Latest Blog Posts

I was fortunate to receive the UACES Microgrant, which provided additional support to attend the UACES 56th Annual Conference in Prague, hosted by Charles University. During the conference, I presented a paper titled Green Defence: Deconstructing NATO and EU Green Defence Policies in A Changing Climate, as part of the ‘Thinking about Resilience and Responsibility’ […]

Hello, this is Valeria, although most people call me Vale, and I am the UACES Graduate Forum Communications Officer. Welcome to our Graduate Forum blog series on the 2026 UACES Annual Conference. This first post is about my overall experience at the conference, but stay tuned: next, we’ll talk about publishing! This series was made […]

The UACES Annual 56th Conference, which this year took place in Prague, addressed the theme of reimagining Europe, covering a wide range of subjects from security, border and migration studies to digitalisation, the green agenda and Space policy. Notable attention was dedicated to critical and epistemologically challenging perspectives about meta-narratives of European studies, core-periphery relations […]

It’s party conference time, so everyone’s pushing their ideas into the public domain, hoping they will get picked up by the faithful (and the media) just at the point that policy might get changed. The IPPR have a useful report on the costs of not having mutual recognition of conformity assessment with the EU, highlighting […]

The European Union increasingly speaks of strategic autonomy as a central objective for navigating a world characterized by geopolitical rivalry, technological dependence, and growing uncertainty. Although the concept initially gained prominence in security and foreign policy debates, it has increasingly extended into economic, technological and digital policy. In particular, the EU has linked strategic autonomy […]

It is wonderful to be back at UACES. I first attended the conference last year, and the discussions there gave me many valuable insights for developing my research. Over the past year, I have revisited my arguments, refined my framework, and incorporated some of those insights into my analysis. Returning to UACES 2026, therefore, felt […]

Marie Francisco The recent progress of large language models, and generative artificial intelligence (AI) more generally, has been the object of many discussions that have inspired both awe and fear. One point seems to rapidly gather consensus: AI must be regulated. My PhD project (Francisco 2025) aimed to analyse the international governance of AI from […]

I’ve been spending the week at the UACES conference in Prague, talking about lots of things to do with European Studies. However, one the things that didn’t come up very much was UK-EU relations. It’s almost as if most people don’t have it on their minds. The moment it did come up was during the […]

The arrival of the seventh Prime Minister in Number 10 since the 2016 referendum is an opportunity to try once again to get to grips with British European policy. In practice, this is not a problem of wrestling Lots of Things, but instead more about trying to work out whether the absence of visible activity […]

Prolonged emergencies pose a problem for European law that becomes increasingly visible over time. A state may have compelling reasons for maintaining an emergency regime, but it does not follow that every restriction on rights introduced within that regime remains necessary in the same scope, as applied to the same persons, and under present circumstances. […]