Ideas on Europe Blog

As a social-anthropologist researching perceptions of remoteness in rural Romania, the object of my research concerns remote villages which have been described as places where people still live like a hundred years ago. They can certainly give that impression as I have also experienced in some of my early encounters. In the following, I want to focus on how anthropologists balance personal experience and background within the main method of ethnographic fieldwork, participant observation.

Some of us grow up on folk tales featuring kind grandpas and grandmas (or on the contrary), of magical beings appearing in the guise of older folk in the woods, or of another type of magical childhood, not involving spells and other realms, but the unrestricted freedom of a youngster left to their own devices in a rural landscape. Via such means, as well as later schooling and experiences, the rural itself can become an otherworld (see Williams’ The Country and the City, or Brass’ Peasants, populism and postmodernism…) not the anthropological other (though it includes it, analytically), but a different ‘world’, which we perceive as having distinct rhythms, rules and atmosphere. As adults, we read, listen, and more recently, consume video blogs and short form videos on tech-free retreats, places where people live like ‘100 years ago’, ‘traditional’ lives on farms, and, on the other end of the spectrum, of the backwards, underdeveloped and uneducated rural. Our early experiences, our education, our readings and the media we consume influence how we perceive the rural and are layers that anthropologists must recognise and see beyond.

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In the mid 2010s, I was hiking up a mountain, with a couple of colleagues. In need of a hot cup of tea, we ended up knocking on the door of one of the local houses. The owners welcomed us warmly, took us to a room with a lit fire and made the best mint tea we ever had. We ended up spending New Year with them and marvelled at the ‘traditional’ building materials and layout, at the hand embroidered tea towels, the wood burning stove’s warm glow, and enjoyed the extremely flavourful home made food. It felt like we were experiencing a living village museum and reliving our childhoods in our grandparents’ houses, at the same time.

Many years later, countless other hikers, walkers, tourists and visitors, and I, are still in awe and in love with the sights, sounds and feeling of the place. But as an anthropologist, I had to learn how to see beyond what one experiences through affect, through the practices of reflexivity and positionality.

In my case, as a city dweller, I yearned for the nature, the quiet, the seemingly tight knit and ‘simple’ living of a village. And I thought I found the quintessential place on my hikes. Upon returning as a researcher, I learned to put to one side the awe struck walker and ground myself in another type of seeing. I had to be a listener and participant observer first. The myth of the impassive, objective and detached anthropologist-observer and recorder-of-facts has long been dismantled. Since, we have become aware how our own experiences, impressions, wants and education shape how we perceive the world and how all of that can influence our ethnographic work, which is why positionality and reflexivity are such important parts of our work.

Even so, it’s not an easy feat and it is a conscious effort we must make continuously, throughout our research. On one occasion, after a few hours climb, with a full backpack, in the heat, I was greeted by a distant whirring, which I had trouble identifying. A few moments later I met my host and after the usual greetings, I asked about the noise. She laughed and said that it was the neighbours’ lawn mower, which took me by absolute surprise, though it shouldn’t have. At that time I had not encountered a lawn mower so high up before, and focused my questions on the difficulty of access. As a result, I had assumed such items were out of reach. My trained gaze faltered in the face of the idyllic landscape, and I briefly succumbed to an idealised vision of the hamlet. The noise broke the spell and reminded me of synchronicity, access, opportunity and the importance of not making assumptions. Such moments are not necessarily rare, nor are they completely avoidable, which is why taking time to sit and think about the views and ideas we bring into our research can prevent personal experience showing up as unproved certainty.

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The above example illustrates that despite learning to put aside elements that influence perception, the tourist-me and the amazed-but-slightly-essentialising-me never made fully went away, as became apparent when I was confronted with a new situation. New fieldsites, other circumstances and perceptions will come into play at different times. Consequently, catching oneself sliding into preconceived ideas and unverified conclusions is part and parcel of the fieldwork, precisely because reflecting on how one’s presence, background, and assumptions actively influence data supports ethical practice and responsible data collection in the field.

The post People Who Live Like a Hundred Years Ago: Unlearning (?) a Borrowed Gaze appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

I presented at the Latin American Studies Association congress in Paris in May on a panel titled “Mexico in Global Competition.” LASA is the largest scholarly association in the world for the study of Latin America, with over 13,000 members and an annual congress running to several hundred sessions across disciplines working on the region. This was the first time I had attended a LASA Congress, though it was not my first conference, and the conference was exactly the mix I had hoped for: historians, political scientists, and practitioners, several career stages in the same panel slots, all genuinely curious about each other’s work rather than waiting their turn to speak.

Jess Gosling at LASA 2026

I had been planning for this moment for a while, So, rather than writing chapters in isolation and looking for conferences afterwards, I tried to align each chapter of my thesis with a conference, where I could test out the thesis of each chapter properly, in front of people who knew the region itself, rather than just the theory alone. My Mexico chapter is the first empirical chapter of my thesis, assembled from fieldwork completed at the British Embassy in Mexico City in July 2025. Paris was the first time I had presented a full empirical chapter, rather than a conceptual paper, outside that of my own seminar room.

My PhD chapter argues that UK soft power in Mexico operates through individuals and relationships rather than being driven by state projection: drawing on interviews with both British officials working in Mexico and locally employed Mexican staff from the embassy. A panel the day before mine had spent an hour on nineteenth-century postal diplomacy and contemporary trade negotiations with a level of regional expertise that sharpened my sense of what a rigorous account of Mexico would require. The questions after my own paper pushed in the same direction: people wanted to know more about how the Mexican staff I interviewed experienced these dynamics, and where the line sits between genuine co-production and something more asymmetric. Those are exactly the type of questions I wanted my chapter to be answering well and hearing them from people who study Latin America for a living informed me precisely where my argument still needed more weight.

What struck me the most was how supportive that scrutiny felt. Nobody was trying to catch me out. They treated a PhD chapter with just the same careful attention and worthiness as anyone’s else’s paper, with several people, among the audience being academics from Mexico, Argentina, and Spain, who all stayed afterwards to talk through specific points with me, and asked about the comparative chapters still to come on South Korea and Poland. I left with a growing list of people whose work I now wish to follow, contacts who feel less like networking and more like the start of an actual research community.

Jess Gosling Presenting at LASA

My paper itself was in English (as was my presentation), but the corridor conversations afterwards were not always, and that felt like its own small milestone, one I am still a little proud of. When I started the PhD, I could barely hold a conversation in Spanish. Talking through my own ideas in Spanish with some Portuguese with people I had met, even haltingly, mattered more to me than I expected.

The other community came from somewhere I had not planned for at all. I fell in, almost by accident, with a group of Brazilian PhD students on the first afternoon, and they adopted me for the rest of the week, talking me through the conference over dinner and breakfasts some mornings. Most of them were historians working on questions far from mine, but this did not matter.

Jess with PhD Students she met at LASA

I went on my own, out of curiosity. During gaps in my schedule, to panels on Brazil’s foreign policy and on Global South diplomacy, and one on Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay that ranged from feminist foreign policy to the social backgrounds of foreign ministers. There were a lot of Early Career Researchers (ECRs) , often putting arguments in front of people for the first time, and there was a real solidarity in that, regardless of which region or discipline any of us worked in.

If any of this is useful to other PhD students presenting an empirical chapter for the first time, here are a few things which might be useful to think about.

Firstly, align your chapters with conferences rather than the other way round. I chose LASA because it matched my Mexico chapter and the timeline, which meant I arrived with something ready for scrutiny with the right people to present it to.

Secondly, go to panels in the days before you need to present your own paper at your panel. Try to attend other panels in subfields which you do not work in. Some of the biggest insights and reflections on my own argument came from a session I attended the day before, out of curiosity, and the friendships that carried me through the week came from panels on Brazil that had nothing to do with my research.

Thirdly, let the gaps in your evidence stay visible in the Q&A rather than being managed away. I had written a line into my paper anticipating the obvious limitation, and answering the questions honestly told me more about where the chapter needed to go, than what a smoother performance would have taught me.

Finally, don’t be afraid to go out of your comfort zone, even when that means going it alone. I went to LASA without knowing a single person there and ended up befriending people who work in different fields entirely. The Brazilian cohort I fell in with made the week feel like a shared experience rather than something to get through alone.

The challenge was real. So was the welcome.

The post What Presenting My First Empirical Chapter Taught Me appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Introduction

“One can say without exaggeration that Europe invented a ‘convergence machine’, taking in poor countries and helping them become high-income economies.” This was the famous assessment of Indermit Gill, Chief Economist for Europe and Central Asia at the World Bank, in 2012. Now, more than a decade later, this ‘convergence machine’ has delivered meaningful economic catch-up (Bulgaria’s GDP per capita has risen from approximately 35% to 65% of the European Union (EU) average since the 2007 accession). Yet, the country’s performance looks more uneven when assessed through the lens of innovation capacity.

Nearly two decades after EU accession, the Eastern European state remains classified as an “Emerging Innovator” on the European Innovation Scoreboard. Business Research & Development (R&D) expenditure remains low, university-industry collaboration remains limited, and overall innovation outputs continue to lag behind EU averages. However, Bulgaria is neither institutionally isolated nor insufficiently integrated into European innovation governance. On the contrary, it has formally adopted key EU innovation frameworks, such as a smart specialisation strategy, and has embedded digital transition agendas in its National Recovery and Resilience Plan. The country participates in collaborative R&D instruments such as Horizon Europe.

Bulgaria’s experience therefore presents a puzzle. Despite deep integration into European innovation governance, innovation performance remains persistently weak and uneven. This suggests that convergence cannot be understood simply as policy alignment or participation in EU frameworks. Instead, the key question becomes why deep integration has failed to generate systemic innovation upgrading and why outcomes remain conditioned by deeper structural and historical constraints.

 

The Convergence Expectation and Its Limits

EU integration has been expected to lead to institutional and economic convergence, yet European Commission reports, such as those on “Regional Trends for Growth and Convergence in the European Union” and “Missing Convergence in Innovation Capacity,” indicate that this has not happened uniformly in practice. European innovation governance seeks to strengthen innovation capacity and reduce territorial disparities, but its effects depend heavily on domestic conditions and are often strongest where pre-existing industrial capabilities, dense knowledge networks, and robust administrative capacity already exist (Rodríguez-Pose & Crescenzi, 2008).

Evidence increasingly suggests that innovation outcomes remain shaped by differences in economic structure and institutional capacity, even under common policy frameworks. EU Research & Innovation funding, for example, remains geographically concentrated across the Union. Such patterns highlight the importance of absorptive capacity, since formal policy harmonisation does not eliminate the influence of historical industrial structures, the quality of domestic demand, or the ability of local actors to translate external resources into sustained development. Where institutional and economic conditions are unevenly developed, externally supported innovation may become fragmented into short-term, project-based activity. Büttner (2019) describes this process as the ‘projectification’ of EU governance, a process that can limit systemic spillovers under conditions of weak domestic capacity. Collectively, this evidence indicates that the effects of EU integration cannot be reduced to policy alignment alone.

National Innovation Systems (NIS) theory helps explain why these constraints matter by treating innovation as an outcome of historically embedded relationships among firms, states, research institutions, and financial actors rather than policy instruments alone (Freeman, 1987). From this perspective, EU frameworks may improve formal coordination without necessarily strengthening the institutional capabilities required for innovation performance – a limitation also identified by Karo and Kattel (2015) in their analysis of Central and Eastern Europe.

 

Post-Socialist Legacy and Institutional Friction

To understand why Europe’s ‘convergence machine’ struggles to generate broad-based innovation, one must look beyond current policy frameworks to Bulgaria’s post-socialist institutional legacy. The country’s NIS remains heavily shaped by communist-era path dependencies. Bulgaria’s research landscape is marked by fragmentation, with the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and regional universities operating as small, dispersed units that struggle to achieve the scale and infrastructure needed for international competitiveness, while institutional arrangements provide little support for building research-industry linkages (World Bank, 2026).

When the centrally planned economy collapsed in the 1990s, the country’s relatively advanced but highly state-dependent innovation ecosystem suffered a severe shock. State funding for R&D plummeted, leading to a “brain drain” and the physical decay of research infrastructure; indeed, R&D institutions were among the most adversely affected by the emigration of talent during the transition. According to the European Commission’s 2025 Policy Support Facility country report, these deep-rooted structural frictions persist despite EU funding and formal alignment with European standards.

In fact, the interaction between EU integration and this socialist legacy has produced complex, often unintended outcomes. EU structural and R&D funds have contributed to laboratory modernisation, yet their effects have remained uneven. As a European Joint Research Centre report (2015) observes, investment has frequently produced isolated “islands of excellence” within universities while leaving broader systemic linkages underdeveloped. Because traditions of university–industry collaboration remained weak, funding was often channelled into short-term, project-based activities rather than durable institutional partnerships. The World Bank (2026) notes that industry partnerships remain limited, applied research sporadic, and technology transfer largely dependent on temporary EU-funded initiatives. In this sense, EU resources became embedded within existing institutional arrangements, limiting their capacity to generate broader systemic change.

This structural disconnect persists because Europeanisation in Bulgaria has operated primarily through policy adoption rather than institutional transformation. Bulgaria’s strategic documents align closely with EU innovation priorities, including digital transition, competitiveness, and knowledge-based growth, as reflected in frameworks such as the EU’s New European Innovation Agenda. However, the institutional and financial capacities required to implement these ambitions remain unevenly developed. Bulgaria continues to rank among the weakest EU performers in innovation capacity, with persistent deficits in public R&D investment, firm-level innovation activity, and institutional coordination (World Bank, 2026). Consequently, alignment with European innovation governance has generated institutional compliance without systemic convergence. Policy frameworks increasingly resemble European models in form, while the underlying organisational capacities and research–industry linkages necessary to sustain broad-based innovation remain underdeveloped. Rather than overcoming inherited institutional fragmentation, European integration has frequently adapted to it, reproducing uneven innovation outcomes despite formal convergence.

 

Conclusion

The discussion supports scholarship that questions linear assumptions linking Europeanisation to developmental transformation. Bulgaria’s experience suggests that participation in common innovation frameworks does not necessarily produce convergence in innovation performance. In peripheral economies shaped by enduring institutional legacies, European integration may strengthen formal policy alignment while leaving underlying capacities for knowledge creation, diffusion, and commercialisation unevenly developed. This implies that innovation convergence should be understood as the ability of domestic systems to absorb, coordinate, and sustain innovation over time rather than through institutional resemblance alone. Reconsidering convergence in these terms may help explain why integration continues to generate differentiated outcomes across the EU.

The post Integration without Convergence? Explaining Bulgaria’s Innovation Paradox appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Blog article adapted from University of Oxford MPhil thesis ‘Imagined Inclusion? Language, Identity, and the Limits of Inclusivity in the Pridnestrovian Nation’ and conference paper by the same name, presented at UACES Graduate Forum Research Conference at Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca on 4 June 2026. The thesis assesses how Ukrainian and Romanian are differentially included within Pridnestrovie’s nation-building process before and after the 2022 Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Will Kingston-Cox is a political researcher and postgraduate in Russian and East European Studies at the University of Oxford, specialising in Moldova, nationalism, and identity politics.

Since attaining de facto independence from Moldova in 1992, the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic, or Pridnestrovie, has pursued a sustained nation-building project. In the absence of a titular ethnic majority, Pridnestrovian state institutions have sought to construct a common political community encompassing Moldovans, Russians, and Ukrainians, as well as numerous smaller minorities, such as Bulgarians and Poles. The resulting “Pridnestrovian people” is officially imagined as multinational, multilingual and supraethnic.

Yet formal inclusion does not necessarily translate to practical equivalence. Russian, Ukrainian and Moldovan written in Cyrillic are constitutionally recognised as official languages, but Russian remains overwhelmingly dominant in state administration, education and public life. The Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 therefore raised a consequential question for Pridnestrovian nation-building: how would a Russian-supported de facto state manage Ukrainian identity when that identity had become increasingly politically sensitive?

One plausible expectation was that Ukrainian would be progressively marginalised because the Pridnestrovian state might have sought to signal alignment with its patron, Russia, over the war in Ukraine. However, my research found a more surprising process. Rather than excluding Ukrainian from the imagined Pridnestrovian nation, the state more actively incorporated it, but on increasingly explicit Pridnestrovian terms. Ukrainian was preserved and, at points, rhetorically protected and activated, whilst being detached from contemporary Ukrainian statehood and subordinated to a Russian-centred, territorially bounded political community.

My research examined presidential speeches, interviews, addresses and press conferences alongside Ministry of Education curricula issued between December 2016 and September 2025. This enabled comparison between the first five years of Vadim Krasnoselsky’s presidency and the period following Russia’s full-scale invasion to assess the positioning and inclusion of Ukrainian (as well as Romanian).

Across both periods, presidential discourse consistently presents Pridnestrovie as a non-titular political community. In 2018, Krasnoselsky declared that the “Pridnestrovian people have been created”, describing a community of different nationalities whose members preserve their languages, cultures and traditions. He added that Pridnestrovie possessed no system of titular nations and that “no nation prevails over another”.

However, the state’s own institutional texts reveal a differentiated hierarchy beneath this language of equivalence. Russian functions as the normative language of public life and as the principal linguistic and civilisational connection to Russia and the Soviet past. Moldovan written in Cyrillic is protected as a purportedly ‘authentic’ Moldovan category, defined partly through its distinction from Romanian and the perceived Romanianisation of Moldova, such as the 2023 renaming of the state language as Romanian. Ukrainian is also recognised as constitutive of the political community, but its inclusion is more conditional and carefully managed.

I characterise this structure as hierarchical multinationalism: a system in which multiple ethnolinguistic identities are formally incorporated into a common political community, but occupy unequal positions within it.

The post-2022 presidential discourse did not reproduce a pattern of Ukrainian exclusion. On the contrary, Krasnoselsky repeatedly affirmed Ukrainian’s official status, defended the continued operation of Ukrainian-language institutions and publicly rejected ethnic antagonism between Russians and Ukrainians. In December 2022, he argued that “destroying a language means destroying a people” and declared himself opposed to the destruction of Russian, Ukrainian or Moldovan. He also threatened to suppress claims that Ukrainians would attack Russians, or Russians would attack Ukrainians, presenting such antagonism as incompatible with Pridnestrovian multinationalism.

The treatment of Ukrainian refugees was especially revealing. Two days after the full-scale invasion, Krasnoselsky emphasised that Ukrainian was an official language, that Ukrainian-language educational institutions continued to operate and that the state would provide assistance to people arriving from Ukraine.

Subsequent statements framed their incorporation more explicitly. In May 2022, Krasnoselsky stated that he could barely describe those arriving as refugees because they were “very similar to us”, invoking the shared historical spaces of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. He claimed that they had “completely disappeared” into Pridnestrovian society and were “all our people now”. By August 2024, he described Ukrainian refugees as having “merged” with Pridnestrovian society and become “our Pridnestrovian people”.

This discourse is accommodating, but also assimilationist. Ukrainian difference is not portrayed as threatening provided that it is absorbed into the supraethnic Pridnestrovian political community. Ukrainian identity remains culturally recognisable, but is not presented as an autonomous axis of political belonging.

Moreover, state curricula demonstrate a parallel process of activated but subordinated inclusion. A June 2020 Ukrainian language and literature curriculum framed the subject primarily in communicative, cultural and humanistic terms. Its stated objectives included developing linguistic competence, expanding pupils’ knowledge and familiarising them with Ukrainian culture and literature. Pridnestrovian nationhood was not invoked explicitly as the object of political loyalty.

An October 2022 curriculum adopted after the invasion differed markedly. It prescribed the formation of a “Pridnestrovian civic identity”, patriotism, “respect and duty to the Motherland”, and respect for the past and present of the “people of Pridnestrovie”. Ukrainian-language education was thereby connected directly to the reproduction of the state’s political community. This did not amount to the removal of Ukrainian culture. The authorised canon continued to contain major Ukrainian writers, including pre-Soviet national classics and members of the repressed “Executed Renaissance”. Nevertheless, Ukrainian culture was institutionally curated. Contemporary post-Soviet literature, diaspora authors and overtly state-centred Ukrainian narratives remained largely absent.

The unexpected post-2022 development was therefore not the marginalisation of Ukrainian, but the increased activation of its inclusion. The state assigned Ukrainian language education a more explicit nation-building function, using it to reproduce loyalty to Pridnestrovie rather than identification with Ukraine. Ukrainian could remain culturally Ukrainian, but was expected to become politically Pridnestrovian.

Thus, the geopolitical shock of February 2022 did not fundamentally reconstruct the position of Ukrainian within Pridnestrovian nation-building. Rather, it rendered the terms of its inclusion more explicit. Across presidential discourse and state curricula, Ukrainian continued to be recognised, protected and institutionally reproduced, but within a political framework that subordinated ethnolinguistic distinctiveness to loyalty towards the Pridnestrovian state.

This reveals the operation of hierarchical multinationalism in practice. Ukrainian is neither simply excluded nor treated as equivalent to Russian. Instead, it is incorporated as a constituent identity whose cultural expression remains legitimate insofar as it is compatible with a Russian-centred and territorially bounded Pridnestrovian political community. The post-2022 period therefore produced a more active management of inclusion.

These findings also complicate depictions of Pridnestrovie as merely a passive extension of Russian influence. Russian patronage profoundly structures the de facto state, but Pridnestrovian institutions continue to exercise some agency in constructing and reproducing their own imagined political community.

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On 25 June 2026, EUHealthGov hosted Dr Chloé Bérut (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) for a presentation on digital health and the transformation of EU health policymaking.

Chloé presented the results of her MSCA postdoctoral research project, which focused on digital health interoperability. Interoperability refers to the ability of data to circulate between different computer systems. Ensuring interoperability of health data across member states is the EU’s priority in relation to digital health. Chloé emphasised that even though this may seem like a purely technical issue, questions of interoperability are inherently political.

Her research investigated these political dimensions, looking at whether and how interoperability – and digitalisation more broadly – create new decision-making dynamics at EU level. The findings she presented were based on two case studies: EU cooperation around COVID-19 contact-tracing apps and the ongoing development of the European Health Data Space (EHDS). Health data, she noted, represents a pioneer case of EU-level data interoperability governance.

She first explored the role of private actors and illustrated the enormous power that tech giants now have in the sphere of health(care) policy through the digitalisation of healthcare. Their ownership of the digital infrastructure means they can shape policy either directly and/or indirectly. In the case of the contact-tracing app, she explained how Google and Apple announced that their systems would only support decentralised contact tracing apps, which effectively took away the choice for member states to decide whether to use a centralised or decentralised system. In the case of the EHDS, tech giants tend to offer the most competitive digital environment, placing them in a strategically influential position. In the Q&A, the question of how the EU’s digital strategy is informed by the EU’s goal to ensure strategic autonomy – and whether the reliance on US tech giants is perceived as a vulnerability – was further discussed.

A second theme presented by Chloé was how and where decisions about interoperability standards are made at EU level. She identified the European Commission as leading the process and using the scientific evidence deriving from EU-funded digital health projects to inform its position and approach. A major finding she put forward is that these EU-funded research projects should be understood as a form of governance, as they provide the standards and knowledge base which inform future decision-making. This point was further discussed in the Q&A, where Chloé elaborated on the complexity and ‘messy’ dynamics of how these projects feed into policymaking.

Chloé’s presentation also highlighted that the pandemic gave the European Commission the political space to coordinate health data, and that its performance and ability to showcase competence mattered more than the need to politically justify EU-level action. She also reflected on how digitalisation can lead to a ‘technologization of political debate’, and that this runs the risk of oversimplifying complex issues, and exacerbating inequalities. An example here was the ‘opt-in/opt-out’ debate, which gives citizens the impression of control over their health data through a binary choice, while the question of consent in a legal sense is in fact much more complex. Finally, her findings revealed new political cleavages emerging in debates over digitalisation, where Green and far-right parties depart (for varying reasons) from the consensus uniting the other parties.

Speaker bio: Dr Chloé Bérut is an MSCA postdoctoral researcher at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Her work focuses on digital health in the European Union, the ways in which these policies are shaped at the EU level, and how they influence domestic policymaking in this sector. More recently, her research has expanded beyond the field of health to explore broader questions about how digitalization transforms EU policymaking across different sectors. Her work has been published in several academic journals and edited volumes, including Governance, European Policy Analysis, and West European Politics.

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The development of green hydrogen production technologies has become increasingly significant within the context of global decarbonisation and the ongoing digital transformation of the economy. The use of renewable energy sources for hydrogen generation significantly reduces greenhouse gas emissions. It also enhances energy security by decreasing dependence on fossil fuels. Moreover, green hydrogen contributes to the formation of a new model of sustainable development in the energy sector, supporting long-term environmental and economic resilience of Europe.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has become a critical catalyst for change in both national and European energy security. Ukraine’s synchronization with the European power system and the initiation of electricity exports to the EU in 2022 demonstrated the country’s strategic role as an integral part of the European energy space. According to the International Energy Agency, following the intensified attacks of 2024, nearly two-thirds of Ukraine’s dispatchable power generation capacity was occupied, damaged or destroyed, underlining the urgency of energy system modernisation and decentralisation.  It is considered that energy systems are increasingly required to become decentralised in order to enhance energy security. For Ukraine, the development of green hydrogen technologies represents a promising direction for post-war reconstruction and integration into the European energy system. Ukraine possesses significant renewable energy potential, particularly in solar and wind generation. This creates favourable conditions for the formation of a competitive green hydrogen market.

Ukraine has a unique combination of factors that shape its competitive advantages in the field of green hydrogen production for the European market. These factors include:

• significant potential for renewable energy sources, in particular solar and wind, especially in the southern regions;
• extensive gas transportation infrastructure, which can be partially adapted for the transportation of hydrogen or hydrogen mixtures;
• geographical proximity to EU markets and the availability of electricity and gas interconnections;
• Ukraine’s integration into the European energy space through ENTSO-E;
• the presence of industrial and scientific potential for scaling up hydrogen technologies.

Howevre, hydrogen energy projects are characterized by a high level of capital intensity, long investment horizons, and substantial uncertainty associated with the external environment, including technological maturity, regulatory frameworks, and market dynamics. These factors significantly increase project risks and require advanced approaches to project planning, risk management, and investment decision-making.

Ukraine’s potential for green hydrogen production is about 44.96 million tons. Despite this, currently Ukraine produces approximately 360 thousand tons of hydrogen annually, mainly for the needs of the chemical industry (ammonia production), which is only 0.5% of global demand.

Ukrainian projects involve the development of specialized hydrogen transport infrastructure, including the construction of hydrogen pipelines and integration with regional logistics routes. Their strategic importance is determined by the possibility of accessing international markets through the southern ports of Ukraine and cross-border hydrogen corridors with EU countries, which creates the prerequisites for Ukraine’s inclusion in the European hydrogen network.

Furthermore, the “Central European Hydrogen Corridor” project envisages the development of a large-scale infrastructure route for hydrogen transportation from Ukraine to Central Europe, constituting a key element in the country’s integration into the European Union energy market. In parallel, the government has approved the National Renewable Energy Action Plan up to 2030, along with a comprehensive implementation roadmap.At the same time, a significant part of green hydrogen projects in Ukraine is currently on hold.

It should be noted that the experience of Germany, which is one of the leaders in the development of the hydrogen economy in Europe, is of particular interest. Germany’s experience can be adapted in Ukraine to form a modern digital hydrogen ecosystem.

Ukraine, due to its resource potential, geographical location and integration into the European energy market, has objective prerequisites for fulfilling the role of one of the key suppliers of green hydrogen for Europe. The realization of this potential is possible subject to the active implementation of digital technologies, including AI tools, and coordination with the European hydrogen policy. The development of AI-based solutions should become a key priority for enhancing the resilience of the energy system to physical damage in the context of armed aggression. The application of risk prediction algorithms for potential damage to energy infrastructure, intelligent vulnerability analysis, as well as automated load redistribution and post-failure recovery systems, contributes to reducing the scale of outages and shortening response times to emergency situations.

The effective implementation of hydrogen projects requires the adoption of digital and AI-driven management tools, which enhance the transparency of investment decision-making, optimize costs, and reduce technological and financial risks.

Therefore, it is necessary to develop and implement IT tools to optimize green hydrogen production processes, including electrolysis, storage and distribution.It is necessary to increase the institutional capacity of communities to implement pilot projects of hydrogen valleys through grants, educational programs and international technical partnerships and integrate the hydrogen economy into the Ukrainoan post-war recovery strategy, with an emphasis on decentralized energy, industrial parks and exports. The integration of IT technologies is not only a technological need, but also a strategic advantage for Ukraine in becoming a regional leader in the field of hydrogen energy.

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I am very pleased to acknowledge the generous support provided by the University Association for Contemporary European Studies (UACES) through its “Microgrant Scheme”, which enabled me to undertake a research visit to Brussels in June 2026 in support of my forthcoming book, “The Making of a Strategy: The European Union and Maritime Security, 2000-2025”. The award funded an intensive two-day fieldwork visit to Brussels, allowing me to collect primary research material for two key chapters of the manuscript. As the main centre of European policymaking, Brussels offers unparalleled opportunities to engage directly with officials involved in the formulation and implementation of the European Union’s security and defence policies. Therefore, the opportunity to conduct on-site research represented a significant contribution to the development of the project.

 

My book examines the transformation of the European Union into an increasingly prominent maritime security actor between 2000 and 2025. It seeks to explain how maritime security has emerged as a strategic priority within the Union’s external action and to explore the political, institutional, and geopolitical factors that have shaped this evolution. Spanning a period that includes the launch of Operation Atalanta, the adoption of the first European Union Maritime Security Strategy in 2014, the revision of that strategy in 2023, and the deployment of Operation Aspides in the Red Sea until the latest development in the Strait of Hormuz, the project provides the first comprehensive account of the development of the EU’s maritime strategic thinking. By combining documentary analysis, elite interviews, and original empirical research, the study seeks to advance our understanding of how European maritime strategy is formulated and implemented.

 

The research visit took place over two days in early June 2026 and centred on a series of interviews with officials working within European Union institutions. During the visit, I conducted four anonymous elite interviews with policymakers possessing direct knowledge of the development of the EU’s maritime security agenda. These interviews generated valuable insights into the internal dynamics of policy formulation, the interaction between EU institutions and member states, and the strategic considerations underpinning the Union’s evolving maritime posture. The discussions also shed light on the processes through which consensus is built among diverse actors operating within the EU’s complex institutional environment. At the thematic level, the interviews focused on the formulation and evolution of the European Union’s maritime security strategies, the role of key institutional actors, and the influence of changing geopolitical conditions on strategic decision-making. Particular attention was devoted to understanding how policymakers have responded to emerging challenges, including instability in the Union’s southern neighbourhood, increased geopolitical competition in maritime domains, and growing concerns regarding the security of global sea lines of communication. As with many studies of European policymaking, official documents reveal only part of the story. For this reason, elite interviews provide a unique opportunity to explore the motivations, preferences, and negotiations that often remain hidden from the public record. Consequently, the evidence gathered in Brussels constitutes a particularly important component of the project’s broader methodological framework.

 

The material collected during the visit will contribute directly to the chapters examining the development of the European Union’s Maritime Security Strategies and the institutional processes through which maritime security became embedded within the Union’s strategic thinking. The interviews have already provided important empirical evidence and helped identify new avenues for analysis that will strengthen the manuscript’s overall argument. Beyond the immediate research outputs, the visit also reinforced the value of conducting fieldwork within the institutional environment under examination. Direct engagement with policymakers and practitioners offers insights that cannot be fully replicated through remote research methods and contributes significantly to the depth and quality of academic scholarship.

 

This research visit illustrates the important role that targeted funding schemes play in supporting high-quality research in European Studies. In this regard, microgrants possess the potential to generate substantial scholarly benefits by facilitating access to primary sources, enabling engagement with policymakers, and supporting the collection of original empirical evidence. The UACES Microgrant Scheme performs a particularly valuable function in this regard by helping researchers undertake activities that directly enhance the quality, originality, and impact of their work.

 

I am extremely grateful to UACES for its support of this project. Such funding has made a meaningful contribution to the development of the manuscript and has enabled the collection of evidence that will strengthen its empirical and analytical foundations. As the project progresses towards completion, the findings generated through this fieldwork will be incorporated into the manuscript and disseminated through future academic publications, conference presentations, and engagement with the wider community in this scholarly field. I look forward to sharing the outcomes of this research and to contributing further to scholarly debates on the European Union’s role as a maritime security actor, and I encourage all researchers to apply for the upcoming rounds of the UACES’ “Microgrant” applications.

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Context is a critical component of business and management research, shaping organisational behaviour and influencing outcomes. In management literature, it is widely acknowledged that “context counts” and “context matters”. Yet it is often present only implicitly, as a backdrop – an afterthought or a control variable – limiting the development of context-sensitive theories and marginalising indigenous perspectives on local phenomena. The field is thus regularly criticised for inadequate contextualisation of emerging economies’ studies, resulting in calls for researchers to “practise more context”. All this was truly relevant to me, as I faced this challenge in my PhD study. My PhD project focuses on the strategies of wineries from Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine – three post-Soviet countries aspiring to join the EU.

As a phenomenon to be understood and explained – an explanandum – eurointegration is best studied not in management research but in EU studies, a field that has spent decades building specific knowledge about it. This led me to engage directly with the context, by turning to the field in which it is most explicitly theorised. So, I had no excuse: I immersed myself in studying that context in depth.

However, for the core phenomena of management and business studies – firm strategy, internationalisation, sectoral adaptation, and so on – eurointegration plays the role of context, or explanans, in which such phenomena are embedded. For these firms, eurointegration is not simply a background condition; it structures the strategic environment in which they operate.

Yet eurointegration, even though it plays distinct roles in EU studies and management research (explanandum versus explanans), is what connects the two fields. You would expect them to talk to each other. But in practice, they rarely do and have mostly grown up in isolation. EU studies theorise integration in depth but seldom follows it down to the organisational level where it takes effect. Meanwhile, management research tends to label the entire process ‘eurointegration’ and move on, treating it as context without spelling out the mechanisms that make it matter.

Thus, in my PhD project, I tried to overcome this limitation by bridging the two fields – and the paper I presented at the forum explains how.

My approach rests on a distinction from accounting research – between domain theory and method theory – to which I add a third, missing constituent – context theory. Together, they split any study into clear jobs. Domain theory says what we are explaining – a firm’s strategy. Method theory says how we study it. And context theory, the missing element of the puzzle that I added, says what shapes the phenomenon: here, what eurointegration does to it. The three depend on each other: domain theory sets the question, context theory supplies the conditions that answer it, and method theory ties them together, and none is asked to do everything – which is what usually goes wrong when one field borrows from another. I do not prescribe any particular domain, method, or context theory. That choice is the researcher’s, to be made according to what best fits the study and explains it most powerfully.

That leaves one question: where does the context theory come from? This is where EU studies come in – that is where I found suitable candidates. The easiest route is to borrow: take an EU theory off the shelf and apply it to firms unchanged. But pure borrowing leaves eurointegration vague, the theory never quite fits, and the two sides stay disconnected. I suggest translation instead. By translation I mean reworking an EU theory’s core explanatory logic for the level of firms and sectors while keeping it recognisably tied to the original – the idea, long familiar in organisation studies, that concepts are transformed as they travel between fields. Translation preserves a theory’s core mechanism, its source of variation, and the conditions under which it holds, so it still does real work as context theory.

Done this way, five EU traditions become five context theories that management research can use. EU-induced domestic change becomes a regulatory adaptation context; differentiated integration becomes a heterogeneity context, since a diversified firm faces not one European market but several; conditionality becomes an anticipatory alignment context, explaining why some firms align before any legal obligation, drawn by the prospect of future market access; multi-level governance becomes a multi-principal context; and politicisation becomes a legitimacy and uncertainty context, where contested integration turns the durability of the rules themselves into a strategic risk.

My wineries sit exactly here. In EU-aspiring countries the institutional environment is neither fully domestic nor fully EU-internal: conditionality drives domestic reform, which generates firm-facing pressure long before membership, and firms respond not with automatic compliance but with a range of options – acquiescence, compromise, avoidance, defiance, or manipulation. To explain why one Moldovan or Georgian producer aligns early with EU standards while its neighbour waits, generic management theory is not enough, and macro-level EU theory is not enough. We need both, to bridge the macro–micro divide in research.

So this is my claim, and my call: to treat eurointegration as the complex context in which our phenomena are embedded – something that must be specified and theorised properly, and that is best understood through EU studies. The way to do our own work well is to translate rather than merely borrow, and to fold that translation into frameworks of our own. Built that way, eurointegration context becomes a bridge the two fields can cross toward each other – a vote for interdisciplinarity, not as a fashionable label, but as the most relevant way to study organisations whose strategic world is shaped by eurointegration and to co-create and share knowledge across two fields.

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Investor-State dispute settlement (ISDS) used to be a niche corner of international economic law. It allowed foreign investors to bring claims directly against host States before arbitration tribunals, usually when they believed that government action had breached an investment treaty. The system was designed to depoliticize investment disputes and give investors a neutral forum outside domestic courts. Over time, ISDS became politically controversial, especially in Europe. Critics argued, in essence, that private investors could challenge public-interest regulation before ad hoc tribunals lacking public-court safeguards.

The European Union’s response has been to attempt to redesign the mechanism itself. Rather than abandoning investment adjudication, the EU has sought to make it resemble public adjudication. This is evident in the Investment Court System (ICS) established in the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement with Canada (CETA) and in the EU’s support for a Multilateral Investment Court (MIC) through UNCITRAL Working Group III. These two examples illustrate the EU’s use of legal design as external policy actorness: by changing who decides disputes, how adjudicators are appointed, whether hearings are public, and whether decisions can be appealed, the EU projects a constitutionalized vision of legitimate investment adjudication.

The EU’s constitutional starting point matters. After the Lisbon Treaty brought foreign direct investment within the common commercial policy, the Union gained a stronger role in a field previously dominated by Member States’ bilateral investment treaties. This explains the EU’s dual approach. Internally, the Court of Justice has treated intra-EU investment arbitration with suspicion. In Achmea, Komstroy and PL Holdings, it objected to arbitral tribunals interpreting or applying EU law outside the EU judicial system. Externally, the EU still negotiates investment protection mechanisms, provided that the model is redesigned and carefully limited.

Legal design becomes foreign policy when procedural rules do more than organise a dispute. In investment adjudication, design determines who exercises authority, how adjudicators are selected, whether proceedings are public, whether awards can be appealed, and how treaty parties may control interpretation. These choices allocate power. Yet a standing investment court cannot be exported through market access alone. It requires treaty consent and political acceptance. This is why the EU works bilaterally, by embedding the ICS model in agreements, and multilaterally, by using UNCITRAL Working Group III to build support for a permanent court.

The political crisis around ISDS became especially visible during the debates over TTIP and CETA. Civil society organisations, public-interest advocates, anti-globalisation movements and Eurosceptic actors argued that investment arbitration gave private economic actors privileged access to challenge public regulation. The European Commission responded by reframing ISDS as a rule-of-law problem. Its reform agenda focused on the right to regulate, tribunal legitimacy, and appellate review. Once ISDS is described in rule-of-law terms, the answer becomes institutional design. A tribunal that can impose liability on a State for sovereign regulation cannot be treated as purely private arbitration.

CETA is the clearest bilateral expression of this approach. Its ICS changes traditional ISDS in several ways. Disputing parties no longer choose arbitrators for each case; adjudicators are appointed in advance by the treaty parties. Cases are allocated by rotation, reducing incentives for adjudicators to cultivate reputations with repeat users. CETA also introduces appellate review, ethics rules, independence safeguards and greater transparency. Treaty parties retain the power to adopt binding interpretations, limiting adjudicatory overreach. Still, CETA remains a hybrid: decision-making is judicialised, while enforcement continues to rely on international arbitration infrastructure.

The EU’s model is judicialised in a specifically EU constitutional way. This became clear in Opinion 1/17, where the Court of Justice held that CETA’s ICS was compatible with EU primary law. The CETA Tribunal may interpret and apply CETA, but it may not authoritatively interpret EU law or bind EU institutions and courts on the meaning of EU legal rules. Domestic law may be considered only as fact. Opinion 1/17 also suggests that an external investment tribunal must satisfy minimum standards of independence and access to justice. The Tribunal must therefore be independent in individual disputes, but not so autonomous as to threaten the EU legal order.

CETA was never intended to remain only bilateral. Article 8.29 commits the parties to pursue a multilateral investment tribunal and appellate mechanism. UNCITRAL Working Group III has become the main forum for this project. Through it, the EU seeks to transform CETA’s bilateral judicialisation into a multilateral template built around standing adjudicators, appellate review, ethics rules, transparency, predictable case allocation and a structure capable of applying across multiple treaties. The MIC project is both normative and strategic, as it reflects the EU’s commitment to multilateralism while moving investment disputes toward a public-law framework more directly controlled by States.

The initiative, however, remains ambitious. Ratification remains difficult, and CETA itself shows how a flagship model may remain only partially operational. The EU also faces constitutional ambivalence, by rejecting intra-EU arbitration while promoting reformed external adjudication. Legally, the distinction rests on the autonomy of EU law; politically, it can appear that the EU accepts international adjudication only when redesigned on its own terms. Fragmentation is another obstacle. International investment law consists of thousands of treaties, divergent standards, survival clauses and pending proceedings. A multilateral court may discipline this fragmentation, but it cannot immediately replace the existing treaty network.

The EU’s reform of ISDS reveals a broader pattern in its external action. Europe’s power in a fragmenting world is increasingly legal, institutional, and constitutional. In investment law, legitimacy has become a question of institutional architecture. The promise lies in recognising that investor challenges to sovereign regulation require public-law safeguards, while its fragility lies in uptake and broader acceptance.

 

Note: This blog post is based on the article of the same title, presented at the UACES Graduate Forum, “Europe at a Crossroads: Integration, Identity and Power in a Fragmenting World,” held in Cluj-Napoca on 5 June 2026. I am grateful to Dr. Laura Lazăr for her valuable feedback during the presentation session.

The post Designing Legitimacy: The EU’s Reframing of ISDS and the Move Toward Standing Adjudication appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

The rapid expansion of digital health has fundamentally challenged the traditional territorial boundaries of healthcare regulation within the European Union. While the promise of seamless cross-border medical care grows, the legal realities of managing patient safety, professional liability, and regulatory harmonisation remain complex. Supported by a UACES Microgrant, I recently spent three months as a Visiting Scholar at the Faculty of Law and Criminology at KU Leuven (March 2 – May 29, 2026) to dive deeper into these pressing challenges. This research stay provided an invaluable opportunity to advance my doctoral research, engage with leading European health law experts, and share my findings within a vibrant, interdisciplinary academic community.

 

Faculty of Law and Criminology – KU Leuven

Project Activities and Intellectual Outcomes

My time in Belgium was structured around translating theoretical legal analysis into concrete scholarly contributions and academic dialogue. A central pillar of my activities was the dissemination of my latest research on the intersection of EU internal market principles and digital health delivery.

During my stay, I finalised two major publication projects that address critical regulatory gaps in the current European healthcare landscape:

First, I completed an article titled “The Telemedicine Paradox: Why Data Moves but Care Does Not”, recently published in the the European Journal of Health Law. This paper examines how the legal framework for cross-border telemedicine remains fragmented and argues that for the EHDS Regulation to succeed, it must move beyond technical interoperabil­ity to address the underlying legal-ethical conflicts of digital sovereignty.

I drafted and submitted a second paper, “The Digital Scalpel in Cross-border Telemedicine: Slicing the Medical Act in DrSmile case,” which is forthcoming in the European Journal of Risk Regulation. This paper examines how corporate digital health models challenge traditional definitions of the “medical act” across national borders.

Beyond writing, the research stay served as a platform for continuous peer review and academic exchange. On April 24, 2026, I presented the core arguments of my DrSmile paper at the “Pitch Please” seminar series at KU Leuven. This interactive format allowed me to gather crucial feedback and recommendations from fellow doctoral students and senior researchers just before final publication.

A major milestone of my stay occurred on May 20, 2026, when I delivered my Doctoral Seminar. This milestone session allowed me to present the comprehensive legal framework of my Ph.D. project alongside the outcomes of my first chapter and drafted articles to the host faculty, marking a significant step forward in my academic progression.

 

Library of the University of Leuven

The Power of Proximity: How the Microgrant Supported My Development

The financial and institutional backing of the UACES Microgrant was instrumental in embedding my research within the geographical heart of European governance. Being based in the Brussels-Leuven ecosystem allowed me to participate in high-level policy discussions that would have been inaccessible from afar.

For instance, on April 23, 2026, I attended the fourth edition of the Health, Ethics, Law and Technology Symposium in Brussels, which focused explicitly on the implementation of the European Health Data Space (EHDS) Regulation. Engaging with policymakers and legal experts a year into the EHDS rollout provided me with real-time insights into how data portability and digital infrastructure are being operationalised at the EU level.

Furthermore, this stay facilitated vital cross-institutional collaboration. On May 28, 2026, I was invited as a guest speaker to the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) by the Health & Ageing Law Lab (HALL) for their monthly HELT Talks series. This invitation not only expanded my professional network but also allowed me to position my research within broader conversations regarding digital health access.

Parallel to my individual research, the stay provided the perfect environment to execute my leadership responsibilities as the Co-Chair of the Young Scholars Interest Group (YSIG) of the European Association of Health Law. While at KU Leuven, I continued my work as a member of the Scientific Committee organizing the upcoming Young Scholars Workshop for the 10th EAHL Conference in Uppsala (September 2026). Additionally, I was appointed Co-Editor of the conference’s upcoming Special Issue.

 

A small glimpse of Leuven

 

Key Findings and Academic Learnings

My research stay yielded several critical insights regarding the future of EU health law, particularly concerning how cross-border digital health interacts with national jurisdictions. First, as explored in my forthcoming DrSmile paper, the commercialisation and digitalisation of healthcare are unbundling traditional medical procedures. When a medical service is split into digital triaging, remote prescription, and localised execution across different Member States, assigning regulatory accountability and liability becomes incredibly complex. Second, participating in specialised academic forums widened my research lens. It underscored that the regulation of cross-border telemedicine cannot look at market access alone; it must actively account for algorithmic bias and the fundamental right to equal healthcare access.

 

Moving Forward

The three months spent at KU Leuven, enabled by the UACES Microgrant, have been transformative for both my doctoral thesis and my professional growth. By combining intensive writing with active participation in European health law networks, I have been able to anchor my theoretical research in the practical realities of current EU digital governance.

I am deeply grateful to UACES, my host Prof. Steven Lierman, and the academic communities in Leuven and Brussels for their support, critique, and inspiration. The insights gained during this stay will undoubtedly shape my work on EU internal market law and digital health for years to come.

The post Bridging the Gaps in Cross-Border Telemedicine: Reflections on a Brussels-Leuven Research Journey appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

I am honored to have received the UACES scholarship to support my fieldwork in Brasília. As a doctoral candidate at KU Leuven, my research focuses on how the diplomatic cooperation between the European Union (EU) and Brazil unfolds in practice at the bilateral, inter-regional and multilateral level. By tracing the strategies and practices present in their every day cooperation between the EU and Brazil, my research aims to ask a larger question of how do diplomats sustain cooperation despite political contestation. While I have had the opportunity to conduct fieldwork in Brussels, it was a privilege to conduct a research trip to Brasília, with the generous support of the UACES PhD Field Scholarships, without which I could not have been able to collect data in person.

This scholarship has supported my one-week stay in Brasília. The award was spent on return flights to Brussels and accommodation fees. This fieldwork trip forms an integral part of my PhD research, as it allowed me to meet interviews in-person, observe their work in Embassies and in the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Itamaraty.

 

National Museum of the Republic designed by Oscar Niemeyer 

Understanding Brasília as a city geared towards diplomacy

I arrived in Brasília in the late afternoon, around 19h. Given Brazil’s position in relation to the Equator it means that it always becomes dark around 17h. I called my uber to the hotel and observed from the ride the city in the dark. You could already tell the white round brutalist Nieymer buildings from a distance: quiet, clean, and extremely well planned – to the smallest details. Every corner, every roundabout, every building was not there by chance. This was the view of a city who was entirely designed for civil servants, like career diplomats. In my walks to the interview locations, I would notice that, instead of street signs, you have country flags. ‘Turn right, into Wing South, for the Spanish, Peruvian, Paraguayan Embassy in SQN345,’ said the GPS. Having been only founded in the 1960s, the notion of space and time in Brasília us designed by its diplomatic headquarters, rather than schools, hospitals, or even commercial buildings. For a diplomacy nerd like me, Brasília was almost being like a kid in Disneyland.

After having done nearly three years of fieldwork in Brussels about how the EU – Brazil multi-level partnership works in practice, I came to Brasília with the goal of understanding how this is being done on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. From afar, which is often where the researcher is, one can read about these practices through joint statements of the EU – Brazil Strategic Partnership, public statements from political leaders, or through social media posts of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the European External Action Service. I have also heard the side of the story from Brussels, by conducting interviews with European and Brazilian diplomats stationed there. Yet, what I have realised in the last three years of talking to diplomats is that, as a researcher who is interested in knowing about the nitty-gritty details of world politics, more often than not, it is not enough to just hear, if you are interested in diplomatic practices. There is an imperceptible value in the mundane, every day, routine aspects of diplomacy. Details, such as informal discussions, diplomatic demarches, lunches with colleagues, which we often regard as irrelevant. But, as political ethnographers will tell you: it is about making the familiar strange, and the strange familiar.

 

Itamaraty Palace

Making the familiar strange and the strange familiar

For this reason, I wanted to have a grasp of how this partnership was viewed from those working in Brasília: how did the EU matter in the current geopolitical landscape for Brazil? Was the EU important in Brasília in the day-to-day tasks of Brazilian diplomats working in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs? Do they meet frequently or not at all? What did an everyday of a Brazilian and European diplomat looked like in Brasília? More concretely, what diplomatic practices help to sustain cooperation when there is political contestation? Given that my focus rests on tracing the logic behind these diplomatic practices to understand how they matter in world politics, my fieldwork in Brasília was informed by an ethnographic approach towards practice-tracing. In other words, I conducted several (on and off the record) interviews with Brazilian and

European diplomats about their routines in Brasília, and spent some dedicated time to observing the spaces (embassies, receptions, waiting halls, cafeterias, institutional buildings, offices) in which they circulate in. It is important to note that this fieldwork in Brasília would not have happened without UACES’s support through the PhD Fieldwork Fellowship, of which I was lucky to have been selected.

The EU and Brazil have shared a strategic partnership since 2007; however, this has not been without its political crises. Due to the nature of democracy, political governments, with different visions about world politics, change throughout time. Some governments, such as the current one in Brazil are more favourable to having a strong partnership with the EU, while others, such as the government of Bolsonaro, have not. In October 2026, Brazil is heading towards another Presidential election. While Lula enjoys a narrow majority, Bolsonaro’s son, Flávio Bolsonaro, is doing well in the electoral race, too. How can then the career diplomats working in Brasília ensure that there is continuity in this partnership, knowing that in October 2026, the political willingness of the Brazilian government might change soon? In the specific case of the everyday cooperation between Brazil and the EU, interviewees revealed these relational strategies are key to ensuring continuity in their cooperation.

Looking back at the interviews I had with diplomats in Brasília, one thing is certain: the devil is in the details. The current geopolitical and societal landscape is certainly forcing diplomats to adapt to new realities: both Brazilian and European diplomats are being faced with structural challenges as to how diplomacy is done. To be a diplomat entails no longer the traditional political work of mediation but demands that career diplomats are able to work in different policy fields. As one of the interviewees explained to me, ‘diplomats are like radar people’, that is, diplomats need to be able to anticipate potential political storms ahead, and if so, to know how – and most importantly whom to talk to – to deal with it. In times of growing political turmoil, interviewees revealed that there can be certain relational strategies and rituals which help to manoeuvre potential disruptions. For example, having a coffee with your regular diplomatic counterpart, a short phone call to update on negotiations, or a diplomatic demarche can often help to facilitate the continuation of international cooperation.

 

Hallway, while waiting for an interview (somewhere in Brasília)

Methodological challenges: positionality, confidentiality and trust

Nevertheless, it is important to note that this fieldwork was not without its challenges. While, in theory, doable, access to these elite spaces is not always easy for a researcher. These are often closed-door and secretive rooms for diplomats: an essential part of diplomacy, yet the one that is probably the most hidden away. In effect, this was one of the issues that I encountered in preparation and during my fieldwork in Brasília. To prepare for my fieldwork, I drew in from my own professional network which I have built for over the last three years for contacts (and willingness to meet, which made a world of difference). Yet, during my interviews, I still encountered some issues about questions of confidentiality. For example, one of the most insightful conversations I had was not recorded given that it was more informal and to respect the privacy of the interviewee. The fact that I did not record it allowed me as well to build a level of trust which would have not been possible otherwise. While ethnographic is an incredibly rich methodology, it does raise some considerable questions about how to study such an elite can demand significant trade-offs in research.

In conclusion, the fieldwork in Brasília became a crucial part of my doctoral research. Often times, research in international relations tends to focus on the understanding the macro picture of diplomatic relations between different countries, yet, it is crucial to not lose sight of the fact that world politics takes place between every day human interactions.

The post UACES Fieldwork Scholarship: Exploring EU–Brazil Diplomacy in Practice appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

The UACES Annual Conference is widely recognised for its academic quality, but it also stands out for the value it offers to delegates. At a time when conference costs are rising across the sector, UACES has taken a deliberate approach to ensuring that high quality academic exchange remains accessible, inclusive and affordable. You can discover more about the Annual Conference here: https://www.uaces.org/prague

Networking built into the conference fee

One of the defining features of the UACES Annual Conference is that networking is not treated as an optional extra. Opportunities to exchange ideas, build collaborations and meet peers are built directly into the structure of the event.

Conference registration includes inclusive lunches on the main conference days, on site refreshment breaks and networking receptions. These shared spaces allow conversations to continue beyond formal panels and create a genuinely collegial atmosphere throughout the conference.

In contrast to other large conferences, at UACES, these spaces for discussion and connection are part of the core conference experience.

A balance of established and emerging voices

The conference programme is designed to support meaningful academic exchange across career stages. Panels bring together established scholars, leading figures in European Studies and early career researchers, alongside new and emerging voices.

This balance creates opportunities not only to engage with cutting edge research, but also to build professional networks and receive feedback in a supportive environment. The programme spans established fields as well as emerging areas of research, ensuring that the conference reflects the full breadth of contemporary European Studies.

A genuinely international conference community

The UACES Annual Conference attracts an international and diverse community of participants. Delegates regularly come from across Europe, the UK, North America and beyond, representing a wide range of institutions and research traditions.

This international mix enriches panel discussions, broadens perspectives and challenges the assumption that the conference is limited to the UK or a small number of EU member states. The result is a conference that feels outward looking, globally connected and intellectually broad.

Strong support for early career researchers

UACES has a long standing commitment to supporting early career and PhD researchers, which is embedded throughout the Annual Conference.

The programme structure, review processes and panel composition are designed to ensure fair and transparent assessment, alongside opportunities for early career scholars to present their work, engage with senior academics and build professional networks. This support is delivered as part of the standard Early Career/PhD conference fee, rather than being confined to separate or additional activities.

In addition, UACES offers funding and support opportunities for eligible members, helping to reduce barriers to participation and ensure that the conference remains accessible.

Value delivered through collective expertise

Together, these elements explain the overall value of the UACES Annual Conference experience. Delegates benefit from a carefully curated academic programme, built in networking opportunities, an international scholarly community and meaningful support for early career researchers, all within an accessible fee structure.

It is this combination of collective expertise, community focused design and a commitment to accessibility that defines the UACES Annual Conference experience.

The post The Value of the UACES Annual Conference: Academic Quality, Community and Value for Money appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

By Karolina Borońska-Hryniewiecka (Polish Academy of Science & Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne) & Jan Kotýnek Krotký (Masaryk University)

On 9 May 2026, we celebrate Europe Day and the fourth anniversary of the closing event of the Conference on the Future of Europe (CoFoE) hailed as a landmark transnational democratic experiment. During CoFoE hundreds of randomly selected citizens from all EU Member States deliberated alongside Members of European Parliament (MEPs) and national parliaments (MPs), producing far‑reaching recommendations for the European Union’s future.

Yet, for all the fanfare, the political follow‑up has been sobering. Most visibly, member state governments have declined to open the process of treaty reform based on the Conference’s proposals, despite the European Parliament’s plea to do so. While the CoFoE inspired a new generation of European Commission’s Citizens Panels and made them a permanent feature of the EU’s participatory toolbox, these deliberative fora remain largely disconnected from parliamentary arenas where political conflict and decision‑making actually take place. At the same time, the EU and its member states are experiencing the crisis of representative democracy manifested by decreasing trust in parliaments, increasing polarisation, populist electoral gains and widespread citizens’ dissatisfaction with democracy in general.

Four years on, one uncomfortable question looms: is the EU drifting towards a model of citizen participation that is rich in symbolism, but thin on political impact and true connection with representative policy-making?

Our recent JCMS article analyses how both MEPs and MPs talk about increased citizen participation in EU policy‑making. We depart from the premise that citizen participation is more likely to gain attention and appreciation from members of parliament when it is institutionally “coupled” with representation and the formal policy-making stage. To achieve our goal, we examine debates in the European Parliament, inter-parliamentary committee meetings, and several national parliaments between 2020 and 2023. We explore the underlying factors behind these positions, such as party ideology, institutional level, and views on European integration. Based on this analysis, we develop a refined typology of political discourses on EU‑level deliberative mini‑publics (DMPs), distinguishing between consultative, sceptical and power‑sharing stances.

A consultative Union – by design

Our first key finding is both simple and striking: across arenas and party families, a consultative discourse clearly dominates which means that parliamentarians overwhelmingly appreciate citizen participation and see value in deliberative mechanisms – as long as they remain advisory and do not fundamentally redistribute decision‑making power. In this discourse, citizens should be regularly asked, listened to, and perhaps even involved “permanently,” but final authority must stay firmly with elected representatives.

In practice, it suggests that most parliamentarians support what we call a “consultative Union”: a system where citizen participation is welcomed, but structurally non‑binding. The Commission citizens panels fit this logic very well – they create new spaces for citizen input, yet their policy-shaping potential remains largely discretionary.

MPs and MEPs: more similar than you might think

The second and unexpected finding concerns the relationship between national and European parliamentary arenas. While we might expect supranational MEPs to be more supportive than national MPs of transnational citizen involvement in EU policy-making, and national MPs to be more sceptical of EU‑level participatory innovations, our analysis suggests otherwise. We find no significant discursive differences between MEPs and MPs.

Such finding not only confirms that political conflict increasingly cuts across, rather than between, the national and supranational levels but is also normatively important since any EU participatory instrument that aspires to be more than window‑dressing needs the support of both national and European parliamentarians. The example of CoFoE showed how quickly legitimacy clashes emerge when that support is uneven.

Power‑sharing or populist plebiscites?

Perhaps the most politically explosive insight from our study is that not all calls for “giving power back to the people” mean the same thing. At first glance, there seems to be substantial support for what we label power‑sharing discourse: representatives who are willing to put citizens on an equal footing with politicians and accept binding forms of citizen involvement in EU decision‑making.

But once we look closely, this power‑sharing discourse splits into two very different strands.

In what we call deliberative power‑sharing discourse parliamentarians advocate binding deliberative mechanisms whose recommendations would directly shape EU reforms – and see citizens as partners in co‑constructing policy. This language is most prominent among Greens/EFA, the radical left and some liberal actors, who stress that strong participation can reinforce representative democracy.

On the other hand, plebiscitary power‑sharing discourse opposes institutionalized, transnational citizen deliberation postulating instead referendums that bypass parliaments and EU institutions. This strand is particularly visible among Eurosceptic and far‑right representatives, who demand EU‑wide referendums on European questions and present them as the only “real” expression of the people’s will.

This finding matters for how we interpret populism’s relationship to democratic innovation. It shows that far‑right and hard Eurosceptic parties may be enthusiastic about direct‑democracy instruments, yet deeply hostile to transnational deliberative settings such as CoFoE due to their distrust of EU‑organised participatory forums as biased or manipulated. Instead, they favour top‑down referendums whose questions and framing they hope to control. In this plebiscitary power‑sharing discourse, citizens are invoked less as co‑deliberators and more as a weapon, or at least a legitimating force for decisions aimed at weakening EU institutions.

Beyond consultation: reconnecting citizens and parliaments

What follows from these findings for the EU’s broader “citizen turn” is that the real challenge is not to invent ever more participatory instruments, but to better connect existing deliberative experiments to representative politics at both EU and national levels.

Our study suggests that while many politicians are not opposed to citizen involvement per se, they are often wary of deliberative designs that either sideline them or appear to instrumentalise citizens. This is precisely why thinking seriously about institutional linkages matters: for example, involving both MEPs and national MPs in transnational citizens’ assemblies, or hosting pan‑European citizen panels in national parliaments during rotating EU Council presidencies.

At the moment, the Commission‑led citizens’ panels risk reproducing the main weakness of CoFoE: citizens are invited to deliberate, but their recommendations are only loosely coupled to the arenas where political conflict is structured and decisions are actually taken. This fuels suspicion that participation serves primarily to legitimise pre‑set policy trajectories – “democracy without politics”, as some have called it.

Karolina Borońska-Hryniewiecka is Associate Professor at the Institute of Political Studies, Polish Academy of Science, and Associated Research Fellow at the CESSP, Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne. She is currently leading an NCN OPUS-funded project exploring transnational political discourse on EU institutional reform. Her work appeared in, among others, West European Politics, European Political Science Review, Journal of European Integration, and Parliamentary Affairs.

Jan Kotýnek Krotký is Assistant Professor at the International Institute of Political Science, Masaryk University. He is currently leading a post-doctoral project on citizen participation in the EU, supported by the Czech Science Foundation. His articles appeared in journals such as West European Politics, JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, Journal of Contemporary European Studies, and European Security.

The post “Consulting Citizens? Be Our Guest – But Only on Our Conditions” appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Ask any academic about how they have come to their present station in their careers and they will talk at some point about the role of chance. The conversation in a queue at a coffee break at a conference, the sitting in on a departmental seminar series, the email on a disciplinary mailing list: the joining of ideas, the crossing of peoples’ paths.

Out of these moments has much research emerged. To take one example, the 2004 volcanic ash cloud that closed transatlantic air transport for over a week, trapping hundreds of European international relations scholars in Canada as their conference was ending, reputedly produced dozens of articles, funding bids and collaborative networks as people found they had time to sit, talk, brainstorm and advance ideas that might otherwise have been lost to the constant pressures of managing a regular workload.

All of which is to say that the advancement of knowledge through research doesn’t follow a straight or foreseeable path. And the growing focus of funding bodies on strategic priorities risks undermining the valuable possibilities that come from a rich and supportive research environment.

The move towards funding priority topics is partly understandable by the desire of funders to demonstrate their direct contribution to areas of political and public interest: research for gain instead of research for its own sake, if you will. In an age of tightening budgets, performance metrics and stakeholder accountability the incentives are clear.

But we now find ourselves at risk of moving too far in this direction.

Firstly, the world moves fast and uncertainly. If priorities are updated too slowly, then we risk missing important new agendas, but if they move too quickly, there is a danger that funding never lasts long enough to allow for the production of sufficiently deep analysis and findings. Supporting researchers to follow many paths – that may for time to time becoming more salient – actually improves the ability to speak to changing needs.

Secondly, priority relies on the existence of a pool of experienced researchers who can bid into designated pots of funding. But if there isn’t the support to allow such people to learn and develop in the absence of targeted monies, then the upsides of prioritisation are severely eroded.

And finally, research has never been just about material benefits. The pursuit of knowledge – in all its forms – is a human endeavour, with intrinsic value. Just as higher education can’t be simply a vehicle for getting a better-paid job, so too must research retain its wider purpose of supporting our understanding of the world and of ourselves.

That means we need to protect funding streams both within individual institutions and from external funders to allow researchers the opportunity to pursue their own agendas and ideas, and to be able to share, discuss and develop them with their communities of practice.

Having been a chair of UACES, which brings together European Studies researchers from across the world and from multiple disciplines, I have been repeatedly delighted and educated by what the rich tapestry of a vibrant and mutually supportive research environment can bring to my own work and to the full range of stakeholders, from politicians to the general public, activists to journalists.

If we can continue to preserve the value of supporting research in the broadest sense then we can not only make targeted funding work more effectively and sustainably, but also ensure that the broadest values of research are protected and shared with everyone.

Simon Usherwood is Professor of Politics and International Studies at the Open University and former Chair of UACES.

The post Why Research Needs a Supportive Environment as Much as Funding Priorities appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Image from Education under Attack / Save Schools in Ukraine: https://saveschools.in.ua/en/

Kateryna Suprun

In the increasingly turbulent economic environment facing many European higher education institutions (HEIs) (Pruvot et al., 2025), performance-based funding (PBF) remains a popular instrument for allocating at least part of core public funding (European Commission, 2023). Traditionally, PBF involves governments rewarding HEIs for meeting specific objectives – an approach often assumed to improve university performance (Kivistö & Mathies, 2023). Yet a key question is: does steering by incentives actually change how HEIs work, or does it merely encourage them to look good on paper?

In my recent article (Suprun 2026) published in the Policy Reviews of Higher Education, I draw on the strategic response framework (Oliver, 1991) to establish if the PBF policy recently adopted in Ukraine has made HEIs change their internal practices. Guided by interviews, surveys and document analysis, I explore the lived experiences of 22 public HEIs between 2020 and 2022 and invite their reflections on the revival of the PBF policy in 2024 amid a protracted military crisis. This approach allows tracing how Ukrainian HEIs have responded to the PBF policy and to which extent they have internalised its expectations.

 

From Policy Design to Institutional Practice

The PBF policy implementation in Ukraine tells a story of policy relevance shaped by political power struggles. Formulated against a backdrop of vested interests, an inflated higher education network, and a historical reliance on student numbers, the PBF policy aimed to make public funding transparent, apply uniform performance indicators, and strengthen better performing HEIs. It was introduced during the policy window of 2020, facilitated by the political turnover, became suspended with the outbreak of the all-in Russian war in 2022, and returned to the policy agenda in 2024, after yet another change of government.

The PBF design has undergone changes in each year of its active implementation, signalling an incremental transition pathway, political volatility and war-induced adjustments of the performance metrics. The resulting fragmented and contested implementation of the PBF policy – often associated with ‘gaming the results’ (Mathies et al., 2020) – calls for its analysis from the perspective of HEIs as street-level bureaucrats tasked with its day-to-day execution.

The strategic responses of the consulted HEIs towards the PBF policy closely correspond to their gains or losses from its implementation: winners tend to comply, while others engage in compromise and manipulation. PBF beneficiaries find it easy to follow the PBF rules: they perceive the PBF targets consistent with their university goals and view the PBF logic beneficial for institutional effectiveness. At the same time, their reported dependence on PBF is modest – ranging from just a few percent to no more than one third of core budget, – supporting the argument that high-performing universities advance their work regardless of PBF incentives (Shea & Hara, 2020).

In contrast, loss-exposed HEIs feel coerced towards PBF, consider its metrics constraining, and experience uncertainty in their financial prospects. Paradoxically, these are precisely the institutions that rely most heavily on PBF disbursements, with some depending on them for up to 70% of their public funding. As the organisational responses of universities are clearly differentiated, the question is if those receiving larger incentives are more inclined to steer by performance internally.

 

How Universities Adapted Internally – and Where They Did Not

The data indicate changes taking place in most of the engaged Ukrainian HEIs, with several clearly emerging trends. PBF beneficiaries are particularly active in introducing internal performance structures and funding models that mirror or adapt the system-level metrics. The reported changes to institutional policies and practices concentrate primarily on the performance areas of external research funding and internationalisation. While the universities adversely affected by PBF have attempted to become more performance-driven, their efforts were reversed with the temporary halt of the national policy in 2022 – unlike those of PBF-winning HEIs who continued with performance practices.

The PBF policy has also produced a few unintended consequences, hindering institutional changes. Limited coordination among national authorities has triggered audits of universities, making them comply simultaneously with the PBF policy and its preceding regulations on student-staff ratio and pay scales. Confronted with these contradictory demands, many HEIs continued to base their financial planning on the outdated model of historical funding.

The one-size-fits-all design of the PBF model, favouring research-intensive and internationally-exposed HEIs, has too yielded frequent grievances on the part of the financially vulnerable HEIs, lacking research capacity and global networks. Finally, the zero-sum logic of the PBF policy and restricted financial autonomy have discouraged or disabled some HEIs to act on the performance targets.

 

Implications for Policy and Practice

The case of Ukraine shows that HEIs adapt internally when they feel aligned with policy objectives, capable of introducing changes and engaged to the decision-making process. Albeit counterintuitively, the PBF policy volatility appears to function as a double-edged sword: while universities are caught in a perpetual turbulence, frequent revisions also reduce the likelihood of opportunistic behaviour.

Importantly, most consulted HEIs recognise the relevance of the PBF mechanism also in times of protracted war. However, their testimonies highlight unresolved inquiries beyond the current design of the PBF policy: do policy-makers acknowledge the value brought by HEIs through their third mission activities? And if so, how can they be measured and incentivised in a transparent and objective manner?  Whether future iterations of the PBF policy will be able to address these challenges remains to be seen.

 

Kateryna Suprun is a Doctoral Researcher at the Faculty of Management and Business, Tampere University, Finland, and a member of the Higher Education Group. Her research explores policy implementation in higher education, with a focus on performance-based funding models and Ukraine. She has previously worked at the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine on higher education and digital transformation policies, alongside emergency humanitarian planning and resource mobilisation. She has also held various roles under the World Bank, European Commission, and European Higher Education Area frameworks.

 

Bibliography:

European Commission. (2023). Final report of the study on the state and effectiveness of national funding systems of higher education to support the European universities initiative. Volume I. Publications Office. https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2766/885757

Kivistö, J., & Mathies, C. (2023). Incentives, rationales, and expected impact: Linking performance-based research funding to internal funding distributions of universities. In B. Lepori, B. Jongbloed, & D. Hicks (Eds), Handbook of Public Funding of Research (pp. 186–202). Edward Elgar Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781800883086.00019

Mathies, C., Kivistö, J., & Birnbaum, M. (2020). Following the money? Performance-based funding and the changing publication patterns of Finnish academics. Higher Education, 79(1), 21–37. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-019-00394-4

Oliver, C. (1991). Strategic Responses to Institutional Processes. The Academy of Management Review, 16(1), 145. https://doi.org/10.2307/258610

Pruvot, E., Estermann, T., & Popkhadze, N. (2025). Financially sustainable universities. State of play and strategies for future resilience. European University Association. https://www.eua.eu/images/Funding_briefing_final.pdf

Shea, S. O., & Hara, J. O. (2020). The impact of Ireland’s new higher education system performance framework on institutional planning towards the related policy objectives. Higher Education, 80(2), 335–351.

Suprun, K. (2026). Implementation of the performance-based funding policy in Ukrainian higher education: impact on institutional behaviour? Policy Reviews in Higher Education, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/23322969.2026.2622677

The post Chasing Indicators or Changing Practices? Ukrainian Universities under Performance‑Based Funding appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

A small meeting room in the European External Action Service is an unlikely place to get goosebumps. Yet, this happened time and time again as I spoke to European Union (EU) officials about the ground-breaking decision to deploy the European Peace Facility (EPF) to support Ukraine’s military response against Russia’s full-scale invasion during a cold February weekend in 2022. They all recall the gravitas of the moment: High Representative Borrell’s famous “Just add a zero” line that allowed the EPF budget to be multiplied by ten, the ground-breaking decision to deploy it to provide lethal equipment, and the momentous feeling of unity between Member States – a Union that, for once, rose up to the stakes of the moment.

Yet, the goosebumps are a momentary experience, and quickly go away as the conversation shifts to the months and years that followed. The tone gets more sour and frustrated. From a powerful innovation signifying European resolve, since 2024, the EPF has been completely blocked by the assertiveness of Hungarian vetoes. The officials I interview often use this as an example to show me that, although we tend to see the EU’s reaction to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine as an ideal case of unity, consensus is not part of the equation at all.

How and why, then, has internal disagreement not impeded a common response in support of Ukraine? The conventional wisdom – that EU foreign policy action requires unanimity – cannot explain this.

My PhD starts from a different premise. Full agreement is a lot to ask of a group of twenty-seven Member States bound together by a sprawling institutional architecture and a multiplicity of tools, but torn apart by diverging interests and strategic cultures. In a decision-making machinery still dominated by unanimity, collective action does not require the elimination of disagreement by channelling twenty-seven voices into one. It requires organising twenty-seven voices into patterns of complementarity rather than contradiction.

These are the theoretical propositions I carried with me back and forth in my Eurostar journeys from London to Brussels since January 2026, when I began my fieldwork, generously supported by the UACES PhD Fieldwork Scholarship.

What I Am Finding: Complementarity, Not Unity 

The central conceptual move emerging from my research is a shift away from thinking about EU unity as the enabling factor of common external action to thinking about complementarity.

The dominant framing treats EU unity and consensus as necessary conditions for EU presence on the global stage: either it ‘speaks with one voice’ or it fragments into competing national positions. A holistic analysis of those cases that are considered closest to ideal types in this binary – Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the Gaza conflict – reveals something this dichotomy cannot capture.

By taking into account the multiplicity of actions across the Union’s multi-actor, multi-method, multi-level system of foreign policy, one starts seeing a different picture. It is the management of conflict and disagreement – not consensus – that enables EU external action, which can exist in multiple forms short of unity. What matters is not whether agreement can be found in the Council, but whether EU institutions and Member States act, in practice, to fill the gaps left by one another.

The EU’s multi-centred architecture – its multiple voices – does not merely constrain action, but provides avenues through which action can be routed around blockages at any given level. The European Peace Facility is a particularly successful and evident example of this: where disagreement existed, and common competencies lacked to support the provision of lethal equipment to Ukraine, the Commission provided EU financing through off-budget mechanisms, Member States delivered weapons bilaterally, and the EEAS coordinated. Each maintained its distinctive organisational approach, but these were structured to complement each other. No preference convergence or further integration occurred, but institutional innovations and procedural flexibility organised these differences productively.

I propose complementarity as the concept to capture this: the degree to which EU institutions and Member States reinforce rather than contradict each other at political, strategic, and operational levels. Complementarity is not coherence or uniformity: it allows for differentiated contributions, sequenced actions, and division of labour across a spectrum. What matters is not the institutional design of decision-making, but its outcome in practice, and whether actors reinforce, supplement, or contradict one another.

What Complementarity Reveals

 This concept helps to start theorising three more and more explicit developments in EU foreign policy into a single framework. These are typically analysed in isolation or misread as signs of dysfunction. Rather, I argue that they are all part of the same phenomenon whereby the EU assumes different patterns of complementarity as the outcome of internal conflict management.

The first concerns the simultaneous rise of Commission assertiveness and Member State coalitions. The European Commission increasingly deploys its own instruments – SAFE, Readiness 2030 – to provide frameworks for action in areas where unanimity in CFSP/CSDP cannot be reached. At the same time, Member States form informal ‘coalitions of the willing’ to tackle urgent problems outside the constraints of unanimity. These are usually analysed as two distinct trends, and the latter is often read as a sign of fragmentation. Yet, I argue that they are symptoms of complementarity in action: efforts of separate actors to enable or strengthen the collective effort.

The second development concerns the increasing visibility of Commission instruments in the making and shaping of EU external action. The existing debate has long equated EU foreign policy with its most visible intergovernmental surface – Council conclusions, statements, declarations. These are either voted on by unanimity or fail to come into existence. But a more holistic view that understands Community and Member State instruments and external competencies as part of the same system of foreign policy, a different picture emerges. Political, strategic, and operational coordination do not always move in tandem: Community tools can be effectively deployed at the operational level even when political consensus is absent. What appears as “disunity” at one level does not necessarily mean the EU is failing to act, or vice versa. It is precisely in these intermediate configurations – visible through a complementary view – that some of the most undertheorised dynamics of EU foreign policy reside.

Third, these configurations are not static. Complementarity is better understood as a process than a state – something that is constructed, sustained, and that can erode. The EU’s response to Ukraine illustrates this vividly: the rapid construction of a coherent response in the weeks following February 2022 gradually became more pluralistic over time – regardless of the sustained existential threat to European security. Changes external configuration of the EU – whether it speaks with one voice or it is characterised by coalitions of the willing and Commission-led workarounds – are often read as predictive signs of the trajectory of EU foreign policy integration. My argument is that this is the wrong frame entirely. These are not steps forward, backwards, or sideways on an integration spectrum that can tell us whether the EU is advancing unevenly, retreating, or finding a differentiated middle path. They are pragmatic, adaptive responses to the specific configuration of external constraints and internal costs the EU faces at a given moment. The EU is not on a linear trajectory; rather, a kaleidoscopic, shape-shifting polity in which coalitions form and reform around specific issues, and where the relevant question is not the degree of integration but the pattern of alignment.

Bridging Theory and Practice: Fieldwork in the Brussels Bubble

The core of my fieldwork consists of elite interviews with practitioners across the EU’s foreign policy ecosystem: officials from the EEAS, the Commission, the Council Secretariat, and Member States. The interviews seek to unveil not the achievement of unanimity as described by the treaties, but the daily, often improvised work of finding éscamotages, creative solutions, and producing collective action under pressure.

Brussels is a bubble that rewards presence. Many of these conversations would not have happened over Zoom. The willingness to speak candidly about politically charged dynamics – particularly about why coordination breaks down and how dissent is absorbed rather than resolved – depends enormously on trust built face to face. The informal chats after the recorded interview, the run-ins around Schuman or To Meli, the introductions passed along by a colleague: these are the understated elements that make research beyond the diplomatic narrative possible. I still have much to do: the human component of interviews requires time – digging into the EUWhoIsWho to identify interlocutors, waiting for answers (which often never come), and finding an appropriate time in the interviewees’ busy schedules. This means: I am still deeply in the process – widening my reach to Member State officials in Permanent Representations and select national capitals.

The UACES PhD Fieldwork Scholarship is essential to sustaining this presence. The scholarship supported my travel and living costs, allowing me to conduct a far richer set of interviews than would otherwise have been feasible. I am deeply grateful to UACES for this support, and for the broader role the association plays in enabling early-career researchers to undertake empirically grounded work.

Looking Ahead

The broader ambition is to equip scholars and practitioners with a framework that makes sense of recent developments in EU foreign policy while relieving them of the unrealistic expectation of consistent unity and the frustration of apparent weakness. The EU is not a unitary state. It cannot always ‘speak with one voice’. But it can and does act – sometimes with remarkable coordination, sometimes in productive pluralism, and sometimes in disarray. Understanding why it takes these different forms can offer insights into how this adaptive quality could become a strength rather than a source of anxiety in an increasingly volatile international order.

The post Conflict Is Underrated: From Unity to Complementarity in EU Foreign Policy appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Although I am currently immersed in the London local elections — speaking with residents, listening to concerns, and experiencing democracy at its most immediate level — I didn’t want to miss the chance to reflect on Hungary’s 12 April vote. I have analysed Hungarian politics for many years, and this election is among the most consequential in the country’s modern history. Balancing local campaigning with international analysis has been a reminder that democratic practice is both local and global, intimate and structural.

Tibor Illyés/EPA

Hungary will hold a parliamentary election on 12 April that many observers describe as the most significant in the country’s modern political history. After 16 years of uninterrupted rule by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz–KDNP alliance, a new political force has emerged to challenge the government’s dominance. The TISZA party, led by former Fidesz insider Péter Magyar, has rapidly reshaped the political landscape and introduced a degree of uncertainty not seen since 2010.

The stakes extend far beyond the composition of the next government. The election will influence Hungary’s economic direction, its approach to the rule of law, and its geopolitical positioning between the European Union and Russia. For many voters, the contest has become a referendum on the political model Orbán has built over the past decade and a half — a model critics describe as “illiberal democracy” and supporters defend as a sovereign alternative to Western liberalism.

How the system works

Hungary is a parliamentary republic with a unicameral National Assembly of 199 members. The PM is elected by a majority of the National Assembly members. The electoral system combines single‑member districts with proportional representation: 106 MPs are elected through first‑past‑the‑post constituencies, while the remaining 93 seats are allocated through national party lists.

Parties must cross a 5% threshold to enter parliament via the national list, although alliances face higher thresholds. A distinctive feature of the system is the “surplus votes” mechanism, which adds unused votes from winning constituency candidates to their party’s national list total. Analysts note that this tends to favour the largest party.

Recent amendments have also redrawn constituency boundaries. Budapest, where opposition parties have traditionally performed strongly, now has fewer seats, while surrounding areas that lean toward Fidesz have gained representation. These changes have prompted debate about the neutrality of the redistricting process.

The political actors 

Orbán’s Fidesz–KDNP alliance is seeking a fifth consecutive term, campaigning on themes of stability, national sovereignty and peace. The prime minister presents himself as the only leader capable of shielding Hungary from external pressures, whether from the EU, NATO or what he characterises as a “pro‑war lobby”.

Péter Magyar, left, of the Tisza Party, and Viktor Orbán from Fidesz, addressing rallies during the campaign (Balint Szentgallay and Akos Stiller via Getty Images)

The main challenger is TISZA, founded in 2024 and led by Péter Magyar. Once a high‑ranking diplomat within the Fidesz system, Magyar broke with the government and has since accused it of systemic corruption and institutional capture. TISZA positions itself as conservative, pro‑European and broadly inclusive, aiming to attract voters across ideological lines.

Other parties remain part of the landscape, though with reduced visibility. The Democratic Coalition, led by Klára Dobrev, continues to advocate for a full restoration of liberal democratic norms and closer alignment with the EU. To the right of Fidesz, the Our Homeland Movement appeals to nationalist voters dissatisfied with the government’s direction. Several traditional opposition parties — including Momentum, the Socialists and Dialogue — have withdrawn from the race to avoid splitting the anti‑government vote, effectively consolidating support behind TISZA.

The issues shaping the campaign

Foreign policy has dominated the campaign, particularly the war in Ukraine. Fidesz has framed the election as a choice between “peace or war”, arguing that the opposition and EU institutions favour escalation. The government emphasises continued cooperation with Russia, especially in the energy sector. TISZA condemns the invasion but has taken a cautious approach to questions of military involvement.

Hungary’s relationship with the EU is another central issue. Approximately €18 billion in EU funds remain frozen due to concerns about corruption and the rule of law. TISZA has pledged to implement the reforms required to unlock these funds, while Fidesz portrays EU pressure as interference in national sovereignty.

Economic concerns are also prominent. Voters face rising living costs, stagnant wages and deteriorating public services, particularly in education and healthcare. Opposition parties highlight the wealth accumulated by business figures close to Fidesz as evidence of systemic corruption. The government points to wage growth and family support schemes as signs of economic resilience.

U.S. Vice President JD Vance shakes hands with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán Tuesday in Budapest. (Denes Erdos / Associated Press)

The campaign has also been marked by allegations of external influence. Reports of Russian‑linked disinformation networks and the increasing use of AI‑generated political content have raised concerns about the information environment. A visit by US Vice President JD Vance in support of Orbán has further underscored the international attention surrounding the election.

What could happen after the vote

A party or alliance needs 100 seats to form a government. A two‑thirds majority — 133 seats — grants the power to amend the constitution and change “cardinal laws”, which govern key areas such as the judiciary, media regulation and electoral rules.

If TISZA were to win a simple majority but fall short of two‑thirds, it could form a government but would face structural constraints, as many institutional reforms require supermajority support. If no party reaches 100 seats, coalition negotiations would be necessary. Analysts note that Fidesz and the Our Homeland Movement share ideological overlaps, though no formal commitments have been made.

Depending on the margin, observers have also discussed the possibility of legal challenges or disputes over certification. These scenarios reflect the high stakes and polarisation surrounding the election rather than predictions about the outcome.

What to watch on election day

 Turnout will be closely monitored, particularly among younger voters who have been highly mobilised during the campaign. The urban–rural divide remains a defining feature of Hungarian politics: while TISZA is expected to perform strongly in Budapest, Fidesz retains deep support in rural areas, where constituency results often determine the overall balance of power.

The performance of smaller parties will also matter. Whether groups such as the Democratic Coalition or the Our Homeland Movement cross the 5% threshold will influence the distribution of list seats. Diaspora votes — particularly mail‑in ballots from ethnic Hungarians abroad — have historically provided several additional seats to Fidesz. Analysts are also watching the role of AI‑generated content and disinformation in the final hours of the campaign.

Why this election matters

The April 12 election is a watershed moment that will decide whether Hungary continues its trajectory as an “electoral autocracy” or returns toward a liberal democratic path within the European Union. The outcome will redefine Hungary’s relationship with Brussels and Kyiv, potentially removing a persistent “spoiler” to EU policy or further entrenching an illiberal vanguard in the heart of Europe. Regardless of the winner, the next government will face the daunting task of navigating an entrenched legal framework and a deeply polarized society.

The post Explainer: Your Guide to Hungary’s Election on 12 April appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Photo: Green Circuit Board by Miguel Á. Padriñán, available from https://www.pexels.com/photo/green-circuit-board-343457/

Cristina Pinna

Over the past decade, research security has moved from a technical concern discussed among specialists to a central issue in European research policy. What began as a debate about protecting sensitive technologies has expanded into a broader question about how knowledge should be governed in a changing geopolitical environment. Today, it shapes funding rules, international cooperation, and the everyday practices of universities across Europe, becoming part of a broader effort to govern knowledge flows amid geopolitical uncertainty and perceived vulnerability. It reflects a wider shift in how the European Union (EU) understands openness, collaboration, and risk.

In my ongoing research on EU research security and international academic cooperation (Pinna, 2024; Cai, Pinna and van der Wende, 2025; Pinna, 2025), I examine how this shift reflects more than a response to specific threats and is linked to the EU’s broader geopolitical repositioning and to the growing recognition that research and innovation are strategic domains. Policy debates increasingly frame scientific cooperation in terms of resilience, technological sovereignty, and economic security (European Commission 2025b) and are linked to the EU’s broader geopolitical repositioning and to the growing recognition that research and innovation are strategic domains. 

 

From openness to managed interdependence

For much of the early 2000s, EU research policy rested on the assumption that international openness was inherently beneficial. The development of the European Research Area (ERA), successive Framework Programmes, and mobility initiatives reflected a paradigm in which universities were encouraged to internationalise, compete globally, and integrate into the knowledge economy. International cooperation was tied to a neoliberal logic of competitiveness and excellence, where openness was seen as necessary for growth and scientific leadership. 

Over time, this consensus began to change. Advances in dual-use technologies, the strategic importance of innovation, and geopolitical rivalry led policymakers to reconsider the risks of unrestricted collaboration. Scientific cooperation is now seen not only as a driver of competitiveness, but also as a source of vulnerability. Concerns about knowledge transfer, foreign interference, and asymmetric dependencies have moved to the centre of policy debates, especially in strategic technologies. Where the previous decade emphasised internationalisation as an economic imperative, the current one increasingly frames it through a security logic concerned with exposure, dependence, and risk.

These developments are particularly visible in EU–China academic relations. Earlier narratives emphasised partnership and mutual benefit, whereas recent debates refer to reciprocity, risk awareness, and strategic dependencies (Cai, Pinna, and van der Wende 2025). Cooperation continues, but under more cautious and conditional terms. 

Recent EU initiatives reflect this recalibration. The Council Recommendation on Enhancing Research Security defines research security as the need to anticipate and manage risks related to unwanted knowledge transfer, malign influence on research, and violations of academic integrity or EU values (European Commission 2024a). Research security, therefore, goes beyond protecting technologies and includes safeguarding the conditions under which research remains open and trustworthy.  The White Paper on dual-use R&D further highlights the overlap between civilian innovation and security concerns (European Commission 2024b). Together, these documents signal a move from unconditional openness to managed internationalisation.

 

Security embedded in everyday research governance

This transformation has not taken the form of sudden restrictions. Instead, security concerns have been integrated into existing procedures.

Rather than imposing strict prohibitions, the EU mainly relies on regulatory and coordinative tools. Funding rules, due-diligence requirements, export controls, and risk assessments increasingly shape research cooperation. Recent Commission initiatives provide guidance and coordination tools for Member States (European Commission 2025a).

Because education and research remain largely national competencies, the implementation of research security is shaped by the relationship between the EU and its Member States. EU institutions set the direction, but Member States, funding agencies, universities, and researchers implement it. In this sense, research security develops through a multi-level governance system in which responsibilities are distributed rather than centrally imposed (Pinna 2024). Translating research security into practice is uneven across governance levels, with divergent narratives creating uncertainty for implementers and making the process more contested than official policy language suggests (Rüland et al. 2025).

 

A broader geopolitical context

The growing prominence of research security is closely connected to the EU’s wider geopolitical agenda. Since the late 2010s, EU policy has emphasised resilience, strategic autonomy, and reducing critical dependencies. Research and innovation are no longer seen only as drivers of growth, but as areas linked to security, competitiveness, and systemic vulnerability (European Commission 2025b).

This shift reflects not only the pursuit of power, but also growing concern about vulnerability within open research systems. Policymakers worry that openness may expose critical technologies, create dependencies, or allow foreign influence in sensitive areas. These concerns have led to new policy instruments in “like-minded” countries such as the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Australia, where governments introduced guidelines to help universities manage geopolitical risks in international collaboration (Shih, Chubb, and Cooney-O’Donoghue 2025). Comparative work also shows that in both Germany and the United States, research security is reshaping scientific cooperation under geopolitical pressure, though through different governance traditions (Rüffin et al. 2025).

The EU response remains distinctive. Rather than relying on direct restrictions, it mainly uses coordination, recommendations, and regulatory frameworks. Cooperation remains central, but with greater attention to exposure, dependence, and strategic capabilities. Research security, therefore, reflects an attempt to govern interdependence rather than abandon openness.

 

Changing language, changing expectations

This transformation is also visible in policy language. Over the past decade, EU documents have moved from the vocabulary of openness and global exchange to terms such as responsible internationalisation, de-risking, and strategic autonomy. These changes reflect shifting narratives about how openness should be organised. 

Earlier frameworks stressed partnership and mobility, whereas recent documents emphasise risk awareness, due diligence, and institutional responsibility. The Council Recommendation on research security places risk assessment and safeguards within normal research governance (European Commission 2024a).  Openness is no longer taken for granted but must be actively managed.

This shift is often summarised in the principle that cooperation should be “as open as possible, as closed as necessary.” Initially used in technical contexts, this expression now captures a broader change in how international collaboration is understood. It reflects the attempt to preserve openness while recognising its risks.

This shift in language is particularly visible in EU–China academic relations. Earlier narratives centred on partnership and exchange, while more recent debates increasingly refer to risk management, strategic dependencies, and the protection of sensitive knowledge (Cai, Pinna, and van der Wende 2025; Pinna 2024). These changes reorganise expectations across the research system, redistributing responsibility among universities, funding agencies, and individual researchers.

 

Concluding reflections

Research security has become a defining feature of EU research policy. What began as concern about sensitive technologies has evolved into a broader effort to reconsider how knowledge circulates in an increasingly contested global environment. 

The shift is visible both in policy instruments and in the language of international cooperation. Terms such as responsible internationalisation, strategic autonomy, and de-risking reflect a shift from openness as the default to a more cautious organisation of international cooperation.

For the EU, this reflects an effort to remain open while reducing vulnerabilities. For universities and researchers, collaboration continues but with stronger expectations of responsibility and risk awareness.  Understanding this shift is essential for navigating European research governance. Research security is not simply a constraint on cooperation, but an attempt to redefine how international collaboration can continue in a more uncertain and contested world.

 

Dr. Cristina Pinna is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Department of International Relations and International Organization, University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Her research examines China’s global engagement, with particular interest in EU–China relations, the geopolitics of infrastructure and science and technology. She previously worked at the United Nations Development Programme in Beijing and has held research and teaching roles in Italy, Netherlands, Canada and China. She has launched a research group (Geo)Politics of the Global Science System – gloknos.

 

References

Cai, Yuzhuo, Cristina Pinna, and Marijk van der Wende, eds. 2025. Rethinking EU–China higher education cooperation in a complex and changing global environment. Special issue, Journal of Studies in International Education 29(2): 167–176. https://doi.org/10.1177/10283153251316930 

European Commission. 2024a. Council recommendation on enhancing research security. COM(2024) 26 final. Brussels.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=COM:2024:26:FIN 

European Commission. 2024b. White paper on options for enhancing support for research and development involving technologies with dual-use potential. Brussels.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:52024DC0027 

European Commission. 2025a. Commission announces new measures to strengthen research security. Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, 28 October. Brussels. https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/news/all-research-and-innovation-news/commission-announces-new-measures-strengthen-research-security-2025-10-28_en

European Commission. 2025b. Strategic Autonomy and European Economic and Research Security. https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/strategy/strategy-research-and-innovation/europe-world/international-cooperation/strategic-autonomy-and-european-economic-and-research-security_en

Pinna, Cristina. 2024. Navigating knowledge and research security in EU–China academic relations: The case of Hungary, Italy, and the Netherlands. Journal of Studies in International Education 29(2): 319–343. https://doi.org/10.1177/10283153241307970 

Pinna, Cristina. 2025. Comparative Perspective In EU Context: Policies And Instruments In Relevant EU Countries. In van der Wende M., et al. (eds.) Changing perspectives: towards conditions for sustainable EU-China collaboration in academic cooperation and R&D. Published by the China Knowledge Network (CKN). https://www.chinakennisnetwerk.nl/publications/changing-perspectives-towardsconditions-sustainable-eu-china-academic-collaboration  

Rüffin, Nicolas V., Katharina C. Cramer, Maximilian Mayer, and Philip J. Nock. 2025.
“Research Security’ in Germany and the United States: Shifting Governance of Scientific Collaboration Under Geopolitical Pressure. Global Policy, advance online publication, pp. 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.70103

Rüland, Anna-Lena,  Rüffin, Nicolas V., Wang, Ruowei and Mauduit, Jean-Christophe. 2025.
“The Implementation of Research Security Policies in Germany: Exploring Policy Narratives across Governance Levels.” European Security, advance online publication.
https://doi.org/10.1080/09662839.2025.2591708

Shih, Tommy, Chubb, Andrew  and  Cooney-O’Donoghue, Diarmuid. 2025. Processing the geopolitics of global science: Emerging national-level advisory structures. Journal of Studies in International Education 29(2): 300–318. https://doi.org/10.1177/10283153241307971

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By Dimitris Bouris (University of Amsterdam), Saul Kenny (Article 109), Hanna L. Mühlenhoff (University of Amsterdam)

In our recent article for JCMS we set out to queer the European Union Foreign and Security Policy.

But what does this mean?

Queer, once a slur, is now a popular term that captures the variety of sexual orientations and gender identities. Rooted in decolonial, black feminist as well as cultural studies, queer theory uses sexuality and gender identity as an entry point to tackle taken-for-granted concepts across literature, politics, law, and international relations.

We applied queer theory to EU foreign and security policy, specifically ‘queering’ the EU’s implementation of Women, Peace and Security (WPS) – a UN-mandated agenda that aims to consider the specific needs of women and girls in conflict. We focused on three queer concepts: invisibilities, heteronormativity, and binaries.

A (brief) overview of queer theory and its place in European Studies

To be queer is to be fluid; queer theory is therefore a framework that can be tricky to pin down. Its roots can, however, be traced to the post-structural turn in the 1980s and 1990s thanks to the work of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Eve Sedgwick as well as the wider LGBTIQA+ movement. Its development is linked to feminism, post-colonialism, and constructivism. And while it overlaps with LGBT Studies, it is at times in tension with it.

Petrus Liu offers a starting point:

“Queer theory challenges categories we take for granted as self-obvious, natural, or immutable… Queer theory is, moreover, a kind of doing, a form of socially conscious intervention that calls into question the blind spots of heteronormative and cisnormative worldviews.”

Queer scholars interpret and apply the theory in different ways, but we support Kath Brown and Catherine J. Nash’s suggestion that it “can be any form of research” that “highlights the instability of taken-for-granted meanings and resulting power relations”.

As we outline in our article, the EU is increasingly examined by various critical theories (most notably postcolonial and feminist theories). And while our research is the first applications of queer theory to the EU’s foreign and security policy, it builds on a rich body of queer literature that exists on the wider WPS agenda, humanitarian responses, development, human rights law, and the fight against the far-right, amongst others. Below, we try to unpack some key concepts of queer scholarship.

Invisibilities

Queer scholarship “focuses on the (in)visibility of queer representations in international politics”, as we write in our paper. This erasure has real-world implications for queer people.

We found that LGBTIQA+ people are absent in the EU’s implementation of WPS. This means they are doubly persecuted; the violence they are subject to is not recognised and so they are excluded from access to legal, health, and other services.

This erasure affects all queer people. On one hand, WPS was designed to protect women and girls – yet it ignores the experience of lesbian and trans women. On the other hand, research increasingly highlights how sexual and gender-based violence does not only affect women; because of gendered hierarchies, men and boys are “feminised” or “homosexualised” in conflict. This process of violent humiliation is often directed at queer men and gender minorities, which is why WPS is often seen to be an avenue to integrate protections for the wider LGBTIQ+ community.

The failure to include references to LGBTIQA+ people is therefore a missed opportunity.

Heteronormativity

Queer theory examines heteronormative and cis-gendered structures. In the EU’s implementation of WPS, we found that all relationships are assumed to be heterosexual. The possibility that couples could be same-sex (or that families could have a single parent, for that matter) is not considered.

But by examining heteronormativity, queer research goes deeper: it attempts to analyse why there are patriarchal (im)balances of power and how they manifest.

Queer theory posits that heteronormativity is upheld by a range of masculinities and femininities, which are expressed in individuals regardless of their gender. It is the “hegemonic masculinity” that defines what is socially expected and is in opposition to “weaker” and “feminine” Others. This violent, patriarchal hegemonic masculinity leads to, and legitimises, acts of violence against LGBTIQA+ people in conflict.

Binaries

Queer scholarship builds on its efforts to deconstruct male/female or gay/straight binaries by doing the same with Either/Or binaries across mainstream politics.

For example, it analyses West/rest, war/peace, foreign/domestic and concludes that they simplify complicated terms and erase the nuance around them. Often, this promotes a xenophobic world view: Josep Borrell’s (the then EU High Representative) now infamous statement “Europe is a garden” and “the rest of the world is a jungle” is an example of this.

As we write in our paper, tackling these binaries helps us appreciate how violence against queer people is:

“Palimpsestic; it does not commence with conflict, nor does it end with the brokering of a ceasefire, the signing of a peace agreement or in the latter stages of peacebuilding. The violence queer persons suffer in conflict-related situations is not an aberration but an extension of that which they face in times of peace.”

Future uses of queer theory: an “open mesh of possibilities”

Queer theory is an “open mesh of possibilities”. This allows us to adapt the framework, use it in parallel with work that examines coloniality, race, disability, and class, as well as find allyship with other post-colonial or critical theories.

That being said, there are queer scholars who would disagree with this, instead positing that queer scholarship should remain on the fringes and not engage with mainstream policies at risk of it being instrumentalised. We recognise this tension but believe queer theory must be driven by a curiosity to engage; its insights are too important to be left on the sidelines.

At a time of increasing pressure on queer research and rights, we hope that others will use queer approaches to interrogate and analyse EU external policies – and encourage researchers to do so.

Doing so helps question the taken-for-granted structures and practises in these policies (what is considered “normal”), revealing the resulting power hierarchies around sexuality and gender identity and also shedding light on those who have been marginalised. In turn, this can contribute to the construction of alternative, more inclusive and irenic, policies and practices.

Dimitris Bouris (he/him) is an Associate Professor and Jean Monnet Chair at the Department of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam. He is also an Associate Editor ofEuropean Security journal and a Visiting Professor at the College of Europe (Natolin). Dimitris’ research focuses lies at the intersection of International Relations (IR theory, peace and state-building, contested states, security sector reform, conflict resolution, diplomacy), EU Studies (EU External Relations, EU security, CSDP, EU foreign Policy) and Middle East and North Africa area studies. He recently co-edited together with Nora Fisher-Onar and Daniela Huber a special issue in JCMS entitled “Towards Allyship in Diversity? Critical Perspectives on the European Union’s Global Role”. In addition to the article discussed in this blog post, recent publications also include an article on the Interrelationship between Gender and European Union Foreign Policy and an article on the performance of Transnistria’s statehood by its political elites

Saul Kenny is the Communication Manager at Article 109, an international coalition of civil society organisations mobilising to review the Charter of the United Nations to make multilateralism better equipped for the 21st century. Before Article 109, Saul worked at the European Commission in support of Horizon Europe. Saul co-authored the paper discussed in this blog after completing his master’s thesis, which analysed policies the EU could adopt to protect LGBTIQA+ people during conflict. Saul has also written about cuts to aid budgets and Europe’s role in a shifting world order.

Hanna L. Mühlenhoff is a Senior Lecturer in European Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She is interested in questions of security, militarism and civil society activism in the European Union and Europe more broadly, including in the context of the UN Women, Peace and Security Agenda and Feminist Foreign Policies. In addition to the publication discussed in this blog post, she recently published a queer analysis of the EU’s Strategic Compass in the Journal of International Relations and Development, and a co-authored chapter on gender (in)justice in von der Leyen’s geopolitical turn.

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By Agnese Pacciardi (School of Global Studies, University of Sussex)

In June 2026, the European Union’s Pact on Migration and Asylum will enter into force. The Pact explicitly recognises the role of civil society organisations and NGOs in EU migration management, acknowledging their practical expertise, especially in working in contexts that are outside the EU. In recent years, EU migration governance has increasingly relied on partnerships with third countries, where border control, development cooperation, and humanitarian assistance overlap. Instruments such as the European Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF) and the Neighbourhood, Development and International Cooperation Instrument (NDICI) show how development funding is increasingly used to support migration management beyond EU borders. In this context, NGOs operating in countries of origin and transit have become central actors in how these policies are carried out on the ground. Much has been written about NGO criticism of EU migration policy over the past decade. Far less attention has been paid to how NGOs actually engage with these policies in practice. What does it actually mean for an organization committed to humanitarian principles to deliver EU-funded programmes inside the EU’s migration machine? My research answers this question by looking at how NGOs in Libya navigate funding pressures, ethical dilemmas, and complex local realities while delivering humanitarian and development assistance in a context heavily shaped by migration control objectives.

Libya and EU Externalisation Strategy

Libya sits at the centre of EU externalisation efforts. Since 2017, the Italy-Libya Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) has funded Libya’s Coast Guard to intercept migrants at sea and return them to detention centres where abuse, forced labour, and torture are widely documented. Research and reports have also documented NGO involvement in alleviating the suffering of migrants in some detention centres, raising questions about whether such engagement is compatible with their humanitarian mandate. This coupling of migration control with development and humanitarian aid is not incidental but is structural, as it is openly acknowledged in Article 2 of the MoU itself.

In this context, NGOs in Libya work in an environment shaped by both urgent humanitarian needs and migration control policies. In my research I show how they navigate this terrain through two seemingly distinct but actually overlapping approaches. The first is what I call “pragmatic developmentalism”: accepting EU funding despite reservations about its political objectives, and focusing on delivering essential services and addressing urgent needs. This approach may involve engaging with local authorities and navigating informal power structures, but it remains oriented towards concrete outcomes for communities. The second is “principled humanitarianism”: an ethics-driven approach in which humanitarian imperatives take precedence over other objectives. This emphasises neutrality, impartiality, and the obligation to provide assistance based on need. In practice, it is based on the belief that NGOs can preserve spaces in which humanitarian action can operate independently of the political agendas that shape its funding context.

The RSSD Project: Where Development Meets Migration Management

The EU-funded Recovery, Stability and Socio-Economic Development (RSSD) project offers a concrete illustration of these dynamics. Targeting municipalities along migration routes in Libya, the project stabilises communities and supports local health systems, such as restoring health centres, delivering medical supplies, and training local staff. While these are developmental outcomes, practitioners themselves recognise that the project operates within a wider strategy aimed at discouraging onward movement towards Europe.

Interviews with NGO workers reveal the two overlapping logics at work. On one hand, they  accept EU funding to deliver essential services, despite some political reservations about the EU migration agenda. On the other they seem preoccupied with maintaining what they describe as ethical “red lines.” What emerges from their accounts is that the tension between pragmatism and principle is not simply an individual ethical dilemma. It may reflect a structural feature of contemporary migration governance itself. NGOs are not only making difficult choices, they are part of the mechanism through which migration policies are implemented on the ground. By delivering services within containment-oriented strategies, NGOs can simultaneously alleviate immediate harm and contribute to stabilising those same strategies. Many practitioners openly acknowledge this ambivalence. One NGO worker describes the tension in stark terms as “whitewashing”, suggesting that the humanitarian framing of their projects can serve to mask a much less humanitarian political agenda. As such NGOs operating within these frameworks are key actors through which migration policies take shape in practice.

Looking Ahead: NGOs and the Future of EU Migration Governance

While the extent to which NGOs manage to maintain independence and stay neutral remains up to debate, the interaction between pragmatic developmentalism and principled humanitarianism shows that NGOs are not simply passive implementers of EU policy. They interpret, adapt, and sometimes push back against EU objectives while continuing to deliver essential services on the ground. At the same time, their work can also indirectly support EU agendas. By framing migration through development and humanitarian action, EU external migration policies can appear more technical and less political, while part of the responsibility for their implementation is carried out by NGOs.

As the EU continues to expand its externalisation strategy, including discussions around “safe third country” arrangements and the delegation of asylum processing, the role of NGOs in transit countries is likely to grow. Understanding their work beyond the simple view of NGOs as either critics of EU policies or their enforcers is crucial for policymakers and civil society actors. It highlights the tensions that arise when migration governance is outsourced, and shows that migration policy is shaped not only by states and institutions, but also by the everyday decisions and principles of the organisations working on the ground.

Agnese Pacciardi is Research Fellow at the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex. Her work focuses on borders, mobility, and security through critical lenses. In her research, she primarily delves into European border security, humanitarianism and development cooperation in North and West Africa, exploring the impacts and implications of these policies on the communities they affect from feminist and decolonial perspectives.

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