The EU Science Diplomacy Towards the Southern Neighbourhood: Reappraising the EU Structural Diplomacy

This is an online event.

Friday, 14 March 2025 from 14.00 until 15.30 (CET).

Throughout the post-volatile phase of 2014-2017, the EU implicit science diplomacy played a distinct role in the overall panoply of the EU’s employed instruments to enhance resilience and promote stability in the EU Southern Neighbourhood in general and Morocco and Tunisia in particular. The thesis enriches academic and policy expert thinking on the evolving understanding of science diplomacy in the EU setting by embedding it in structural diplomacy. The roles of the managers of the EU-funded projects are explored via Bourdieu-inspired contemporary practice theory. Structural diplomacy and practice theory have several commonalities with most reflections on the evolving understanding of EU science diplomacy. Thus, stronger ties to these schools of thought result in the coining of Eranetisation. The term is introduced in this thesis. Eranetisation refers to a geoeconomic and intellectual propensity among entities located within and outside of the EU to prioritise the research, technological development, and cooperation opportunities offered by the European Research Area. Ten articles forming a constituent part of this thesis offer a nuanced and multifaceted response to the research question of how research cooperation helps to achieve the overarching goals of the EU Southern Neighbourhood Policy and the European Research Area. The EU-funded projects serve as temporary institutions that translate the evidence-informed and research-intense resilience-building and tackling of socio-economic challenges into sustainable and concrete actions. In a new materialist-inspired manner, projects facilitate the deployment of technoscientific gifts in the ESN. Thereby, projects make the EU's geopolitical benevolence felt on the ground and across a wide range of beneficiaries in Europe and the Southern Neighbourhood.

Speaker:

Zane Šime is a (virtual) Visiting Research Fellow at the United Nations University Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies (UNU-CRIS) and an Affiliated Researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).

REGISTER ONLINE