Latest Blog Posts

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. […]

The Check on the Check: What the Limits of Article 265 TFEU Reveal about Horizontal Accountability within the EU While all European Union (EU) institutions have, to some extent, the obligation to ensure compliance with the Treaties’ values and norms, it is the European Commission that bears responsibility for overseeing and securing compliance as the […]

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, […]

On 9 December 2022, Europe was shaken by images of cash-filled suitcases and the arrests of European Parliament Vice-President Eva Kaili and former MEP Antonio Panzeri. Quickly dubbed “Qatargate,” the operation exposed a cash-for-influence scheme, in which the governments of Qatar and Morocco allegedly bribed European co-legislators to promote their interests within the European Parliament […]

Danagul Yembergenova In 2018, Kazakhstan granted public universities greater institutional autonomy, encouraging them to become more entrepreneurial, internationally competitive, and responsive to societal and economic needs. But autonomy reforms do more than change governance arrangements; they reshape how universities understand themselves. Rather than asking whether universities have become more autonomous, our recent research asks a […]

As a social-anthropologist researching perceptions of remoteness in rural Romania, the object of my research concerns remote villages which have been described as places where people still live like a hundred years ago. They can certainly give that impression as I have also experienced in some of my early encounters. In the following, I want […]

I presented at the Latin American Studies Association congress in Paris in May on a panel titled “Mexico in Global Competition.” LASA is the largest scholarly association in the world for the study of Latin America, with over 13,000 members and an annual congress running to several hundred sessions across disciplines working on the region. […]

Introduction “One can say without exaggeration that Europe invented a ‘convergence machine’, taking in poor countries and helping them become high-income economies.” This was the famous assessment of Indermit Gill, Chief Economist for Europe and Central Asia at the World Bank, in 2012. Now, more than a decade later, this ‘convergence machine’ has delivered meaningful […]