If you are a PhD candidate, you might have heard at some point that it would be good for you to attend an academic conference. Well, I would say that you must! As a final year PhD Candidate in International Relations at the University of Kent, I have attended international conferences since 2021, the second […]

Russia’s full-scale invasion and war of aggression against Ukraine has impacted security perception in the European Eastern Neighbourhood and it has highlighted the need for the international community to pay increased attention to so-called ‘frozen’ conflicts. When such conflicts remain ignored and unresolved for too long, there is continuous danger of eruption and escalation.

Development assistance funding by international donors is rarely channeled through local actors. While there are strong normative and practical arguments to localize funding (i.e. directly channel funding through local actors), progress has been piecemeal as donors are largely left to their own devices to decide how/when/where and how much to localize.

As you'll know, the UACES office is going through some changes. I will be writing to you shortly to introduce our new Executive Director, but in the meantime I want to give our collective thanks to Melina Dieckgräber, our Digital Communications Manager.

My two-day field trip to the United Nations Library & Archives Geneva, funded through a UACES-JMCT Scholarship, had the added benefit of being the site of the long-deceased League of Nations and was truly a wonderful location for one to conduct archival research at.

Between September and December 2023, I undertook a RENPET-funded research stay at the University of Kent’s School of Politics and International Relations. This period was integral to my PhD thesis, which examines Russia’s hybrid interference campaigns in Western democracies. My primary aim was to explore the changing dynamics of Russian disinformation and cyber interference, assessing […]

In late November 2023, Finland temporary closed all its border crossing points with Russia in response to the perceived ‘instrumentalisation of migrants’ by that country. This has been made possible by the recent amendments to the Finnish Border Guard Act that allow for border closure in case of a large influx of migrants, deliberately caused […]