International and Transnational Relations
The European Union is an international actor of growing significance. Its external policies and those of its member states have major impacts on its neighbours and beyond. In recent years, the Centre has focused on the enlargement of the EU, the Mediterranean region, and transatlantic relations.
The global trade regime, European foreign and security policies, and the EU as an international actor are issues among our interests. The Centre is currently turning its attention to the wider 'neighbourhood' policy.
ReligioWest is a four year research project funded by the European Research council and based at the European University Institute, Florence, Italy.
It aims at studying how different western states in Europe and North America are redefining their relationship to religions, under the challenge of an increasing religious activism in the public sphere, associated with new religious movements and with Islam.
Although each country starts from very different and specific contexts of the relationship between state, religion and public sphere, this move seems to lead to a more uniform perception of what the relationship should be.
More importantly, it seems to lead to the use of a common paradigm of what religion is, with the consequence of pushing religions, through a complex array of constraints (public order) and incentives (freedom of religion), to format themselves according to this common paradigm.
But, due to the de jure or de facto separation of church and state, governments have little leverage on this process. It is made under a mix of social and political pressure (banning or not the visible signs of Islam for instance) and the promotion of a concept of freedom of religion more linked to the US common law tradition than to the European tradition of dominant or even established religions with close relations (even conflicting) with the state.
The Transatlantic Programme conducts policy-oriented and basic research on the subjects of transatlantic relations and transatlantic governance. Its activities aim at improving public and scholarly understanding of transatlantic partnership, and the role of the transatlantic partners in issues of global governance.
Established in September 2000, thanks to a generous grant from BP, the programme receives generous support from the US Mission to the European Union to bring American scholars and policy-makers to the Centre.
The programme's activities include sponsoring research, hosting visiting research fellows, organizing workshops and conferences, and publishing policy-relevant results focusing on political and security relations, trade and regulatory relations and monetary and financial relations.
Since 1999 the Mediterranean Programme has been developing various activities focusing on the Euro-Mediterranean area understood as embracing also Middle-Eastern countries, Gulf States, Iran, and Iraq. It was created thanks to the generous support of private and public corporations.
The Mediterranean Programme has been conceived as a comparative and interdisciplinary programme, with a special emphasis on political economy perspective. It therefore articulates specific academic activities (summer schools, seminars, international conferences, workshops, publications) with more policy oriented projects (high profile lectures, partner of the 'Task Force Middle East' on Iraq, conferences on the geopolitics of energy).
The Annual Mediterranean Research Meeting that has taken place every year in March since 2000 is the perfect illustration of the main objectives of the Programme: helping the dialogue between academia and expertise, connecting different generations of scholars and favouring the networking, interaction and cooperation of people from Europe, North Africa and the Middle-East.
In the coming years, the Mediterranean Programme will develop new research lines centred on the EU-Mediterranean partnership and the neighbourhood policy in this region. It will also host a project on Muslim minorities in the Europe Union (EU-MUSMIN).
Focusing on key theoretical questions and policy issues, the European Security research domain deals with the different dimensions of security, their actors, and their transformations in a global context.
Created in October 2004, the RSCAS’s Security Working Group brings together faculty, fellows and doctoral researchers who are working on security issues from different disciplinary and methodological perspectives.
The Security Working Group explores issues such as the relations between security and democracy, military strategy and ways of war in Europe, the consequences of globalization on military power, counter-terrorism policies, and the securitization of migration, and provides a forum for interdisciplinary debate through the presentation and discussion of work in progress as well as brainstorming on emerging issues of common interest.
Furthermore, the Security Working Group encourages and facilitates the organization of collective research like the project 'European Worldviews: Ideas and the European Union in World Politics' which examines the strategic beliefs of key figures and office holders of the EU.