Jointly Executed Research Projects

The GEM PhD School aimed to back top-doctoral research concerned with the different challenges facing the contemporary regional and global governance systems. The resulting epistemic community was understood as a bridging exercise between various Social Science disciplines. Amongst other, the program seeked to foster an innovative and mutually-beneficial dialogue between Global & EU studies The development and coherence of this vast research agenda was ensured through its three component Jointly Executed Research Projects (i.e. JERPs.): AMETRINE, CITRINE & MORGANITE.

For a more detailed description of the joint and invididual research projects, see the programme’s Research Guidebook (PDF).

AMETRINE

Headed by the Université libre de Bruxelles (BE), AMETRINE was a coordinated research initiative focused on the normative components of European and international politics. It aimed at comparatively examining European and non-European perspectives on issues of justice related to globalization and global politics.

Research Agenda

The normative component of international affairs is increasingly recognized as a key element in order to understand the international relations we live in. Since the seventies, political philosophers, political theorists, and political sociologists have forcefully claimed the necessity to take into full account the normative side of international politics. Issues of justice such as global poverty and global redistribution, minority rights and social inclusion, war and deterrence, self-determination and intervention, environmental degradation and global health, human rights and nationalism, sovereignty and supranational institutions, migration and citizenship cannot be fully analysed without considering their axiological component. The European Union is a key case study for a normative approach to international relations. From the original discussion on the civilian power of the EU, up to the most recent interpretations as normative and ethical power, the EU actorness cannot be fully grasped without a proper consideration of it as a normative endeavour.

Research Questions

International political theory is the discipline that provided the best avenue to investigate these issues and it is the discipline that was central in AMETRINE, together with IR, political sociology, and political philosophy. AMETRINE thus provided an opportunity to investigate the range of issues of international political theory and IR that are most related to the case of EU and other regional cooperation processes. Issues of civilian, normative and ethical power EU were investigated, together with the other major normative dimensions of the EU internal and external action such as EU standardization. Especially interesting was the comparative study with other regional normative endeavour which allowed for a better understanding of the European experience. Finally, normative issues in and models of global politics were also studied from a multidisciplinary perspective which include IR, political theory, and political sociology. Accordingly, research proposals from political theorists, political philosophers, sociologists, and researchers in European and International studies were welcome.

citrine

Headed by the University of Warwick, the CITRINE Joint Research Project studied the interplay of any combination of forces that come together in struggles over the scope and character of contemporary regulatory interests.

Research Agenda

The CITRINE Joint Research Project was coordinated and managed by the Department of Politics and International Studies (PAIS) at the University of Warwick.  The research specialisms of PAIS staff members and their associated existing PhD students cohere around four groupings, which taken together provide the department with its collective research culture and its specific profile of research outputs. They are International Political Economy (IPE), International Relations & Security (IRS), Comparative Politics & Democratisation (CPD), and Political Theory (PT). PAIS is also home to three specialist research centres: the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation (CSGR), the Centre for Studies in Democratisation (CSD), and the Centre for Ethics, Law and Public Affairs (CELPA). PAIS welcomed applicants to the CITRINE Joint Research Project who wished to undertake doctoral studies on topics related to any of these areas in which the department has expertise.
Regulatory interests in the European Union and beyond are constantly being redefined under the twin pressures of globalisation and multilateralism. The political economy of contemporary world order plays out against the backdrop of both a major global banking crisis, the real possibility of a fracture within the eurozone and the ever-present contestations that surround international trade politics. These are issues that have been studied in great detail and to widespread acclaim by members of our IPE Research Group. The national and international security context of contemporary world order is situated against the backdrop of a permanently changing set of assumptions as new threats come to the fore and overlay historically-rooted social and political tensions, coupled with a new wave of democratisation enacted in recent months.
These are areas in which the reputation of the department is growing rapidly thanks to the work of members of the IRS Research Group, often undertaken in conjunction with members of the CSD. Public policy decisions are likely in the near future to become increasingly prone to challenge at a variety of spatial scales, as public spending cuts take hold across Europe and beyond. Here the members of the CPD Research Group continue to be at the forefront of scholarly debates through their high profile work. Every member of the Department, at one level or another, focuses their research on the significance of regulatory interests, whether that is in terms of theorising shifting forms of legitimacy within everyday politics or through assessing the relative efficacy of policy-making conducted domestically, regionally and/or globally.

Research Questions

More than ever perhaps, the EU’s relationship with its inside and outside is open to question. Within this debate sit quite different narratives of: (i) the regulatory role that different legal jurisdictions should have over economic, security and public policy issues; (ii) how these different legal jurisdictions should constitute themselves as actors within the increasingly global domains of production, finance, trade, the environment, national security, governance, etc.; and (iii) what sorts of values, preferences and norms should be represented – and by whom – in each of these fields of public policy and many more besides. At every turn, these narratives spark alternative technical and normative arguments, with each being enveloped by potential sources of political controversy and struggle. The quality and intensity of these debates vary within and between European states, as well as between European states and a range of differently situated social forces located in the rest of the world. In some cases the use of formal political authority is seen as an interventionist threat to neoliberal growth strategies. In others this view is inverted and the use of formal political authority has merely cemented neo-liberalism and should thus be seen as a threat to social progress, cohesion and developmental growth strategies designed to exit recession. There are also contests about legitimacy and the extent to which the economic, social and security governance beyond neo-liberalism can continue to rest upon currently existing political foundations.

Morganite

Headed by the LUISS Guido Carli di Roma (IT) MORGANITE project was rooted in both International Relation Theory and European Studies as either of these fields has over the past decades been redrawn by significant conceptual debates and factual challenges. These challenges have fostered a host of innovative avenues and a dynamic interdisciplinary dialogue which have allowed for a renewed institutionalist research agenda centred on the parallel dynamics of cooperation and discord within the international and European systems.

Research Agenda

Since the early 1990’s, international institutions have undergone something of a revival illustrated both by a major proliferation of regional initiatives as well as by a growing call for re-invigorated Global Governance mechanisms. Since the end of the naughties, their multiple deficits have undeniably been laid bare by the prolonged financial, economic, and ecologic, and crisis. Such short-comings include: structural difficulties in collaboratively addressing global challenges such as Climate Changes; debilitating stalemates with regards to necessary reforms of key regional and international organizations; blinding uncertainties facing democratic transitions in the Mediterranean and elsewhere; as well as the continued management of local conflicts and human security challenges. All in all, institutional evolutions have not yet meet the changing efficiency and legitimacy challenges facing the global system in the current multipolar world.
Accordingly, in-depth exploration of multilateral and multi-layered institutional dynamics – both in light of their inherent diversities, as well as their converging elements – has become a major research agenda within the social sciences. Various approaches – be they the set of new institutionalisms, or among others constructivist, post-structuralist, cognitivist, and behaviouralist perspectives; have thus come to offer the research community a rich analytical framework wherewith to broach a broad set of multilateral dynamics, both at the regional as well as global level. Transnational networks, ideas, interest representation, changes in statehood, interregional relations, and evolving identities are all possible components of this research agenda centred on the role of regional and international institutions in global affairs.

The MORGANITE Joint Research Project strived to study the institutional implications of the emerging multileveled multilateral global system. These institutional evolutions were assessed on the basis of both historical as well as topical perspectives, without neglecting key theoretical and methodological considerations. Above all, its research agenda was articulated around the abovementioned interdisciplinary dialogue between International Relations, on the one hand; and European Integration Studies, Comparative Regionalism and Interregional Analysis, on the other. Accordingly, the MORGANITE Joint Research Project focused on the following research fields: (1) the factual and conceptual challenges which have coloured the disciplinary debates on Governance, Regulation, Institutional Cooperation, and Multilateralism, both within European Integration Studies and International Relations; (2) the institutional implications of evolving regional, interregional, and global agendas; (3) and the growing interactions and mutual learning-processes emerging between these two levels of enquiry.

Research Questions

A series of specific questions were addressed as the institutional dimension of the international system is analysed through a variety of approaches. The debates focused on the nature of the different institutional actors, processes and settlements on the regional and world stages. The theoretical issues born from the emerging tensions between the imperatives associated with national State sovereignty on the one hand; and supra- or trans-national challenges or constraints, on the other; formed a recurring leitmotiv throughout the project’s agenda.

While particular attention was paid to the significance of the institutional debate within the European Union, notably with regards to its External Action; the PhD School also focused on other institutional arrangements – at the Global and Regional level – which have come to face questions resulting from the evolving global system. MORGANITE attached particular importance to evaluating, both through comparative analysis as well as interdisciplinary dialogue, to which extent the various existing institutional arrangements can contribute to the emergence and stabilisation of a legitimate and efficient multilateral and multi-levelled Global Governance system.