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.

*

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.

*

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.

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.

“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.

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.

The post Included, but on whose terms? Ukrainian identity within Pridnestrovian nation-building after 2022 appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

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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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.

The post Ukraine’s Role in Europe’s Green Hydrogen Future appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

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.

The post Advancing research on the European Union’s maritime security: Reflections on a UACES-funded field trip to Brussels. appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

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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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.

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.

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