Congratulations to Pablo Puertas Roig, Lorenzo Mascioli, Juliette Saertre, Lotta Lintunen, Leon Kustermann, Johannes Christiern Santos Okholm, Pavel Skigin, Ingvild Zinober, and Azucena Moran from the EUI Department of Political and Social Sciences, for receiving their doctorates in November 2025, after unanimous decisions from the jury.
On 3 November, Pablo Puertas Roig defended his thesis The EU and the Sovereign-Monetary Nexus: In Search of a European Telos. His dissertation argues that the collapse of the EU’s federalist telos has created a normative vacuum that hinders effective reform. Pablo proposes a model of social justice that balances solidarity with national responsibility as a way to address this gap. The examiners unanimously praised the thesis.
Read Puertas Roig’s thesis in Cadmus.
On 10 November, Lorenzo Mascioli defended his dissertation Governing Development: Local Networks and Public Projects in Contemporary Italy. The thesis examines the role of local governance in shaping regional development in Italy, challenging prevailing determinist approaches in economic geography and institutional analysis.
Read Mascioli’s thesis in Cadmus.
On 14 November, Juliette Saetre defended her thesis Turning the Tide: Mobility and the Upstream Diffusion of Political Attitudes and Behaviors. The dissertation investigates how human mobility unintentionally creates pathways for the diffusion of political attitudes and behaviours. A key contribution is Saetre’s solo-authored article in the American Journal of Sociology, which shows how a Chilean protest performance spread globally through diaspora networks, enabling solidarity actions abroad that then in turn exposed and inspired non-Chilean communities to adapt the protest, revealing how historical emigration creates latent transnational infrastructures for diffusion.
Read Saetre’s thesis in Cadmus.
On 21 November, Lotta Lintunen defended her thesis The Promised Land of Equal Opportunities? Spatial, Temporal, and Life Course Approaches to Educational Inequality. Her dissertation presents substantively and methodologically novel analyses of the development and geographic distribution of educational inequality in Finland. The committee highlighted the high-quality data, rigorous analysis, and strong contributions to understanding how life chances and their distribution change over time.
Read Lintunen’s thesis in Cadmus.
On 21 November, Leon Kuestermann defended his dissertation Shaping the Direction of Structural Change: How Firms and Institutions Influence the Outcomes of Economic Transformations in the 21st Century. The thesis examines how major forces of structural change—technological innovation, globalisation, and the climate transition—shape people’s life chances, while highlighting firms as often-overlooked political actors in comparative political economy.
Read Kustermann’s thesis in Cadmus.
On 24 November, Johannes Christiern Santos Okholm defended his thesis Russia’s Information War & Western Fringe Communities: How Russia Targets Fringe Communities in Western Europe and What to Do About It. His dissertation argues that Russian information warfare strategically exploits marginalised or disillusioned groups in liberal democracies, whereby subversive narratives are pushed in digital ecosystems where these groups have a presence.
Read Chistiern Santos Okholm’s thesis in Cadmus.
Also on 24 November, Pavel Skigin defended his thesis Economic Sanctions and Natural Resources: A Property-Based Theory. Pavel’s thesis argues that economic sanctions can be morally justified as tools to enforce distributive justice in the allocation of natural resources, thus bridging the gap between ideal theories of global justice and non-ideal theories of international coercion. The examiners unanimously praised the thesis.
Read Skigin’s thesis in Cadmus.
On 25 November, Ingvild Zinober defended her thesis Understanding the Green Gender Gap: How Gender Role Identity Shapes Environmental Ideology and Political Behaviour. The dissertation explores the 'green gender gap,' the persistent difference between men and women on climate issues, and argues that it is driven by gender identity rather than structural factors such as education, employment, or family experience. The first study measures the green gender gap over 20 years across more than 30 European countries, finding the gap to be remarkably stable across time, countries, and age. The second study examines early-life gender socialisation in Norwegian adolescents, showing that by age 13, boys already express lower concern for climate change than girls. The third part combines analyses of Norwegian public opinion data, cross-national data from 24 European countries, and a survey of 1,300 undergraduate students, revealing that traditional and hyper-traditional masculine identities are strongly associated with climate scepticism, while feminine identities are not. Overall, Zinober’s research provides a novel theoretical and empirical contribution to gender, environmental, and political studies.
Read Zinober’s thesis in Cadmus.
On 26 November, Azucena Morán defended her thesis Common Ground, Extracted Ground: Deliberating the Green Transition. In her dissertation, Morán critically engages with the ways in which deliberative approaches to climate justice and the green transition function at the expense of green sacrifice zones. The thesis combines empirical research on Free, Prior, and Informed Consent in Maya-Q’eqchi’ territories in Guatemala with analysis of extractivism at COP26, while conceptually exploring inclusion, deliberative autonomy, and the role of veto for communities most-affected by green extractivism. Drawing on anti- and decolonial thinkers, her work asks what climate futures might look like if deliberative democracy addressed the historical dispossessions and material injustices—the 'extracted ground'—underpinning current transitions.
Read Moran’s thesis in Cadmus.