Dear friends and colleagues of the Kolleg-Forschergruppe,

Welcome to our summer newsletter edition!

The first half of 2017 is almost over, and we would like to keep you informed about what is happening at the KFG. As you might know, we are on sabbatical right now, but the work at the KFG is still going on with the weekly Jour Fixe meetings, workshops, and preparations for our final conference in summer 2018. More details on that will follow within the next months.

In this newsletter edition, you will find a report about the final stage of our roadshow for the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Regionalism. This time a roundtable on the topic “European Solutions for Global problems? The European Union and Comparative Regionalism” was held at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences in February.

Furthermore, KFG- associated Fellow Elin Hellquist hosted a workshop on the “Varieties of Punishment” regarding the practice of regional sanctions. You can find a review in this edition.

Our Visiting Fellow Professor Jolyon Howorth contributes to this edition an advanced overview of the EU-NATO relations and estimates their future by developing three possible scenarios.

We would also like to introduce our new associated and DFG-funded project “Global Pathways – Knowledge Diffusion in International Relations Research”, co-led by Thomas Risse and executed by Wiebke Wemheuer-Vogelaar.

Even though there are not many PhD candidates and PostDoc fellows left at the KFG, the remaining ones are very active. We congratulate Harrison Kalunga Mwilima on successfully defending his dissertation. In the “Famous Last Words” section, you will find his goodbye statement. Among other things, KFG PostDoc Stefano Palestini Céspedes published two articles online at Open Democracy and IPI Global Observatory, which we highly recommend reading. In addition, we would like to draw your attention to the forthcoming publication of Digdem Soyaltin’s dissertation “Europeanisation, Good Governance and Corruption in the Public Sector - The Case of Turkey”. Last but not least, you will find an overview of the latest working papers published in our series.

Finally, we co-organized an event about so-called “post-factual” politics and how political science should deal with this phenomenon at the annual Long Night of Sciences 2017, consisting of a minute-madness session and a panel discussion.

We wish you a relaxing summer break and look forward to another productive term in autumn 2017!

Best regards,

Tanja A. Börzel, Thomas Risse & the KFG Team

As the final event of the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Regionalism book tour, the KFG hosted the panel discussion „European Solutions for Global Problems? The European Union and Comparative Regionalism” on 15 February 2017 at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Regional organizations (ROs) are increasingly active as senders of sanctions against their own members. This practice of suspending membership rights or imposing targeted measures breaks with old legacies of non-interference in domestic affairs. Moreover, the measures of regional organizations often overlap with the foreign policy sanctions of the European Union (EU), the United Nations (UN), and individual states. The interplay between emerging regional sanctions doctrines and conventional sanctions policies provides a crucial empirical opportunity for better understanding frictions and cooperation between plural political authorities on the international scene.

When the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CSDP) was first launched at Saint Malo in December 1998, the key concept was “autonomous action”. The EU, it was asserted, would develop its own strategic vision. The European framework would allow the member states to generate serious military capacity, whereas in NATO they would simply free-ride. And CSDP would allow European forces to tackle regional security challenges the US did not wish to engage with. Alas, CSDP did none of those things.

The Global Pathways project is a collaboration of scholars from the sociology of science, bibliometrics, and International Relations (IR) based in Germany, the United States, and Japan. The aim of “Global Pathways” is to examine whether and how the social and topical structure of scientific communities affects the diffusion of knowledge within and among these communities in the field of IR.

Our KFG PostDoc Stefano Palestini Céspedes has published two articles on the ongoing political struggles in Latin America, the fight for democracy and the role of regional organizations.

Digdem Soyaltin’s dissertation "Europeanisation, Good Governance and Corruption in the Public Sector - The Case of Turkey" will be published soon. She worked as a research fellow at the KFG during her Ph.D. studies. 

We have recently published two new working papers: Working Paper No. 78 by Mor Mitrani and Working paper No. 79 by Brooke Coe.

KFG PhD Alumni Harrison Kalunga Mwilima tells us about his stay at the KFG.

On June 24^th, the Long Night of the Sciences 2017 took place in Berlin. As a co-organized event with the Center for European Integration, the Center for Transnational Relations, Foreign and Security Policy and the United Nations and European Union Documentation Center we took a closer look at the term “post-factual” politics in International Relations.