Maastricht University, Campus Brussels
Brussels, Belgium
1-2 December 2011
The workshop aims to critically analyse the EU’s multilateral foreign policy with a specific focus on authoritarian regimes on its Southern and Eastern rim. The popular uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and Libya in early 2011 have raised serious questions about EU policy towards the region, which has accepted the regimes in the Mediterranean as strategic allies over many decades. The recent events not only highlight the need to re-examine EU policy towards authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The EU engages with authoritarian regimes in many other parts of the world and hardly any research systematically analyses EU policy towards authoritarian regimes in a comparative perspective. The workshop contributions analyse what paradigms and strategies have guided EU policies towards authoritarian regimes over the past decades, to what extent the EU has applied double standards in practice, and the factors which explain the recent failures of EU policies vis-à-vis authoritarian regimes. Workshop contributions offer historical and theoretical reflections, alongside empirical case studies analysing EU policy towards authoritarian rule in (i) the MENA region: Libya, Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt, Algeria, Syria, Jordan; (ii) Eastern Europe: Belarus, Ukraine, South Caucasus and (iii) Central Asia: Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan.
To find out more please contact: Giselle Bosse at g.bosse@maastrichtuniversity.nl
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