Congratulations to Haoyu Zhai and Inés Bolaños Somoano from the Department of Political and Social Sciences for receiving their doctorates in December 2023, after unanimous decisions from the jury.
Haoyu Zhai successfully defended his dissertation, Three Papers in Applied Political Methodology on 1 December 2023. The examining board comprised his supervisor, EUI Professor Miriam Golden, and his co-supervisor, EUI Professor Elias Dinas, as well as two externals. The externals were Professor Macartan Humphreys (Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung), and Professor Mark Kayser (Hertie School in Berlin). Zhai's three papers exhibit a shared commitment to understanding how best to aggregate knowledge across multiple methods and studies, and how to push forward an agenda involving meta-analyses of various types. The dissertation exemplifies how to use systematic statistical methods to clarify and analyse complex and politically-relevant data, and proposes the use of principled approaches to combine models. Zhai leaves the EUI for a post-doctoral position at New York University in Abu Dhabi.
Read Zhai's thesis in Cadmus.
Inés Bolaños-Somoano has successfully defended her dissertation, Counter-terrorism from Afar on 12 December 2023. The originality of Bolaños-Somoano's thesis is to study the issue of radicalisation from the point of view of an institutional policy of prevention set up by a political body: the European Union. She looks at the institutionalisation of governance of Prevention of radicalisation/Countering Violent extremism, at the EU level as well at the concrete mechanisms for current EU governance of P/CVE today. The axis of this policy is "securitisation", that is analysing and neutralising the potential threats that could come from Islam as a religion/ideology and from the Muslim populations. She shows how any policy of prevention is based on a premise: a definition of what is radicalisation, thus closing the doors to a variety of other analyses and interpretations. Because the EU has no way to implement directly at State level a policy of countering violent extremism, it contributes more to create or re-enforce a consensus among the member states than to forge real tools of action.
Read Bolaños-Somoano's thesis in Cadmus.