About
Marius Ghincea is a postdoctoral researcher and university lecturer at ETH Zurich’s Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences. He is also a Visiting Fellow at the European University Institute’s Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, and a university lecturer at the University of Lucerne, where he teaches a class on European security amid great power competition. He received his PhD from the European University Institute in 2024, where his dissertation examined the domestic politics of foreign and security policy. Before joining ETH Zurich, he held visiting or adjunct positions at the Hertie School’s Centre for International Security, Syracuse University’s Florence program, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Bologna, Central European University, George Washington University, and St Antony’s College, Oxford.
His research focuses on how great power competition shapes European integration. He develops a theoretical framework distinguishing four strategies that the United States, China, and Russia use to influence the EU: binding (creating structural dependencies), compellence (coercion under time pressure), wedging (exploiting internal divisions), and subversion (undermining legitimacy). The framework traces how these strategies interact with domestic political cleavages across member states to produce integration, fragmentation, or stasis in different policy domains. A related strand of his work examines the domestic politics of foreign and security policy, investigating how governments construct consensus for international commitments and why states vary in transparency about military aid.
He specializes in qualitative and mixed methods research, with particular focus on qualitative Bayesian reasoning and process tracing. These approaches enable systematic evaluation of competing causal explanations and transparent assessment of evidence strength in small-N research designs. At ETH, he teaches graduate courses on research design and qualitative methods, as well as undergraduate courses on contemporary European politics.
His publications appear in the Journal of European Public Policy and Foreign Policy Analysis, with additional work under review at the European Journal of Political Research and other journals. He is preparing a book manuscript, Forging Consensus: The Domestic Politics of Foreign and Security Policy and two other co-authored volumes for Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press.
In Romania, he is a recognized voice on foreign policy and European security. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and contributed to the Working Group on Romania’s National Security Strategy convened by the Presidential Administration. He co-founded the Quartet Institute. He comments on Romanian and European affairs in outlets including the Washington Post, Politico Europe, and AFP, and appears very frequently in Romanian media to discuss foreign policy, EU integration, and security issues. He serves on the Academic Advisory Board of the European University Institute’s EU Security Initiative.