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The European Union (EU) is often seen as a global leader in environmental causes ranging from climate change to biodiversity. However, in the case of sustainable forest management the EU has had difficulties in exercising influence over the international negotiation process despite initial enthusiasm amongst its member states. This thesis attempts to explain this paradox by examining the extent of the EU's influence and by studying how that influence is shaped by interest-based, institutional-based and ideational-based considerations. By disaggregating influence into three different components, the explanatory framework highlights the ways influence can be enabled or constrained. The explanatory framework is applied to the case of international forest negotiations between 1995 and 2007. This complicated and complex case is divided into three sub-cases to improve analytical clarity. The first sub-case concerns the effort to build a legal binding instrument on global forest management. The second sub-case focuses on the issue of certification. The third sub-case concerns the drive to create a global fund for financing sustainable forest management. Each case sheds critical light on the subtle and complex factors shaping the EU's influence on process and outcomes. Examining data from participant interviews, textual analysis, and secondary accounts, analysis shows that the EU's influence varied in different sub-issues within the negotiations and that the factors acting on the EU's influence are more subtle than previously understood. The findings deepen our understanding of the EU's role in global policymaking and offer insights into how the EU may help restart global forest negotiations.

The paper discusses the growing literature on the interrelations between neoliberal policy and rising inequalities in the European Union, and their impact to the growing social movements. The analysis shows that inequalities within the EU member states and between them are the results of the current EU policy due to fostering marketization, trade liberalization, privatization and financialization at the expense of social, economic and political rights of the majority. This trend has induced social movements to campaign and advocate for social changes. These civil society networks share same position in demanding transformation of the current 'market Europe' into 'social Europe'. Their proposals to counter economic difficulties are based on introducing transformative economies that 'works for people'. They advocate for alternative economic models, prioritizing socioeconomic justice, gender justice, tax justice, food justice and environmental justice. Thus, their position is far from populist 'radical right'. The analysis also shows that these social movement networks may constitute corrective to democracy.

Terrorism is widely regarded as a public bad vis-à-vis security - a public good - affecting the subjective well-being of citizens. As studies have shown, citizens' risk-perceptions and risk-assessment are affected by large scale terrorist acts. Reported evidence shows that individuals are often willing to trade-off civil liberties for enhanced security particularly as a post-terrorist attack reaction as well as adopting more conservative views. Within this strand of the literature, this paper examines whether terrorism and in particular mass-casualty terrorist attacks affect citizens' political selfplacement on the left-right scale of the political spectrum. To this effect the Eurobarometer Surveys for twelve European Union countries are utilised and Ordered Probit models are employed for the period 1985-2010 with over 230 thousand observations used in the estimations. On balance, the findings reported herein seem to be pointing to a shift in respondents' self-positioning towards the right of the political spectrum.

This paper investigates economic convergence in real income per capita between 27 European Union countries. We employ a non-linear latent factor framework to study transitional behavior among economies between 1970 and 2010. Our results offer important insights on the economic catch-up exhibited by the new EU members in light of the institutional changes and macroeconomic adjustment processes undertaken over the last 40 years. Our main findings suggest no overall real income per capita convergence in the EU, however, we identify subgroups that converge to different steady states using an iterative testing procedure. Regional linkages play a significant role in determining the formation of convergence clubs. The empirical evidence suggests a clear separation between the new and old EU member states in the long run.

The economic effects of the financial crisis in the eurozone have been much studied, but the impact of political and institutional changes made amidst crisis conditions have been less studied. This article examines the changes in the EU since 2008 through the lens of T.H. Marshall's concept of citizenship, gauging the effects of different changes in the EU polity on the citizenship rights of individuals. The key changes are in fiscal governance, which includes a new treaty as well as substantial legislation changing the balance of powers within and competencies of the EU institutions, the European Central Bank's role and the Troika arrangements for countries in crisis. We find that while the EU's contribution to civil citizenship in Europe is relatively intact, the development of its fiscal governance is bringing serious negative consequences for political and social citizenship in all member states. The EU is adopting policies that entrust more power to less democratically accountable institutions with the objective of fiscal rigour rather than social citizenship.

In this briefing on the InterGovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), the relationship between the EU in Africa is characterized as an inconsistent intervention policy of "gap diplomacy." The partnership between the EU & the AU is traced through the failure of the Lome Conventions to adapt to the international economic situation, the difficulty of meeting the Cotonu Agreement in Somalia & Sudan, & the lack of EU military intervention. The Western determination of Somalia as a network for terrorism is asserted to have increased regional politics on the Horn of Africa. The US suspicion of terrorist networks spread to the EU since the attacks on Madrid & London is argued to limit the EU's power to bring peace to the region as it oscillates between following international trends & defining its own agenda. J. Harwell

"The European Council: The Fascination and Frustration of Studying a Key Institution" published on by Oxford University Press.

This paper studies the impact of national fiscal rules on government size as measured by the ratio of government expenditures to gross domestic product. We develop a model of the budgetary process and show that a common pool problem may arise which can be mitigated through fiscal rules. We test the model's predictions using a novel time-series cross-section dataset of 27 European Union members for the period between 1990 and 2011. Corroborating the model, we find that fiscal rules have a negative impact on government size. Contrasting the model, their impact becomes smaller as the number of ministers increases.

This presentation was presented at the Philippine Institute of Development Studies, Manila, Philippines. ; In recent years, Europe has experienced a huge influx of "irregular" or "unlawful" immigrants, mostly from the Middle East and Africa, unprecedented in modern history. More than a million migrants crossed into Europe in 2015, entering mostly through six European Union nations - Greece, Bulgaria, Italy, Spain, Malta and Cyprus. The vast majority arrived by sea but about a third made their way over land via Turkey. There are push and pull factors causing such a large migration inflow into the EU, with the push being civil war and terror in the country of origin of the migrants and the pull factor being the a better quality of life in Europe. ; N/A

In this article, the author explores how the question of Europe has been established on the domestic scene. The article focuses on referenda on EU-related issues held in three EU member states, ranging from Ireland in 2001, to Sweden in 2003, and finally France in 2005. In all three cases, the national populations voted against the will of a majority of their representatives, and chose not to follow the defined EU agenda towards greater integration. The study includes analyses of the national news reporting in the three cases as well as responses from Brussels. The author infers that the three No-votes, in the perspective of the political elites, were interpreted as incentives to further the integration process, spelling out a message of that Europeans want Europe, even if some people (i.e. the No-voting majorities) were considered yet to learn what it means to be, act and think as Europeans in Europe. Adapted from the source document.