Join Tobias Flessenkemper, Council of Europe, Head of Belgrade Office, for his talk on the uneven evolution of democracy, rule of law, and human rights in the Western Balkan region.
The talk will focus on the uneven evolution of democracy, rule of law, and human rights in the Western Balkan region. It will assess developments in view of the expectations following the end of atrocities in the 1990s, and discuss how these played out in the period after the region had been given a European perspective at the 2003 Thessalonica European Council. Particular emphasis will be placed on the role of the Council of Europe in this process.
Join this round table chaired by Professor Erik Jones, Director of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies
This invitation-only small and informal roundtable discussion will explore how ‘uncertainty’ influences the way we think and act across a range of policy domains. The roundtable will be opened by Professor Ian Scoones from the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex and Principal Investigator of the ERC Advanced Grant, PASTRES (Pastoralism, Uncertainty and Resilience: Global Lessons from the Margins, pastres.org), which is co-hosted by EUI. An open discussion structured around a series of short presentations will follow. This will explore how an ‘uncertainty lens’ may be relevant to participants’ areas of work, before a concluding session on emergent insights of wider relevance to policy and governance.
Uncertainties are everywhere. Whether it’s climate change, pandemics, financial volatility or the outbreak of war, we don’t know what the future will hold. Navigating uncertainties, where we cannot predict what will happen, is essential. But how is this done, and what can we learn about responding to, managing and living with and indeed from uncertainty from different experiences?
The concept of ‘uncertainty’ contrasts with ‘risk’, where prediction and control-oriented management are possible. While the world has always been uncertain, perhaps it is our modernist attempts to predict, manage and control that are failing, bolstered by a hubristic faith in technology combined with controlling forms of economic and political order. If uncertainty is to be navigated effectively new approaches are needed, some reclaimed and adapted from previous times or different cultures.
A focus on uncertainty – and not risk, control and fixed management plans – therefore suggests a very different way of doing things. This is as relevant to global finance and banking or pandemic response as it is to managing water or electricity systems in California or responding to drought in Kenya.
As the PASTRES programme argues, embracing uncertainty requires fundamental shifts in both policies and practices, as well as professional training and support. Importantly, we can all learn from others who live with and from uncertainty, such as pastoralists across the world. From such lived experiences, key principles emerge for navigating uncertainties in a turbulent world.
This roundtable is by invitation only.
Join Christopher Barrett for his talk on the adverse effects of natural disasters on human capital formation.
Index-based livestock insurance (IBLI) to protect pastoralists against catastrophic herd losses associated with droughts were launched in northern Kenya in 2010 and in neighboring areas of southern Ethiopia in 2012. Short-term impact evaluations based on an individual-level randomised encouragement design, with re-randomisation over a five year panel period, found clear evidence of positive impacts on milk production, income, children’s education, as well as reduced meal skipping, distress livestock sales and child labour.
This presentation studies the longer-run impacts based on revisiting the same households ten years after the baseline surveys in each community, using the original randomised design for causal identification. Consistent with the broader literature’s evidence on the adverse effects of natural disasters on human capital formation, we find that by providing insurance against drought, the main disaster risk confronting pastoralists in this region, IBLI’s primary impacts appear with respect to human capital formation, specifically children’s educational attainment. Treated households exhibit triple the rate of age-appropriate children’s educational attainment as compared to control households. The human capital effect is synergistic with induced herd composition changes, as insurance reduces households’ precautionary savings in the form of small stock (goats and sheep) that provide financial liquidity but are mainly herded by children, inducing greater investment in camels that are lumpier, and thus less liquid and riskier, investments. As in several other long-run studies of financial interventions, many of the short-run income and non-human asset effects dissipate over time.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101031139
Join Scott Titshaw in the next Global Citizenship seminar series
This project seeks to compare and classify laws determining full membership status in various states, identifying bases underlying the different regimes such as family unity, service, ethnic and racial identity, linguistic and social commonality, religious and political ideology, and duration of residence. Residence over time, for example, often leads to lawful long-term residence or citizenship, a time-makes-right concept also reflected in other areas of the law, such as prescriptive property rights, common law marriage, de facto parentage, and statutes of limitation.
This project also seeks to identify patterns in legal development over time. For instance, states with expanding territory or influence often liberalize their birthright citizenship rules to legitimize colonial or ideological claims on others. Post-colonial powers, in contrast, may restrict immigration and citizenship to focus inward, conserving privilege and the perceived common identity among citizens.
Join Luca Macedoni in this webinar that explores the impact of quality regulations on global trade.
This presentation investigates the positive international spillover effects of non-discriminatory product regulations, such as quality standards. It will incorporate regulations into a multi-country general equilibrium framework with firm heterogeneity and variable mark-ups. The research models regulations as a fixed cost that any firm selling to an economy must pay, consistent with stylised facts that are presented. It is demonstrated that, in the presence of variable mark-ups, the fixed cost generates a positive spillover effect on the rest of the world, as it induces entry of high-quality firms and it improves the terms of trade of the non-imposing countries. The author argues that the benefits of such regulations are not fully realised under non-cooperative policy settings, leading to a call for international cooperation in setting regulations. The research estimates the model and applies its gravity formulation to quantify the global welfare consequences of altering regulatory policies, the extent of the positive externalities across countries, the effects of cooperation, and the comparison with further tariff liberalisation. The analysis reveals that the entry of new high-quality firms, rather than changes in terms of trade, serves as the main quantitative driver of international spillovers.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101031139.
Any dissemination of the results of this event, reflect only the presenters’ view. The European Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.
This event is co-organised with the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies.
An annual conference, co-organised with the World Trade Institute, University of Bern, which hosts researchers and practitioners working in the area of trade and development
Global trade and investment are increasingly affected by unilateral policies motivated by both economic and non-economic objectives ranging from national and economic security to protecting workers and the environment, combatting climate change, and promoting social values. The 2023 edition of the annual World Trade Forum, a joint venture of the Global Governance Programme of the Robert Schuman Centre and the World Trade Institute, University of Bern, will focus on the use of trade policies to pursue non-economic goals and recent developments and prospects for sustaining multilateral trade cooperation in a world characterised by rising geopolitical and geo-economic rivalry and existential threats.
As in previous iterations, the conference will bring together researchers and practitioners working in the area of trade and development, with a mix of plenary panel discussions and presentations of research. Subjects that will be addressed include trade and democracy, developments in the area of international dispute settlement, addressing environmental challenges in times of geopolitical tensions, the impact of sanctions on supply chains, making trade & investment policy more inclusive, digital trade policies, data regulation and trade in services, the design and effects of sustainability standards and supply chain due diligence requirements, evidence on the effectiveness of pursuing non-economic objectives through trade agreements, and research on trade and development in Africa and Least Developed Countries.
The conference is by invitation only.
In this Global Citizenship seminar series Asheley Mantha-Hollands will explores the regulation of sex equality by international law in the nationality practice of states.
What constitutes indirect discrimination based on sex in the nationality laws of states? And what is the role of international law in constraining these practices? Liberal democracies share a commitment to the value of equality, yet they are far from achieving substantive equality between the sexes. Women do not share in the same material or participatory equality as men; they have (generally speaking) less property, lower incomes, and are more financially dependent. This article explores the regulation of sex equality by international law in the nationality practice of states. The first part traces the growth of international citizenship law as it has been intertwined with developments in women’s citizenship. The second one reflects on discrimination law and discusses which common naturalisation requirements indirectly discriminate towards women. And the third part suggests three ways international law can further mitigate cases of sex discrimination in citizenship law by i) advancing the theory of genuine link; ii) procedural changes to citizenship acquisition guided by the Committee to Eliminate all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW); and iii) institutional changes to CEDAW itself. This article contributes normative analysis to the future governance of citizenship by offering ways in which state practices can be transformed.
Scientific Organisers: Maarten Vink, Jelena Dzankic
Speaker: Asheley Mantha-Hollands
In this ‘Europe in the World’ seminar series, Nina Hall will present research on how legal form and funding models help explain the behavior of advocacy organisations.
Join this ‘Europe in the World’ seminar series with Jef Huysmans
