Congratulations to Anna Savolainen, Maxine Both, and Joris Frese from the Department of Political and Social Sciences, for successfully defending their doctoral theses in May 2026, after unanimous decisions from the jury.
On 4 May 2026, Anna Savolainen defended her thesis Three neoclassical realist perspectives on small states and threat: Finland and Russia's aggression against Ukraine, 2014–2022, which examines how the interpretation of threats posed by Russia evolved in Finland between the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and how this ultimately led the country to join NATO. The first chapter compares Finnish and Swedish responses to the 2022 invasion, highlighting Finland’s threat-driven pursuit of NATO membership and Sweden’s initial preference for non-alignment. The second chapter examines how the Finnish sense of possible victimisation and Russia as a threat intensified over those eight years. The third empirical chapter investigates how Finnish policymakers and the public conceptualised the Russian threat in the context of Russia’s demands that NATO refrain from enlarging. The particular contribution of the thesis is its conceptualisation of threat in International Relations in a new and original way from the perspective of the threatened actor – as a feared outcome rather than as a threatening state.
Read Savolainen’s thesis in Cadmus, the EUI's research repository.
On 11 May 2026, Maxine Both successfully defended her thesis In-between borders. Transborder space, practices, and subjectivities of solidarity and immigration detention in Canada and Italy, which rethinks how we understand borders to make better sense of immigration detention and acts of solidarity. She argues that detention centres function as a kind of in-between space, marked by a lack of control, improvisation, and temporal suspension. The thesis uncovers how those who support detained migrants work across borders to challenge and delegitimise the divisions that detention creates. She explores how encounters with these spaces and practices reshape people’s sense of self, and considers whether the ‘in-between’ is something that persists, hardens, or can be transformed. Her thesis jury was unanimous in praising the thesis for its innovative theorising grounded in extraordinarily rich and ethically aware empirics.
Read Both’s thesis in Cadmus, the EUI's research repository.
On 20 May 2026, Joris Frese defended his thesis How Political Elites Can Shape Public Opinion amid Scandals and Crises. Substantively, across three empirical papers, Joris identifies the conditions under which elite behaviour influences public attitudes through two channels: the framing content of elite messages and the reputational standing (valence) of the messengers. He shows that ‘deservingness’ frames reduced European xenophobia after the Taliban takeover, particularly when used by ideologically aligned politicians. Second, Joris finds that voters tend to align their preferences with high-valence politicians until scandals reverse this alignment, challenging classic spatial and valence theories. Finally, the thesis demonstrates that purely altruistic frames around Mediterranean shipwrecks do not shift attitudes. The thesis is an outstanding example of research in contemporary political behaviour: addressing salient theoretical issues with innovative research designs, impressive data collection and analysis, methodological sophistication, and rigour.
Read Frese’s thesis in Cadmus, the EUI' s research repository.