Panel on "The EU and the Global South: towards strategic and coherent action across policies?" EISA 9th Pan-European Conference on International Relations, Giardini Naxos (Italy) September 24-26 2015

The starting point of the panel (s) is that numerous changes in the international landscape require the EU to adapt its development and foreign affairs policies, objectives and institutions. Development – which was the EU’s ‘traditional way’ of engaging with the global south – has decreased in relative importance, forcing the EU to rethink how it engages with rapidly changing developing countries. In addition, the EU is also more active in other areas of external policy and increasingly aims to foster integrated policy responses that interlink development with broader foreign policy objectives. This changing empirical reality also compels EU scholars to rethink and adapt their research. While in recent years we have witnessed an emerging literature on the EU as a development policy actor, the scholarly community is still largely preoccupied with ‘traditional‘ developmental questions (i.e. development policy and aid effectiveness) and is mostly disconnected from the broader field of EU international affairs. The need to bridge the gap with research areas including the EU's global role, the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), the EU's Neighbourhood policy or the EU's role in climate change is pressing.

This panel thus invites scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds to (i) bring various perspectives on the EU's engagement with the developing world together and (ii) to analyse the EU's management of policy interlinkages and integrated policy responses.

The panel will be organized and chaired by Jan Orbie (Ghent University), Nadia Molenaers (University of Antwerp) and Svea Koch (German Development Institute). Please send abstracts of up to 200 words and your name, organisation and contact details to Jan.Orbie@UGent.be.





Deadline for abstract submission: 8th January 2015







EISA deadline for panel submission: 15th January 2015