5th European Neighbourhood Policy PhD Summer School: In Search of Resilience in the EU and its Neighbourhoods: Reconciling Democracy and Security?

Framed by a truly topical and contested theme of reconciling the European Union’s and its neighbours’ search for democracy and security in view of growing internal instability and external security challenges, the 2017 edition of the ENP PhD Summer School brought together both research on, and researchers from, the EU and its neighbourhoods to discuss their doctoral projects in the context of the outlined issues. The ENP PhD Summer School concentrated on analysing conceptually and empirically the dynamics between the European Union and its eastern and southern neighbourhoods, with a special focus on the nexus between democracy and security, state and societal resilience. Both democracy and security are at the core of the EU’s transformative engagement in its neighbourhoods. Since 2014, and particularly with the adoption of the revised European Neighbourhood Policy strategy in 2015, state and societal resilience have come to supplement the EU’s multifaceted engagement in neighbourhood state-building, regional economic and development-related stabilization initiatives, including the increased cooperation on internal and external security challenges. Understanding the perplexing nature of the democracy-security nexus in the emerging meta-political framework of the EU’s resilience strategy is central to the analysis of the social and political transformations in Europe and its neighbourhoods.

Programme

Topics addressed during the summer school included, among others: # Research design in the study of European integration, EU foreign policy and the ENP # Conceptual approaches in the study of the ENP # What kind of power? Role concepts, the ENP and ‘Normative Power Europe’ # External perceptions of the ENP and the EU as an international actor # Security dilemmas in the European Union’s neighbourhood # EU multi-level governance and the ENP. Institutional accounts of ENP decision-making # The ENP and democracy promotion # The politics of neighbourhood association: The case of Ukraine # The EU and state-building in the southern neighbourhood # The ENP and the Eastern Partnership – The case of South Caucasus # The role of civil societies in conflicts in the neighbourhood # The EU, the ENP and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict # State and societal resilience in the EU and its neighbourhood # Migration and displacement in the European neighbourhood.