I study how changes in the international distribution and exercise of power reshape political institutions. My work asks a question that connects international relations with comparative and European politics: how does the return of great-power competition affect the development, distribution, and durability of political authority and policy capacity in Europe?
I approach the European Union not simply as an international organization or a system of interstate cooperation, but as a developing multilevel polity whose institutional trajectory is shaped by the interaction of international pressures, domestic political conflict, and inherited institutional arrangements.
This agenda speaks to a broader problem in the study of international institutions. Such institutions are usually examined either as structures through which states manage cooperation or as constraints on state behaviour. Yet changes in the international environment can also alter the institutions themselves. External threats, coercive pressure, economic interdependence, and geopolitical rivalry generate demands for new capacities, redistribute authority between national and international institutions, and shift the boundary between domestic and international governance. My research seeks to explain when such pressures produce institutional development, what form that development takes, and when political actors instead preserve existing arrangements.
My published work has developed the components of this programme: how crises temporarily change the political conditions for empowerment in European foreign policy, and why that empowerment is often reversed; how geopolitical rivalry has transformed the logic of EU enlargement since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine; and how domestic institutional processes shape foreign and security policy, including the transparency of military assistance to Ukraine. A full list of publications is available here.
Three interconnected strands organize my medium- and long-term agenda.
EUCOERCE: External Coercion and Institutional Development
The principal project I am developing is EUCOERCE: External Coercion and European Polity-Building. It asks:
Under what conditions, and through what mechanisms, does external coercion by great powers affect the institutional development of the European Union?
Great powers routinely seek to alter the behaviour of others through economic pressure, security threats, diplomatic leverage, or the manipulation of asymmetric interdependence. Coercion is generally studied in terms of whether it changes the immediate behaviour of its target. EUCOERCE shifts attention from behavioural compliance to institutional consequences: whether and how being subjected to external coercion changes the way political authority is organized within the target.
The EU offers us an exceptional case study in this regard. Because authority is distributed across national and European institutions, governments facing external pressure must decide not only what policy response to adopt but also who should acquire the capacity and authority to act. Similar pressures can therefore produce markedly different institutional outcomes — national responses, coordination of existing instruments, new common capacities under retained national control, pooling, delegation, or a move into alternative venues such as NATO.
Rather than treating institutional development as a continuum between “more” and “less” integration, I separate two dimensions: capacity and authority. Governments can build substantial common capacities while keeping tight intergovernmental control over their use; conversely, reform can alter decision-making authority without generating new material capacity. Distinguishing the two explains why external pressure can strengthen European collective action and preserve national control at the same time.
The framework turns on three linked problems. Functional inadequacy: coercion generates pressure for change only where existing national or European arrangements cannot address the vulnerability it exposes. Political convergence: member states must converge sufficiently on both the diagnosis and the desirability of collective action, which external pressure is filtered through national threat perceptions, economic exposure, and domestic coalitions. Control: governments must decide how much control to surrender, and through which venue collective action should occur.
Empirically, the project compares episodes of coercive pressure involving the United States, China, and Russia across economic, foreign, and security policy — economic coercion and geoeconomic statecraft, including the EU’s Anti-Coercion Instrument; European responses to Russian pressure since 2014 and their acceleration after 2022; and coercion at the Union’s external boundaries. Methodologically, it combines comparative case analysis with within-case causal inference: process tracing, elite interviews, systematic coding of institutional documents, and congruence analysis of competing mechanisms, with the empirical implications of each mechanism specified in advance.
Geopolitical Enlargement as a Demarcation Project
My work on enlargement argues that Russia’s invasion accelerated a shift from enlargement as a predominantly transformative project toward enlargement as geopolitical demarcation. I am extending this comparatively, examining how the EU and competing powers construct, stabilize, and contest political ordering spaces in Eastern and Southeastern Europe.
In doing so, I move the central question from why and whether the EU enlarges to when and under what what conditions it succeeds in converting geopolitical claims into durable political boundaries — a question that implicates candidate-state politics, competing external influence, conditionality, security guarantees, economic incorporation, and the credibility of membership commitments. This reverses the long-established focused of studies of EU enlargement, so that rather than asking only how the EU transforms candidate countries, I ask how geopolitical enlargement changes the EU itself, through internal distributions of power, decision rules, budgets, security obligations, and differentiated integration. Boundary formation and internal political development are analytically connected.
The Multilevel Politics of European Rearmament
Europe’s rearmament is usually conceptualized as an aggregate response to threat, or measured through defence expenditure and military capabilities. I ask instead how rearmament operates as a multilevel political project. Large increases in defence provision redistribute resources and authority, generate new economic interests, empower some political and bureaucratic actors over others, and create new conflicts over the relationship between national, European, and Atlantic institutions.
I examine three dimensions: the domestic coalition politics underpinning sustained rearmament; the emergence of European defence-industrial and financing arrangements and their implications for the distribution of authority; and the evolving politics of European nuclear deterrence, including the conditions under which national capabilities could acquire broader European functions. The logic extends that of EUCOERCE: external security pressures do not translate mechanically into institutional outcomes, but depend on domestic coalitions, institutional legacies, distributional conflict, and struggles over control.
A Long-Term Programme
These are parts of a common programme that I am aiming to develop over the next decade. Each examines how changes in international power relations interact with existing institutions to reshape political authority, capacity, and boundaries. Over the next five years, EUCOERCE will be the main vehicle for developing it, generating comparative articles on economic coercion, security institutions, and institutional venue choice, as well as the foundations of a book on external coercion and European political development. I am developing this agenda as an independent research programme suitable for major external funding, with the longer-term aim of building a team studying how geopolitical competition reshapes institutions across different regions and forms of political organization — beyond the EU, to test the scope conditions of the framework I am developing.
The broader ambition is to bring international politics back into theories of political development, and political development into the study of international relations. I view the return of geopolitical competition as more than a new set of policy challenges for Europe. What I believe it does it that it changes the conditions under which pre-existing European and national institutions are built, capacities created, (political) authority contested, and political boundaries are drawn.
For published and ongoing work, see Publications. For background and affiliations, see Bio.