Open Research Repository

Recent Submissions

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    European Union Development Policy : Collective Action in Times of Global Transformation and Domestic Crisis
    (2017-07) Bodenstein, Thilo; Faust, Jörg; Furness, Mark; Department of Public Policy
    This special issue of Development Policy Review reflects on European Union (EU) efforts to build a more effective global development policy amid a rapidly changing international context. As 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals have made clear, global development challenges require collective action if they are to be resolved. Contributions to the special issue explore the ways in which the EU approaches collective action challenges in different development cooperation frameworks and policy settings. Themes explored include strategies for overcoming collective action problems, the impacts of these interactions on EU and member state aid policies, coherence between development and other policy fields, relations between European and other development actors, and the reception of the EU's efforts in developing countries.
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    Who Cares? European Public Opinion on Foreign Aid and Political Conditionality
    (2017-09) Bodenstein, Thilo; Faust, Jörg; Department of Public Policy
    We provide evidence on the individual and country-level determinants of citizens' support for political conditionality in foreign aid, using novel survey data for 27 European countries. Based on the welfare state literature and existing public opinion research in foreign aid, we expect citizens with more rightist political orientations as well as those who do not perceive their own state apparatus to function in a meritocratic way to be more likely to support political conditionality. Our multi-level analysis supports these hypotheses in general, but also shows that the effect of political orientations on support for political conditionality in foreign aid is limited to traditional EU donor countries, where the left/right-cleavage has been dominant in politics.
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    Is Poststructuralism a Useful IR Theory? What About Its Relationship to Historical Materialism?
    (2013) Merlingen, Michael; Department of International Relations
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    A toolkit for evaluating the design and implementation of European Union security and defence policy mandates
    (2013) Merlingen, Michael; Department of International Relations
    The paper elaborates a toolkit for the systematic assessment of CSDP operations. It is derived from international relations theories and enables analysts to go beyond existing evaluation research of the CSDP, which is largely ad hoc and idiosyncratic in character. The kit classifies operations on the basis of their mandated activities. Common Security missions perform three roles: bargaining, arguing and information brokerage. These roles can be further broken down into specific actions: deterrence, compellence, facilitation of EU conditionality, mentoring, advising, training, monitoring and mediation. Drawing on IR theories, the toolkit identifies conditions that enable the successful completion of these actions. The paper uses examples to illustrate how the toolkit can be used to evaluate to what extent the roles assigned to CSDP operations by Brussels match the scope conditions present in theatre; to what extent Brussels has equipped its operations with the required role-specific policy instruments; and to what extent mission managers (in Brussels and in theatre) are successful in organising the means they have been given to increase the likelihood of successful mandate implementation.
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    From Financial Crisis to a Crisis of Interpellation : Unpacking Ideology Production in the European Union and Clarifying How Its Failures Affect Foreign Affairs
    (2018) Merlingen, Michael; Department of International Relations
    We identify an ideology gap in the Marxist EU (European Union) literature, which we then set out to narrow by identifying and analysing core elements of the particularising EU version of the global ideology of feel-good and ethical capitalism through which the EU interpellates certain subaltern classes towards identifying with the deepening and widening of neoliberal governance. We then show, by means of discourse analysis, how ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) secure but also occasionally undermine the ideological bloc of dominant and dominated classes. We conclude by arguing that the ideological dimension of EU foreign policy is becoming increasingly important as the EU’s self-ascribed status as a uniquely normative power in world politics offers multiple opportunities for ISAs to obscure the reality of a materially increasingly polarised EU whose internal structure has acquired pronounced imperialist properties during the recent financial crisis. This does not harbour well for international order in Europe and beyond.

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