Research project

EU-STRAT: ‘The EU and Eastern Partnership Countries: An Inside-Out Analysis and Strategic Assessment’

What should the EU do to support Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova? How can the European Union adapt its policies towards these countries in a very difficult and challenging geopolitical context?

Duration: 2016 - 2019
Contact: Antoaneta Dimitrova
Funding: This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 693382.
Partners: Freie Universität Berlin

EU-STRAT will address two main questions: First, why has the EU fallen short of creating peace, prosperity and stability in its Eastern neighbourhood? And secondly, what can be done to strengthen the EU’s transformative power in supporting political and economic change in the six Eastern Partnership (EaP) countries?

Adopting an inside-out perspective on the challenges of transformation the EaP countries and the EU face, EU-STRAT will:

Develop a conceptual framework for the varieties of social orders in EaP countries to explain the propensity of domestic actors to engage in change;

Investigate how bilateral, regional and global interdependencies shape the scope of action and the preferences of domestic actors in the EaP countries;

De-centre the EU by studying the role of selected member states and other external actors active in the region;

Evaluate the effectiveness of the Association Agreements and alternative EU instruments, including scientific cooperation, in supporting change in the EaP countries;

Analyse normative discourses used by the EU and Russia to enhance their influence over the shared neighbourhood;

Formulate policy recommendations to strengthen the EU’s capacity to support change in the EaP countries by advancing different scenarios for developmental pathways.