Politics & Public Policy

Only a short post this week, as I’m attending the first European conference on Learning & Teaching in Politics, IR and European Studies at the University of Maastricht (yes, there again). Obviously this week potentially represents an important moment for the EU, with its possible resolution of the Spitzenkandidat issue at Ypres. Certainly, to listen to some of the British press, the […]

In Monty Python’s Life of Brian, Reg, a character played by John Cleese, famously asks what the Romans have ever done for the people of Judaea. That no one had asked this question before may have been because Roman rule had become taken for granted. But after a moment’s reflection, his fellow freedom fighters quickly […]

William Hague and Angelina Jolie are hosting a global summit in London to put an end to sexual violence in conflict (follow #TimeToAct). In June 2013, Madrid hosted the 5th world conference on (against) death penalty. It was organised by an abolitionist group (ECPM), and sponsored by the Governments of Spain, France, Switzerland and Norway. […]

I’m just back from Montreal, where I was invited by the EU Centre of Excellence at the Université de Montréal and McGill University to participate in a roundtable on the European elections. My plan was simple: to go and talk about how well eurosceptic parties of different stripes had done, but how they were likely to be […]

  Yoav Freidman, Hannah Moscovitz and Hila Zahavi The conference “Approaching Europe: Israel and the Knowledge-Based Society”, jointly organized by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev’s Bologna Training Center (BTC) and the Israel office of the Konrad-Adenauer Foundation, sought to examine the European experience in higher education policy and reform, focusing on the European Higher Education […]

Anti-EU parties have made huge gains in the European Parliament elections 2014 and caused what the headlines are describing as an ‘earthquake’. But despite this, pro-EU parties still retain the most seats in the European Parliament, and the European Peoples Party* – strong supporters of the European Union project – is still Europe’s biggest party with […]

Yesterday morning on BBC radio 4 Prof Michael Sandel animated an episode of the Public Philosopher on the thorny issue of “Why vote?” in the context of Thursday’s local and European elections.  The episode opened with Sandel asking members of the public why they would not vote in the forthcoming election. Expecting answers based on […]

On the 9th of May 2014 I presented a Paper at the Conference on Freedom of Expression held at the University of Helsinki from 7 to 9 May 2014. Inspired by Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), I was trying to combine substantial rights and their constraints, ethics and politics, discourses […]

Martina Vukasovic It is 10 years since the largest EU enlargement wave (sometimes referred to as “EU Big Bang Expansion”) and 15 years since the formal beginning of the Bologna Process. The former Yugoslavia countries provide an interesting example of integration of the “new member states” in the Europe of Knowledge. Slovenia entered the EU […]

Tonight I’m speaking on a roundtable in Edinburgh on ‘Reporting Europe‘, where we’ll be considering how the media covers the EU and the influence of euromyths in the debate. I wrote about this last year, but it’s a good time to revisit the issue, given the quality (or perhaps ‘quality’) of the media coverage of the European […]