MSCA Full-Time Doctoral Fellowship in Comparative Politics...

Entitled ‘Impact of competing models on the EU’s political conditionality in a turbulent neighbourhood’ the individual research project of the hired PhD fellow will be in the fields of Comparative Politics and Area Studies - European Area with a specific focus on the European Neighbourhood/Eastern and Southern European neighborhoods.

This 3-year long full-time EU-funded MSCA doctoral fellowship is set up as part of the so-called GEM-DIAMOND research project which will collectively assess the EU’s capacity to act given the challenges facing Democratic Institutions, the rise of Alternative MOdels and mounting Normative Dissensus (DIAMOND).

The hired fellow will accomplish their PhD both at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB, BE) as well as at the University of Warwick (UoW, UK) as they work towards a double doctoral degree awarded by both institutions

The PhD fellow hired through the ULB will assess the effectiveness of the EU’s instruments to promote democracy within the context of the EU’s enlargement and European Neighbourhood policies. The main starting assumption of the project is that diverging political values, foreign policy approaches and alternative governance models championed by autocratic regimes around the EU affect the EU’s ability to engage with its neighbors.

Based on this assumption, this individual research project will explore how and to what extent competing power centers around the EU, which contest EU norms have constrained or altered the main tools used in the EU’s external policies in relation to its neighborhood. The neighborhood is defined broadly to include both the candidate countries and those that are part of the formal neighborhood agenda, which includes the Eastern and Southern neighborhoods. More specifically, the research objective of the PhD project will be to analyse how the growing contestation surrounding democracy, the rule of law and foreign policy norms (international law and multilateralism) affects EU’s toolbox to promote pro-democracy and/or foreign policy principles, and in particular its political conditionality. The project is expected to study the EU’s foreign policy by focusing on the impact of autocratisation processes around the EU on the EU’s instrument of conditionality vis-à-vis third states. Hence, the focus is expected to be on the authoritarian tendencies in the EU’s neighborhood and the challenges these tendencies pose not only to the EU’s norm promotion efforts, but also to its normative power claims. Therefore, the research project is expected to also address how these various forms of domestic norm contestation in the neighborhood affect the EU’s role as an international actor and its foreign policy identity. This doctoral project could employ qualitative and/or quantitative methods. Comparative research designs are encouraged to observe and assess the variation in EU’s relationship with different neighborhood regions or within the same country over time.

As part of their application, candidates will be asked to submit a personal interpretation of the research project in the form a specific project proposal of 2-3 pages, including a research question, a theoretical framework, a methodological strategy, and a justification for the suggested empirical choices.