Science & Technology

Anne Goldmann When the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act was finally adopted in 2024, most of the public debate had already moved on from how the Act regulates to whether it should. Headlines focused on the moments when it looked as if everything might still fall apart: the dispute over facial recognition and law enforcement powers1, […]

Lise Moawad The rise of university alliances has become a defining feature of the contemporary European higher education landscape. While transnational partnerships that have emerged through programs such as the European Universities Initiative (Gunn 2020) have received much attention, local university alliances, especially those based in capital cities, remain relatively understudied. These local configurations are […]

Marija Antanavičiūte Effective ethics-policy advisory systems are increasingly important in the context of rapid technological change, declining public trust in science, and shifting geopolitical dynamics. Questions about who becomes an ethics expert and who advises governments on ethical issues, who controls the narrative on major cross-national issues such as regulation and ethics of AI and […]

Cristina Pinna Over the past decade, research security has moved from a technical concern discussed among specialists to a central issue in European research policy. What began as a debate about protecting sensitive technologies has expanded into a broader question about how knowledge should be governed in a changing geopolitical environment. Today, it shapes funding […]

Bao-Chau Pham When the European Union‘s Artificial Intelligence Act finally entered into force on 1 August 2024, it was widely described as a landmark: the world’s first comprehensive framework for regulating AI. Throughout the policy-making process from early 2018 onwards, much of the debates focused on how the Act regulates – its risk categories and […]

The 2025 edition the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) General Conference at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece, 26-29 August. These were four intense days of thousands of participants exploring most pressing political issues of our times over a range of featured roundtables and hundreds of panels. The conference section of the ECPR […]

Anna-Lena Rüland For several research fields, large-scale research infrastructures play a crucial role in advancing cutting-edge research, with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) often being referred to as a particularly successful example. Accounts of how “big science” projects like CERN get off the ground abound in the history of science as well as […]

Marina Cino Pagliarello Diplomacy is under pressure – from climate change and trade inequalities to military conflicts on multiple fronts. Russia’s war in Ukraine continues to test the continent’s democratic resolve. The crisis in the Middle East underscores the limits of formal diplomacy. Across regions, authoritarianism is on the rise, and even established democracies are […]

by Matti Ylönen (Academy of Finland Research Fellow; Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki) A few years ago, the idea of the Brussels effect took the European Union (EU) circles by storm as an exciting new framework for understanding the global exemplary impact of the EU rules. Now, it faces tumultuous waters as Donald […]

Myroslava Hladchenko Global university rankings have got prominence in recent decades. Nation-states develop evaluation policies drawing on the assessment criteria of world rankings aiming their universities to take higher positions in these rankings (Salmi & Saroyan, 2007). QS Rankings is one of them. It is a profitable business that generated €46 m in revenue in […]