΚΕ is a public law legal entity  supervised by the General Secretariat for Research and Innovation of the Ministry of Development.

Since its establishment, ΕΚΚΕ :

• Has established a research tradition in areas such as social policy, political sociology and electoral geography, social geography and social anthropology.
• Conducts social research on a wide range of subjects, constantly enriching a decades-long tradition with issues of current importance
• Provides support to the State by designing and evaluating public policies at the national, regional and local level, as well as providing research and expertise reports aiming at the timely indication of critical social and political issues
• Maintains constant international collaboration by its presence in international research and expertise networks as well as major European research programs
• Contains one of the country’s largest libraries for the social sciences that provides support for its research activity as well as for the social sciences and research in Greece more generally.
• Publishes print and free access digital works related to the research on and analysis of aspects of contemporary Greek society. An important number of EKKE’s publications are included in the syllabuses of University Department courses
• Publishes The Greek Review of Social Research, the country’s oldest social sciences journal and one of the first scientific journals to have adopted the blind peer review system.