The 2024 Pact on Migration and Asylum is the latest test. Which perspectives on gender equality made it into the package, and why did they prevail over alternatives? Recent events in Brussels make the question more urgent.

On June 23^rd, 2026, a Taliban delegation held talks with the EU in Brussels on the issue of returning failed asylum-seekers to Afghanistan, an entirely unprecedented visit. The Commission said 15 member states took part in a technical meeting co-chaired by Sweden. The stated focus was on people who have committed serious crimes or pose security threats, but the talks also covered resuming consular services and “a dignified return process.”

Human rights activists and MEPs warned that the meeting risks normalizing a regime that has banned girls from attending school beyond the sixth grade and that seeks to erase women from public life. Among them, Human Rights Watch argued that EU countries undermine their credibility by condemning Taliban abuses while cooperating on forced returns.

This exact tension has been analyzed by the literature. After 2021, the EU made women’s rights a central pillar of its Afghanistan policy, including through a “by women, for women” approach. This was enabled by political convenience: the broad recognition of gender apartheid made feminist commitment cheap. Now that migration control is on the table the commitment is being tested at a real cost. Against this backdrop, the contradiction in this event, between promoting Afghan women’s rights in EU external action and negotiating return agreements with Afghan authorities, is precisely why we should analyze how gender is addressed in migration governance.

Texts do not write themselves; someone does. To understand how gender ended up in the Pact, or didn’t, we can look at the architecture of relations that actors built with one another during the negotiations. Social Network Analysis (SNA) maps these relations, and it is increasingly used to study power relations among actors in the same policy domain.

What makes the method valuable here is that it shows not only who was present and who held influence, but also who was not in the room. A network reveals gaps as clearly as connections. It lets us assess whether migrant women’s organizations and other intersectional actors were actually included, or whether access stayed with organizations closer to the EU’s status quo. Established, EU-based women’s organizations have been described as representing predominantly white, professional women, while the women most affected by the Pact may sit at the periphery of the network, if they are represented at all.

While SNA typically employs quantitative data to count interactions and calculate their weight, the integration of expert interviews adds the qualitative layer that moves this method towards capturing the meaning of the relationships under scrutiny and of what actors exchange. As a result, this integrated approach shows which actors pushed explicitly for gender-related objectives, what ideas about gender they brought to the table, and which actors contested those ideas.

Network analysis and gender studies do meet, mostly around gender policy issues such as equality or employment. But few accounts combine the two to study gender within a specific policy field, and fewer still look at gender policy networks in migration. That is the space this research aims to fill.

The interviews conducted so far point to the fact that gender is not simply absent from the Pact’s negotiation. It is folded into the broader language of vulnerability, and intersectionality is diluted along with it. And while this notion provides additional leeway to allow gender-sensitive provisions during implementation, avoiding politically loaded terms that would trigger contestation during the negotiations, its use bears questions about the consequences of not naming gender in policies. This fits what critical border scholarship finds in the Pact’s texts. The issue relates to reducing social categories of age, gender, geographical origin, sexual orientation and disability to a vulnerability “check list”, which does not go under the surface and hence fails to grasp more profound and structural ways in which vulnerability occurs along migration routes.

In the Commission texts analysed by Häkli and Peltonen, for instance, gender appears mainly as a label that flags certain people for care, such as pregnant women or single-parent families. That is not the same as a lens for asking how border policies affect women and men differently. The authors warn that this logic reproduces racialised, gendered and classed hierarchies among asylum seekers. Gender enters the Pact as a marker of fragility, not as a question of equality. My research therefore asks who put it there, and who could have put it differently.

Asking who pushed for gender equality, and who was left out, shows how one of the EU’s founding values fares where security and humanitarian logics collide.

This research is not only relevant for feminist studies, but also vis-à-vis the literature related to EU integration theories and concepts investigating the role and relevance of normativity within European policy, especially in relation to migration. It further responds to the need to bridge mainstream theories with feminist literature for theoretical and societal reasons, to identify the shortcomings of both the EU migration policy’s study and application.

The post Who Shapes Gender in the EU Migration Pact: A Network Approach appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Since then, there has been a fair amount of (sometimes hyperventilated) comment and discussion about what this relationship might look like, usually in flavours of Why My Prior Preference Was Right Then And Right Now.

But one thing that has been missing is any more detail about what Burnham actually, specifically has in mind for this ‘dialogue’. Indeed, it’s not even clear who the dialogue might be between.

Monday’s statement to Parliament might have been that moment, as the Prime Minister dropped a bunch of international matters on the floor of the House. That neither Iranian involvement in the Fairford incident nor future UK-EU relations was felt to be serious enough to merit a statement of their own points both to a busy time in international relations and to Burnham’s standing intention to focus more on domestic matters (logically, given that these are much more immediately likely to secure votes in a general election).

But the statement was very light on details too. Other than that he will do something around the time of the 20 November summit to ‘present options’, we have no guidance on process, who’s involved, how long it will take, whether any decisions will come out of it, nor what actions will flow from any decisions that are made.

As a best guess – and it is a guess – Burnham will do some kind of high profile speech to start a form of public consultation/debate, presumably with a nominal end-point that will get captured in a reflection document. That document either gets debated in Parliament as the basis from some new mandate to negotiate or – more likely – becomes the basis of a new Labour party manifesto commitment for the next general election.

Given that Burnham was repeatedly pushing back not only on indicating a preference option but also on going across existing red lines, it’s hard to see him trying for anything more than this, certainly within this Parliament.

None of this is intrinsically wrong, but with only just over a month until the summit the absence of any articulated plan, especially one where “[a]t every stage, the British public will be the boss”, seems to confirm the extent to which this whole project was sprung on government by Burnham, leaving it running to catch up. That in turn points to a more extended process, to set up lines for the next Parliament, rather than any hurried dash to set new policy.

From a European perspective that might be the better way of doing things too. Given understandable concerns about whether this is simply another swing of the Brexit pendulum, the effort to seek out more consensual and non-partisan policy positions might better enable the exploratory talks that this development seems likely to produce. Of course, should there be a Conservative/Reform-led government, the limits to that will be all too obvious.

In the meantime, it is useful to keep watching how the plans develop and who gets to set those decisions, especially if there is a genuine commitment to popular involvement.

PDF: https://bit.ly/UshGraphic152

The post A dialogue on Europe, but with whom? appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Knowledge Politics and Policies Standing Group at the 2026 ECPR General Conference in Krakow

The 2026 edition of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) General Conference took place at Jagiellonian University in Krakow (Poland), 8-11 September. Over four conference days more than 2000 participants presented in over 500 panels discussing some of the most important topics of our times including democratic backsliding and resilience, radicalisation, climate change, and technological transformation. 

This is a special year for our ECPR Standing Group Knowledge Politics and Policies, as we celebrate the 10th anniversary of our Standing Group and the 15th time of organizing our section at the ECPR General Conference. Our Standing Group (initially under the name ‘Politics of Higher Education, Research and Innovation’) was established in 2016 following earlier successful sections at the ECPR General Conference and the previous UACES collaborative research network ‘European Research Area’ (2013-2016). Our section and Standing Group has evolved into an active research network with currently more than 200 members having initiated and supported a range of collaborations leading to joint projects, special issues, and edited volumes.

This year our section had 10 excellent panels on topics such as politics and policies of Artificial Intelligence, academic freedom, science diplomacy, research security and more. To learn more about the questions discussed, please see below panel summaries prepared by the panel chairs. 

Artificial Intelligence

Inga Ulnicane

The panel on politics and policies of Artificial intelligence has become a traditional element of our section, taking place the 7th year in a row. If in 2020 our first panel on this topic seemed to be the only one in the General Conference dedicated to AI, then over the years the number of  panels discussing AI across various sections has grown considerably. It is good to see that our AI panel keeps attracting a lot of interest and continues to be a place where field shaping publications and next steps are discussed. This year again speakers included authors of some of the most cited publications on AI governance and policy. 

Based on her recent World Bank working paper, Roxana Radu discussed the global landscape of national AI strategies. Tero Erkkilä presented his joint work with Konstantinos Kostas comparing various global governance indices on AI readiness. Inga Ulnicane talked about her research on limitations and alternatives to offering AI as a quick technological fix to complex societal challenges. Meng-Hsuan Chou provided findings from her study on how platform workers are portrayed on legacy and social media in Singapore. Finally, Susan Robertson’s talk was based on her recent article co-authored with Michele Martini on the use of AI in education. 

The panel was followed by an informal meet-up of AI politics researchers bringing together participants from the ECPR General Conference with attendees of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) conference that took place at the same time just across the road. Enthusiastic response and interest to the informal meet-up invitation exceeded expectations and led to vibrant interdisciplinary conversations. The meet-up confirmed high demand for more activities of high-quality research focusing on AI politics . If you are interested in upcoming activities, please get in touch!

Knowledge, Politics and the Changing Academic Profession

Panel chairs and presenters

What happens to the academic profession when both its mission to contribute to the public good and its authority over the production of knowledge are increasingly contested? This was the question at the heart of the panel Changing Profession, Changing Times. Chaired by Meng-Hsuan Chou (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore) and Eva Hartmann (University of Cambridge, UK), the panel zoomed in on four areas to examine this question, with contributions from Yiran Zhou (University of St Andrews), Premysl Rosulek (University of West Bohemia), Christopher Pokarier (Waseda University), and Eva Hartmann. The four contributions demonstrate that the challenges facing the academic profession cannot be reduced to questions of working conditions or institutional management. They concern the societal role of academia itself. 

The increasing securitisation of research raises questions about academic autonomy and the purposes of science. Using Australia mainly as a case study, Christopher Pokarier explores how nationalist pressures challenge the cosmopolitan orientation of higher education. The rise of “pseudoscience” – knowledge presented as scientific despite lacking a scientific foundation – adds a new dimension to the politicisation of academic knowledge, further pressuring the authority of scientific expertise, as Premysl Rosulek pointed out for the Czech Republic. In addition, the acceleration of academic work underpinned by a publish-or-perish culture raises questions about the conditions necessary for producing reliable and meaningful knowledge, as Yiran Zhou demonstrated in her study of Chinese academics. Reflecting on these developments therefore means asking not only how universities are changing, but also what kind of profession academia is becoming—and what role it can play in increasingly polarised societies.

Data and International Politics

The panel on data and knowledge interdependencies in international relations featured four presentations. Ivan Josipovic started his talk with a vignette around a German platform that traces knifing incidents in Germany, which, he argued, was difficult to comprehend using established conceptions of data activism. He proposed a more differentiated typology of civic data activism in migration governance along two dimensions: degree of epistemic alignment with state institutions and degree of centralized control over data infrastructures. Martin Albrecht Haenig presented a mixed methods research proposal on the landscape of European think tanks and their knowledge production about China. His research features a large-scale analysis of discourses derived from policy documents as well as process tracing to establish an understanding of how discourses translate into political decision-making. 

Yamini Yogya presented research on the circulation and mediation of knowledge in the context of the Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Yamini showed structurally divergent national knowledge flow networks and discussed how such structures affect the implementation of effectiveness of such science-policy-initiatives. Paul Dunshirn presented an interdisciplinary research paper on data interdependencies in global biodiversity monitoring, for which he systematically extracted data sources used in biodiversity research using a machine learning approach. His findings indicate strong global dependencies on publicly-funded U.S. American data sources, highlighting the vulnerability of biodiversity monitoring to ongoing funding cuts. Overall the panel highlighted emerging political questions affecting global flows of knowledge and data across policy contexts and different methods for capturing the interdependent relationships between involved actors.  It provided a vantage point for further research on both the factors shaping such interdependencies and the effects they have on political decision-making and policy.    

Knowledge, Power, and Citizenship

The panel Epistemic Governance in Higher Education: Knowledge, Power, and Citizenship, chaired by Hila Zahavi, brought together three papers exploring how institutions shape knowledge, education, and their political and administrative consequences. Yuan Zhou presented joint work with Duancheng Yang on how China’s National Social Science Fund reshapes political science through research funding and disciplinary priorities. Tao Zou presented joint research with Tatiana Fumasoli examining the unequal effects of Erasmus Without Paper digital infrastructure across European higher education institutions. Finally, Martin Dybdahl examined the political returns to higher education in Germany and the UK, distinguishing the effects of university education from selection into higher education.

European Higher Education Governance

The panel European Higher Education Governance in Practice and Context, chaired by Lise Moawad (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), explored the practical dynamics of European higher education governance through a variety of case studies, revealing how the deployment of academic infrastructures (university alliances, doctoral reforms, quality standards, and scholarly communities) produce differing effects depending on national and disciplinary contexts. The presentations highlighted the tensions between European coordination, local adaptations and structural inequalities, and questioned the validity of certain commonly held notions in higher education studies.

David Joshua Schröder (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) began by outlining the different modes of engagement found in publicly funded university alliances, and the relationships these maintain with their member universities and external stakeholders, against the backdrop of the question of agency. Next, Jacek Lewicki (SGH Warsaw School of Economics) presented a pilot study on the implementation of a political programme for developing doctoral studies in Poland. He focused in particular on the 2018 shift in the structuration of doctoral education and what this entailed in terms of quality assurance.

Teresa Teixeira Lopo (Universidade Lusófona), for her part, examined the standardised roll-out of the Bologna Process from a critical perspective, using a case study of Paris-Saclay. She explored the various meanings of ‘pedagogical innovation’, a term that is often positively connoted and value-laden. Finally, Stanisław Krawczyk (University of Wrocław), Tessa DeLaquil (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) and Rasmus Harsbo (Adam Mickiewicz University) examined what the regionalisation of scholarly communication might reveal. To do so, they compared Polish history, where regionalisation is experienced as a constraint, and Danish game studies, where regionalisation is naturalised.

Governing Grand Challenges Through Transnational Strategic Partnerships 

Agata Lambrechts

The Panel on Governing Grand Challenges Through Transnational Strategic Partnerships chaired by Agata Lambrechts and Alina Felder-Stindt, focused on the emergence of these partnerships as flagship instruments in European and global governance. Setting the macro-level context, Agata Lambrechts examined how grand societal challenges themselves function as distinct ‘governance means’ in European policymaking within the education and training field. Through an analysis of the European Universities initiative and Centres of Vocational Excellence, her work demonstrated how challenges orient collective action, mobilise diverse stakeholders, and enable EU steering toward broader societal goals beyond mere economic competitiveness. Complementing this, Alina Jasmin Felder-Stindt introduced a joint conceptual framework with Linda Wanklin to systematically categorise transnational skills initiatives. By mapping configurations like cross-border education clusters and higher education alliances, she illustrated the diverse governance logics at play.

Moving from macro-policy to institutional realities, the panel also looked into the organisational design and everyday tensions of implementing these partnerships. Kim Waechtler addressed the structural friction within European Universities initiative alliances, introducing the concepts of Temporary and Permanent Meta-Organisations to capture how institutions navigate the clash between long-term strategic ambitions and strict, project-based deadlines. Her analysis suggested that these alliances actively sustain this temporal tension, resulting in a distinctive hybrid governance model. Building on this institutional focus, Lukas Fuchs explored how universities use these novel transnational channels to renegotiate their core purpose. He argued that as external pressures mount to address practical societal needs, alliances serve as crucial networks for moral reflexivity, allowing institutions to self-confidently re-imagine their material relationship with society beyond traditional appeals to academic freedom.

Governing the Politics of Research and Knowledge Security

Research and knowledge security have become prominent concerns for governments, funders and universities. Decisions about international partnerships, access to data, researcher mobility and emerging technologies are increasingly framed in terms of risk and strategic competition. Yet the meanings of research and knowledge security remain contested, as do their implications for academic openness and cooperation. This panel examined how these concepts are constructed, translated into policy and put into practice across different institutional and regional settings.

Chaired by Cristina Pinna (University of Groningen), Governing the Politics of Research and Knowledge Security: Rethinking Knowledge, Power, and Global Academic Cooperation brought together five papers. Gabriele Manca examined how references to China shape definitions of risk and justifications for research security measures in European academic and policy debates. Cristina Pinna and Annina Lattu compared how the EU and China govern open science alongside research security, identifying different approaches to openness and protection and their implications for EU–China academic cooperation.

Moving from policy debates to institutional responses, Mitchell Young, Zuzana Krulichová and Tomas Nigrin compared the Czech Republic and the Netherlands. They examined how relationships between states and universities shape responses to higher education interference. Monika Szkarłat studied the securitization of scientific cooperation in the European Arctic, focusing on Svalbard and the roles of states, EU institutions and scientific organisations amid geopolitical tensions.

Building on her experience in France, Valérie Zwilling shared a practical perspective on the shift from openness towards greater awareness of security concerns. Her paper brought the panel back to the practical challenge researchers face in sustaining collaboration while recognising the vulnerabilities that openness can create. Together, the papers showed how research security is defined and put into practice across different contexts. They raised questions about how institutions can address security concerns while maintaining the conditions for international scientific cooperation.

Academic Freedom

Krakow marks the second time for a panel on academic freedom at the Knowledge Politics and Policies section, coinciding with a still growing scholarly and policy interest in the theme. Anna Gall presented a paper titled “Unpacking Performances of Science Politicisation” where she explored the process through which science becomes politicized as the “rightful place” for science is being negotiated.  Drawing on perspectives from STS and political science, the paper built on cases from sustainability science and security-related research as vignettes. Mari Elken and Peter Maassen presented the paper titled “Academic Freedom and Political Polarization in Europe”. Exploring particularly the role of illiberal regimes, the paper analysed the different versions of the illiberal playbook in Hungary, Italy and Poland, to explore the various ways in which such regimes have tried to take control over higher education, comparing this to experiences in countries where such regimes have not obtained a strong position. The presentations were followed by a rich discussion on the issue of academic freedom and how securitization of science, increased political polarization and politization of science shape the conditions for research in Europe.   

Science Diplomacy

The panel Science Diplomacy’s Competitive Orientation included three contributions and was chaired by Mitchell Young of Charles University. The panel was influenced by the recent turn towards research security, which has become a key pillar in science diplomacy. Two of the papers related to this. Rachel Fishberg from Aarhus University presented her co-authored paper “Critical research as classificatory work from within”, which examined how the category of “critical research,” as it appears in policy discussions around critical materials and technologies, is translated from EU and state policy levels into institutional research governance. 

Adam McCarthy from University of Manchester presented a comparative study, titled “Science Diplomacy and the Making of AI Governance: A Comparative Study of UNESCO’s Ethics of AI and the EU AI Act View Paper Details”. As the lead author of a team working on these topics, he provided insights into this broad ranging examination of two different AI governance processes, comparing four aspects: definitional work, expertise legitimisation, authority building, and governance tools. Finally, Wojciech Szczerbowicz from University of Wrocław presented “Small states, knowledge hubs and the Arctic: science diplomacy in the foreign policy of the Nordic states” which was drawn from parts of the newly published book Science Diplomacy and Foreign Policy in Northern Europe (Szkarłat et al, 2026). He talked about the intersection of foreign policy and science diplomacy, which were addressed in tandem in each country case studied in the book. 

European University Alliances

Panel chairs and speakers

The panel The External Dimension of European University Alliances: Universities as Transnational Actors, co-chaired by Marina Cino Pagliarello and Andrew Gunn, examined how European University Alliances are increasingly moving beyond their original role in internal European integration and developing a more visible external dimension. Bringing together work on academic diplomacy, expert knowledge, policy transfer and institutional change, the panel explored how universities and alliances operate across the boundaries of higher education, transnational governance and European external action. Contributions included research on the European Commission’s role and influence in Indonesian higher education, the policy effects of the European Universities Initiative in Serbia, and European University Alliances as infrastructures of higher education diplomacy, including the case of CIVICA for Ukraine as well as examples of alliance engagement in Africa and Asia through academic partnerships, capacity-building and wider transnational cooperation. 

A central theme emerging from the discussion was the need to look beyond conventional accounts of EU influence based solely on normative power and to consider more closely the role of knowledge power: the capacity to shape institutional practices, policy agendas and transnational relationships through expertise, research, education and sustained cooperation. At the same time, the panel stressed that universities and alliances should not be treated as formal foreign-policy actors. Their significance lies precisely in the hybrid space they occupy, where institutional autonomy, national priorities, EU-level strategies and local adaptation intersect. The discussion therefore highlighted both the growing diplomatic relevance of higher education cooperation and the importance of examining how knowledge travels, is translated and becomes influence beyond the EU. 

Standing Group Business Meeting

At our Standing Group Business meeting, we discussed our recent successes and future plans. Former include an international workshop on AI politics research that took place at the ECPR Harbour House earlier this year and was supported by the ECPR Research Development Grant awarded to our Standing group. As in every Business meeting, we celebrated our most recent winner of the excellent paper award from an emerging scholar, Synne Lysberg from University of Bergen (Norway). We also took our traditional group photo that together with similar photos from previous years allows us to trace continuities and changes in our Standing Group and section. Our future plans include preparing the section for the next ECPR General Conference that will take place at the Pompea Fabra University in Barcelona, 7-10 September 2027. If the topics discussed in our section are of interest to you, watch out for the next call for applications for our excellent paper award and join us for our future activities!

The post ECPR Knowledge Politics and Policies 2026 appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

The session brought together 12 experts with experience in areas including academic publishing, leadership, diversity and inclusion, and different early career researcher profiles and pathways. Rather than following a traditional panel format, the activity was organised around small rotating groups. Participants moved between the different experts throughout the session, allowing them to engage with a range of perspectives and have more focused conversations in a smaller setting.

The four areas were chosen by asking a fairly simple question: what do Early Career Researchers need to know to navigate academia today? Leadership in Academia focused on the different forms leadership can take at an early career stage: from organising projects and events to taking on responsibilities within your university department, and ultimately contributing to the wider academic community. Career Development focused on the uncertain, and often difficult, transition that comes after the PhD stage. We brought together different experiences and pathways from people working both within and beyond academia, to show that there is no single route forward and that life after the PhD does not have to follow the cookie-cutter transition straight into academia. Publishing gave participants the opportunity to have one-to-one time with our editors and look behind the curtain of a process that can sometimes feel opaque. We gave them space to talk openly about ideas, peer review, rejections, and finding a journal where their work might feel right at home. Equality, Diversity, Inclusion & Community focused on the environments in which academic careers actually unfold, and on what it means to build spaces where people feel welcomed, supported, and able to participate fully in academic life.

This format encouraged participants to take an active role in shaping the discussions. They were able to ask questions about the experts’ professional trajectories, experiences, and career decisions, while also discussing some of the challenges and opportunities associated with developing a career in and beyond academia. The conversations provided practical insights into different career paths, as well as an opportunity for participants to learn from experiences that may not always be visible through more formal conferences or training sessions.

An important outcome of the activity was the opportunity for participants to expand their professional networks. The small-group format made it easier to establish direct contacts with experts and with other participants attending the session. Beyond exchanging advice and experiences, the activity therefore helped create connections that participants could potentially continue developing during the UACES Annual Conference and thereafter. The diversity of the experts’ backgrounds, who hailed from institutions across Europe, also meant that participants were exposed to different approaches to research careers, leadership, publishing, and creating more inclusive academic environments.

Feedback from participants was very positive. The informal nature of the activity was particularly valuable in creating an open atmosphere in which participants felt comfortable asking questions and discussing their own experiences and concerns. The experts also contributed to this atmosphere through their willingness to share personal experiences and engage openly with participants.

The setting contributed significantly to the success of the session. As the conversations developed, most of the groups moved to the courtyard of the Hollar Building at Charles University. This provided a relaxed and pleasant environment for continued discussion and networking, and reinforced the informal character of the activity. The courtyard ultimately became a natural space for participants and experts to continue their conversations beyond the initial structure of the rotations. For us, this was probably the best sign that our format had worked: once the structure and the rigid format of the rotations had faded into the background, people simply kept the conversations going. What started as a planned, and very structured, networking activity gradually evolved into something more natural, with conversations going beyond not only the allotted time, but also the event itself, continuing throughout the Annual Conference and possibly even beyond that.

Overall, the session achieved its main objectives of facilitating peer learning, professional exchange and networking. By combining structured rotations with informal conversation, it created space for participants to gain practical insights, make new contacts, and reflect on their own potential career paths. The positive feedback and continued conversations in the courtyard demonstrated the value of creating informal, accessible spaces for connection within the wider UACES Doctoral Training Academy. We would also like to extend our sincere thanks to all the experts who participated in the session and generously shared their time, experiences, and insights with our participants. Their openness and willingness to engage in conversation were an essential part of what made the session so valuable and helped create the welcoming and informal atmosphere that allowed the discussions to continue well beyond the planned format. 

The post From Structured Networking to Meaningful Conversations appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Either they’ve kept quiet on the matter or they’ve offered much talk. Probably only the LibDems of the national parties have both adopted a new policy objective and talked explicitly about how it fits with their wider plans. Sadly for them, that got rather overtaken by Burnham’s commitment to look at the ‘different options‘, which everyone seems to be taking as a pathway to a re-accession commitment in the next manifesto.

While Burnham’s move is the big one from the season, it shouldn’t obscure the other developments we’ve seen.

ECHR withdrawal has become a mundane part of both Reform and Conservative policy, grounded solely within the frame of controlling borders and immigration. Neither party seemed to make much of the effects of withdrawal generally, let alone its impact on UK-EU relations. As a reminder, the Trade & Cooperation Agreement provides for extensive retaliatory measures and suspensions of provisions should one party leave the Convention; a provision including in large part for just this kind of scenario.

This incidental collapsing of much of the architecture of relations is part of a wider piece by these parties to move beyond Brexit, which they now singularly fail to defend as a success. Indeed, it was telling that Kemi Badenoch’s only mention of Europe in her speech yesterday was to argue that re-opening things was a waste of time:

“Can you imagine having to go through that again? So much time lost. Arguing with ourselves, arguing with the EU, going round and round in circles, businesses not knowing whether they should invest. He [Burnham] wants to do it all again. I think that is a terrible idea.”

The absence of substantive thoughts on either process or direction of policy should Burnham actually get moving on all this does not suggest that the Conservatives will find it as easy as they might have thought beforehand.

As a final observation, the absence of anyone arguing that the status quo is working points to medium-term instability in policy. Those on the left seem to want to explore well beyond the current red lines, while the right affects to be unconcerned about causing a major argument with the EU.

What the EU itself wants does not appear to be a major concern at this stage, but the volatility that British politics continues to display is likely to reinforce more cautious voices across the Channel that worry about making any kind of deal that might come unstuck very quickly.

PDF: https://bit.ly/UshGraphic151

The post Party conferences and the EU appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Andy Burnham’s speech to the Labour party conference has fired the gun on something that felt pretty unlikely just a few weeks ago: a debate about the UK’s relationship with the EU.

Given that one month ago I myself was arguing that silence reflected a likely low profile for EU affairs for Burnham, I am forced to reconsider my position, which I happily do, even if I’m not yet fully sold on how far this new process will go.

Burnham’s speech highlighted the degree to which we shouldn’t oversell the move right now. The section on the EU was pretty short and vague in its intent, coming after a much more impassioned and developed exploration of social care; even electoral reform got more of a commitment than Europe.

But Burnham did move the dial in saying that Brexit had done “more harm than good”. With that came the implication that red lines might have to change or go, something confirmed by subsequent remarks that leave all options on the table.

As someone who’s spent years saying we need to have a public debate about what the UK’s relationship with the EU should be, including the costs and benefits of different options, it’s very odd to hear an actual Prime Minister say just that, and I guess I should feel more positive than I do.

Part of my hesitancy is that there’s a big gap between saying you want a debate to see if you can find a consensus picture and actually doing that. As we know, there has been a lot of talking about what individuals would like to see happen (as last week) which largely involves ignoring inconveniences like other people having ideas (and votes) too. Like the EU itself.

On this, Burnham has not said much, although there appears to be some recognition that there’s no point in coming up with a plan that won’t fly in Brussels or national capitals.

Moreover, there is also a tendency in British discussions to date to treat ‘Europe’ as a separate box from the rest of politics. If we might learn one thing from Brexit, then it is that involvement in the system of European integration comes with extensive and deep entanglements across the full range of economic and political life, in ways that aren’t immediately apparent. To flip that on its head, any discussion of European policy will also have to consider government policy in general, since the former can only be sustainable if it is married to the latter and the conceptualisation of the UK’s development.

Here, Burnham has been less explicit and given the relative disconnect of social care or electoral reform from the EU’s remit we might wonder if there becomes a splitting off of European work to allow the other items to press on.

And finally, despite everything we’ve experienced in the past decade, we risk forgetting that most people don’t have strongly held views on European integration or British policy. Preferences are relatively shallow and liable to shift, depending on what information you give people, a point highlighted by some polling over the summer by Britain Elects. More pertinently, the ability of campaigners to reframe options in active political debates was well demonstrated by the Leave campaign in 2016, building on long experience in articulating eurosceptic arguments; something largely absent in Remain.

This is perhaps where Burnham has been least adventurous. He seems to know his own mind on much of his politics and has previously expressed a desire for much closer EU relations, but here seems determined at this stage not to prejudge a debate where a consensus view might not quite match his.

Fair enough, but in the prospective of having to defend going across red lines, up to and including rejoining, there needs to be much more development of the rhetorical lines and arguments that will convey the logic and imperative of that change.

Go back to the conference speech and the section on the EU, which I include here:

“Later this year, there will be a UK-EU summit where one of the issues on the agenda will be how we best work together on immigration.

And beyond that we will work to secure gains for our industries most harmed by Brexit.

Conference, these are important concrete steps.

But they are not enough.

I say this to you and the country.

We will not give Britain the clear path we need into the rest of the century until we decide on a long-term relationship with what is still our largest market.

I cannot say to you truthfully that where we are is good enough.

Brexit has done more harm than good.

We need to restore a higher level of growth and prosperity for Britain.

So, I will take the opportunity around the summit to lay out to you, to lay out to the country, what I believe the different options are for Britain’s long-term relationship with our European partners.

And there are different options.

And I will see if we can find consensus around one which will give us clarity about our position, and the future of the continent we live in.”

So is this just about ‘growth and prosperity’ and ‘markets’, or does ‘the future of the continent’ cover something more? Burnham will recall that owning the rational argument in 2016 didn’t cut it against the emotional lines that Leave advanced, but we wait to see if he has his own take to bring to the matter.

So we wait for some more flesh on the bones of this moment. Potentially, it opens up a path to major movement in British policy, even if that seems likely to be limited to manifesto commitments in the general election to break current red lines. Certainly, the initial response has been at the better end of expectations, with generally positive reactions in Labour and more muted lines from Reform and the Conservatives (partly reflecting their focus on the pension triple lock, where they think there’s more traction).

The possible unblocking of the reset negotiations to allow for a late November summit is an important contextual development here, since it is a marker of how serious Burnham is about moving forward. The uncertainty here is that university fees seems to be parked in the youth mobility deal, something that had been a big EU ask: if it has been disconnected, then that suggests the EU is also up for moving things promptly and amicably. If that turns out not to be the case, then we are back to underlining the centrality of EU preferences in all this.

In the meantime, it might be helpful to start laying the groundwork for what’s coming. The following graphics offer a summary of possible models and some key points to keep in mind as the debate starts. As ever, my interest in how we might move towards a grounded and resilient relationship that works for most people means that I’ve got to step up on providing useful and impartial support, so if you have any questions or queries then do just ask.

PDF: https://bit.ly/UshGraphic150

PDF: https://bit.ly/UshGraphic149

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The paper introduced the conceptual framework of my PhD and provided an overview of my early empirical findings, arguing that current attempts to green defence in NATO and the EU appear to reproduce assumptions that limit how environmental harm can be understood and addressed, as well as what kinds of action can be considered possible.

The Empirical Puzzle: Integrating Climate Into Defence

There is growing acknowledgement that, as the rest of the world transitions to greener technologies, defence has a carbon problem. However, the environmental harms of defence – its ‘bootprint’ – have gone largely overlooked and have avoided attention in high-level discussions.

The EU has attempted to address this oversight by publishing the Climate Change and Defence Roadmap in 2020, which recommends a series of concrete short-, medium-, and long-term measures to address climate change and the nexus between defence, climate, and security, committing the Union to making military operations greener. Similarly, NATO introduced its Climate Change and Security Action Plan in 2021, which aims to advance the Alliance’s climate agenda around awareness, adaptation, mitigation, and outreach.

These efforts signal a shift toward a more environmentally conscious policy approach and demonstrate a policy-level recognition that defence contributes to environmental harm. However, critics have labelled the integration of climate change into defence as greenwashing, with the defence sector often portraying itself as green while still contributing to environmental damage. This is often linked to the military-industrial complex, the prioritisation of military effectiveness over sustainability, and the way militarised knowledge can act as a barrier to systemic change.

These criticisms also apply to the Roadmap and Action Plan. However, the processes that produced these policy frameworks remain under-researched, and these decision-making processes are where ideas and assumptions about greening defence are perpetuated and institutionalised.

Presenting My Research: Starting to Deconstruct the Roadmap and Action Plan

To examine approaches to policymaking and the emergence of the Roadmap and Action Plan, I analyse three dimensions of the policymaking processes developed from my early empirical research and conceptual framework. I presented these three dimensions at the conference to demonstrate how they can be applied to the Roadmap and Action Plan:

1. Plurality and perspectivity:

To unpack who was involved in developing the Action Plan and Roadmap and assess whether established or dominant understandings of green defence took precedence.

2. Assumptions about predictability and linearity:

To question linear, rationalist approaches that assume political problems, in this case environmental ones, can be known, modelled and managed predictably.

3. The humans-nature relationship:

To analyse whether defence doctrines value ecosystems only insofar as they serve military and operational efficiency.

Presenting this research was a great experience, and I received insightful comments and feedback that will be valuable as I move into the next stage of the research and my PhD.

Overall: A Fantastic Week

The Annual Conference was a wonderful three days of thoughtful academic exchange, building new connections in European studies and, as a PhD researcher, a key opportunity to develop skills important for career development.

In addition to presenting my research, I attended the UACES Graduate Forum Doctoral Training Academy (DTA). The DTA was organised around topics tailored towards PhD researchers and early careers, such as publishing, EDI, leadership in academia, and career development. This was a great experience, where I had the opportunity to engage with experienced academics, meet other PhD researchers, and (most importantly) make new friends! The Graduate Forum also organised evening social events, which encouraged socialising, relaxing after the conference, and exploring Prague.

Overall, I had a fantastic week, and I’m very much looking forward to hopefully attending the UACES Annual Conference again in future!

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This series was made possible by the UACES Microgrant Initiative. You can learn more about the Microgrants here: https://www.uaces.org/funding

I arrived at UACES 2026 after a year of developing new research ideas, applying for postdocs, and generally trying to work out what comes next after the PhD. Wearing several hats at the conference, as a presenter, organiser and convenor, made the experience especially immersive: somehow chaotic, but wonderful. It was a great experience that felt deeply meaningful on so many levels.

This year also marked a big first: we decided to hold our Doctoral Training Academy, an event offering training opportunities for early-career researchers, right before the Annual Conference welcome drinks on Sunday afternoon. With this event, we wanted to give participants the chance to interact with experienced professionals, learn more about publishing, and ask the questions they might not always feel comfortable asking elsewhere. Most importantly, we wanted to foster a sense of community among Graduate Forum members and help them meet and get to know each other before the Annual Conference.

When we started planning our Doctoral Training Academy, we wanted to focus on some of the hardest parts of the academic experience: publishing and networking. Through UACES’s existing network, we brought together a panel representing different sides of academic publishing across European Studies: JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, Contemporary European Politics (CEP), and the Contemporary European Studies book series. Our session started with the question, “What does it take to turn an idea into a publication?” We asked all our editors, and they said there is no single answer. It really depends on a lot of factors: timeliness, coherence, good and (mostly) bad reviewers, and learning that Marketing Studies is not the same as Market Studies. A huge thank you goes to Gabriel Siles-Brügge, Monika Brusenbauch Meislová, and Christopher Huggins for their lovely presentations and for giving us their time.

The second part of the afternoon was dedicated to our Meet the Experts session, where we tried to (and hopefully did) make networking less intimidating and give participants a chance to connect with our UACES experts. We split our participants into small groups and sent them rotating through four conversations on Leadership in Academia, Career Development, Publishing, and Equality, Diversity, Inclusion & Community, hoping that somewhere in the organised chaos people would actually talk to each other, and somehow it worked. The conversations became more informal and flowed much better than anything we could have planned: people asked questions, shared experiences, and discussed things that people sometimes struggle to bring up in a conference room. Even though I was busy keeping time, I enjoyed watching the session turn from an activity into a conversation and seeing how a project that had, for months, been an increasingly terrifying spreadsheet of groups, rotations, and names became something really beautiful. A huge thank you goes to Toni Haastrup, Thomas Hoerber, Tomáš Weiss, Filiz Dogan, Olga Litvyak, Koen Slootmaeckers, Roberta Guerrina, and William T. Daniel.

The DTA was only one of the many events we planned for the Annual Conference, and I often forget that I started planning it months ago as a co-convenor for “Sectoral challenges for the implementation of the green agenda in Europe,” along with Rosa Fernandez Martin and Blanca Marabini San Martín. Being a convenor is an understated role, mostly because it happens behind the scenes, but it is one of the most crucial roles in shaping the conference programme. This year, we saw a wide variety of topics on the green agenda, ranging from the more political aspects to geopolitics and the implications of the European Green Deal beyond EU borders, including questions of securitisation.

Working on the securitisation of green tech myself, I was particularly interested in learning more about how sustainability, resilience, and security intersect beyond the trade and technology dimension. Much of my recent work has focused on resource dependencies through supply chains and how these can become vulnerabilities. Key supply chains linked to the EU’s twin green and digital transition are increasingly showing how the EU’s industrial base is becoming securitised. In areas such as semiconductors, AI, critical technologies, and green supply chains, the securitisation shift is becoming increasingly visible in the language of technological sovereignty, strategic autonomy, and economic security.

This was one of the threads of one of the papers I brought to Prague, “Trade as Crisis Governance: Legal Responses to Strategic Supply Chain Dependencies in the EU”, which I presented in the Trade Policy track. In this paper, I am examining the international dimension of the EU’s response to dependencies through strategic partnerships. The semiconductor sector is probably the clearest example of this securitisation shift. The EU’s attempts to strengthen its own technological capacity are happening alongside deeper cooperation with actors such as Taiwan, showing that resilience does not necessarily mean less interdependence, but often a more selective and politically charged form of it.

What I found really interesting was that both the Green Agenda panels and the Trade Policy panels were sometimes looking at versions of the same issues from different starting points. The securitisation of the EU’s industrial policy is turning sector-specific questions into matters of broader resilience through diversified international partnerships, strategic autonomy, and concerns about the future of European economic governance. This is another of the many things I value about UACES: it made me think less in terms of separate tracks or different policy ‘boxes’ and more about a broader shift in how the EU is governing interdependence.

European Studies cannot be reduced to a checklist of separate approaches; instead, it is made up of the ways trade, sustainability, law, policy, security, and social policy constantly intersect. These different perspectives constitute a community, and together they shape the broader picture of what European Studies is. In a way, our maps at the Graduate Forum booth became a literal representation of this idea when we put up maps of Europe and the world and asked people to stamp where they came from. Over the course of the conference, the maps slowly filled up: people came from different countries, institutions, disciplines, career stages and research areas, but for a few days all of those different points became part of the same picture. It was slightly chaotic, increasingly imprecise, and somehow a very fitting picture of UACES itself.

My presence at the Annual Conference was also made possible by a UACES Microgrant, which was particularly important for me this year, as I do not currently have a full-time position with access to conference funding. After a year spent trying to work out what comes next after the PhD, Prague did not give me one neat answer, but it gave me new ideas, new people to talk to, and a much stronger sense of belonging to a wider European Studies community. Maybe that is also what the increasingly chaotic maps at our Graduate Forum booth came to represent: lots of different people, disciplines and paths, all leaving their mark on the same space.

This is only the first post in our Annual Conference series. Next, we are going to talk a little more about networking, what makes it difficult, and what we learned from trying to make it slightly less terrifying at the DTA. Stay tuned!

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In my research, I have been interested in rethinking democratisation as an ongoing process of political subjectification that concerns the ways in which democratic principles, such as equality, freedom and resistance to oppression, are reimagined and sought to be realised in national contexts. In one such instance, I examine the origins of the Latvian digital platform “MyVoice” in the aftermath of post-recession protests in the country that was among the hardest-hit places in the 2009 economic crisis. The platform was created by a small grassroots group in 2011 that used an existing legal provision that allowed for citizen-submitted legislative initiatives. If the required 10,000 signatures were not so easy to collect on paper, on the internet it proved to be a much easier – and highly popular – exercise of direct citizens’ voice.  The platform, operated by a non-governmental organisation and supported by microdonations of its users, has since become a major site of political participation with a significant impact: since the platform’s inception, 118 laws in Latvia have been changed because of citizens’ initiatives.

“MyVoice” illustrates that democratic initiative is not solely situated with formal political institutions or a pre-determined set of civil society and third sector organisations. It can be born anywhere and anyplace, prefiguring new capacities for existing institutions and practices. In this process, democratic innovations are situated to acquire a much larger role than being just a consultative mechanism – they can also act as a space of protest, resistance and, most importantly, as a site of constructing new collective identities. This interplay between protest and inventiveness was especially pertinent to the focus of our symposium at the UACES Conference. In late autumn of 2025, reacting against the Latvian parliament’s sudden withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention – an international human rights treaty that has become a battleground of anti-gender politics – “MyVoice” became one of the main channels of conveying a wider public rejection of the decision. The petition against the withdrawal from the Convention gathered a record number of signatures (almost 70,000) in a record amount of time (over three days). The platform offered a competing site of political representation to traditional institutions, rivalling the image of society presented by the parliamentary majority. As such, it underlined the potential of democratic innovations to become spaces of resilience, which is particularly relevant in democracies under strain.

The thread of unexpected patterns of citizen self-organisation ran through other presentations at our panels. Postsocialist Europe has largely been studied through the lens of democratic backsliding, with the focus on countering democratic decline remaining on external actors such as the European Union. However, mass protests and grassroots campaigns in countries like Bulgaria, Hungary and Serbia have demonstrated that this lens on democratic defence is limited. The overall conclusion of the symposium was that it is high time to explore democratic inventiveness as a conceptual perspective to better understand response to autocratisation and backsliding. Tracing these new practices, tools and meanings of resistance and democratic reimagining shows that democratic decline does not have to be a foregone conclusion in the region itself and also beyond it.

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