Editorial | The Time for Implementation and Commitment

January is a time for reflection and renewal. The year that now begins marks, for CEIS20, a particularly demanding transition: from evaluation to implementation, from external validation to internal responsibility, from strategic design to its translation into concrete practices, choices, and priorities.

In 2025, the Centre’s strategic plan was evaluated as Excellent by the FCT — a classification that greatly honours us, but which, above all, commits us. It commits us to an ambitious scientific project for the period 2025–2029, and also to a clear understanding of institutional maturity: the recognition that a Centre is defined not only by the quality of what it proposes, but by the consistency with which it is able to put those proposals into practice.

In this sense, the mandate of the new Scientific Coordination, which began at the end of 2025, is one of critical continuity: continuity with the strategic project that was approved and evaluated; and critical in the sense that it is oriented towards refinement, operationalisation, and the taking of decisions that accompany this process of implementation — decisions which, in several areas, cannot simply amount to a reproduction of what already exists.

The Implementation Plan we are currently preparing — and which will be discussed across the Centre’s various governing bodies over the coming months — should be understood as a political–scientific instrument, one that seeks to articulate different principles, rhythms, scales, and responsibilities, with a clear objective: to establish CEIS20 as an international reference point and as a genuine laboratory for interdisciplinarity, understood not as a label, but as a space for scientific, institutional, and methodological experimentation. I would highlight several aspects that seem decisive at this stage: the centrality of interdisciplinarity as an effective practice; the strengthening of intermediate structures of scientific coordination — namely the Thematic Lines — as spaces for defining priorities, pooling resources, and representing the Centre; the recognition of collaborative work and disciplinary interdependencies; the valuing of scientific trajectories and interdisciplinary knowledge production, with particular attention to early-career researchers and doctoral training; and the strategic articulation of CEIS20 with the University of Coimbra, affirming our institutional positioning and the specificity of our contribution.

At the same time, this is also a year of opportunities: new appointments, new internal dynamics, new parameters for research funding and support, new formats for scholarly exchange and discussion, and new ways of making visible — within and beyond the University — the work developed here. These transformations entail increased demands, but they also open up concrete opportunities for researchers and teams seeking to strengthen their international profile and to pursue sustained interdisciplinary work. All of this requires engagement, openness to debate, and a willingness to think of CEIS20 as a shared project — necessarily plural, but strategically oriented.

January 2026 thus marks a point of commitment: to the level of excellence recognised by external evaluation, but also to the internal responsibility of transforming an excellent plan into a Centre that is even more robust, legible, and sustainable — and capable of consolidating and deepening, at an international level, the classification we have been awarded. It is in this spirit that we begin the new year.

José Oliveira Martins

Scientific Coordinator of CEIS20