I am a Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. I have been on the faculty of the International Relations Department at the LSE since 1997. I am also Director of the European Foreign Policy Unit (within the International Relations Department). I teach courses on the EU in the World, EU Enlargement, European institutions, and genocide. I also supervise PhD students in those broad areas.
My main area of research has been the ‘international relations of the European Union’. Initially, I was principally interested in analysing and explaining why a collectivity of states, the EU, has formulated and implemented common policies towards other countries and in the international system – overcoming numerous obstacles to inter-state cooperation in order to do so. I have since been exploring what kind of policy the EU’s foreign policy system produces and related issues of consistency, coherence and effectiveness of EU foreign policy. In particular, I have examined the EU’s pursuit of so-called ‘ethical’ foreign policy goals such as promoting human rights and democracy. More recently, I have pursued my interest in ethical foreign policy, and tried to explain policy-making within European states regarding genocide. I am currently pursuing several research questions arising from my book, Genocide and the Europeans (Cambridge University Press, 2010), as well as continuing to analyse EU-UN relations.
My work on EU human rights policy and EU mass atrocity prevention was the subject of an ‘Impact Case Study’ for the UK’s 2014 Research Excellence Framework. You can learn more about the Impact Case Study here.
In 2012-13, I served as Co-Chair of the Task Force on EU Prevention of Mass Atrocities, an initiative of the Budapest Centre for the International Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities. For information on the Task Force, click here, and for information on the Centre, click here. The Task Force’s report, ‘The EU and the Prevention of Mass Atrocities: An Assessment of Strengths and Weaknesses’ was published on 4 March 2013; click here for a copy.
