EUTOPIA Connected Research Community Trans-policy perspectives on transformations in sovereignty

This Connected Research Community will bring together researchers from EUTOPIA institutions and beyond that deal with transformations in sovereignty at the state level and beyond. This will bring together centers of excellence across the EUTOPIA network that are working on similar issues to allow them to share ideas and data, focus reflections, and build novel approaches to understanding how sovereignty is evolving as an academic concept and as a political tool in today’s world.

Sovereignty in the traditional nation-state centric sense is being challenged by different forces and thus redefining the global order. The norms and the (social) practices around the term ‘sovereignty’ are currently in disarray, from understanding how to deal with communicable diseases, to managing our global digital networks, or understanding how conflicts such as the one in Ukraine shape our used of the term. Public goods such as health, security and digital networks are under increasing pressures to disassociate themselves from national borders, whereas politicians are moving toward more ‘sovereignist’ discourses in national and international speeches. Regional integration bodies are also now addressing the concept of sovereignty in their strategic and policy documents, which brings an added dimension to these global and local ‘pushes and pulls’ on the term.

The triad of policy areas described above (health, security, digital) present global challenges in their own right, but we aim to use this CRC to share reflections and to see whether there are intersections, or points of concern that can be drawn across the different policy fields. In this sense, we aim to explore the potential for trans-policy perspectives on this field.

As global public goods, the collaboration that will emerge from these areas clearly fits within the objectives of the funding stream, and additionally aims to support the SDGs, most specifically Goal 17. As we intend to engage with our VUB campus in Bruges, hosted by the United Nations University Institute for Comparative Regional Integration Studies, the SDGs will be a key priority for us in our work.