It was particular joy to meet again in person at the General Conference of the European Consortium of Politics Research (ECPR) last week 22-26 August. After two years of virtual conferences due to Covid, this time the ECPR General Conference took place in the beautiful city of Innsbruck in the Austrian Alps. It brought together […]

Anna-Lena Rüland The world has seen a fair share of democratic backsliding in recent years, for example in countries like Turkey, the Philippines and Russia. Science diplomacy is often seen as a means to continue some sort of engagement with such regimes. Although it sounds great in theory, we do not yet know how exactly […]

Mitchell Young While, as the name of this blog reflects, knowledge has become a central concern in European policymaking internally, it has not made the same inroads into the EU’s external policy discourses. This neglect of knowledge in the field of international relations is not limited to the EU, but given the European policy context, […]

Inga Ulnicane ‘… Europe is a unique aspiration. […] It is an aspiration of a world full of new technologies and age-old values’, Ursula von der Leyen, then incoming President of the European Commission, wrote in her political guidelines in 2019. Since then questions of new technologies and European values have been at the forefront […]

Marina Cino Pagliarello The implementation of a common Higher Education policy has been a long-standing objective of the European Union (Corbett, 2005). The launch of the Bologna Process in 1999 with its aim of creating a European Higher Education Area (EHEA) and the establishment of the European Research Area (ERA) have been important drivers in […]

Kasja Weenink The study ‘We’re stubborn enough to create our own world’ (Weenink, Aarts, & Jacobs, 2021) addresses how directors of educational programs understand and enact higher education quality in interdependence with its environment. It reveals that the directors’ room to play out their quality views depends on their position within the academic hierarchy and […]

Martina Vukasovic In 2015 the Norwegian government launched a large-scale re-organisation in higher education. The policy solution proposed, like in many other cases, involved mergers of higher education institutions. There were several formal policy goals, such as robust academic environments, good access to education and expertise, contribution to regional development and effective use of resources. […]