Dr Markus Kornprobst awarded John Fell OUP Research Fund

Dr Markus Kornprobst has been awarded the John Fell OUP Research Fund: Small Award Scheme, for his project ‘Argumentative Encounters: International Crisis Management as European Foreign Policy?’.

Markus’ project examines the foreign policy of the European Union. The attempt to speak with one voice in world politics has been an integral element of the European unification process since 1957. Yet the record of harmonising the foreign policies of member states has remained mixed at best. This applies in particular to the management of international crises. What explains this mixed record? Under what conditions do the crisis responses of EU member states converge and under what conditions to they diverge?

The project makes two important contributions: (1) Borrowing from argumentation theory, it develops a novel theoretical framework for how to understand EU foreign policy making. (2) This enables the study to gain new insights into often debated questions on how far Europe is on the path towards becoming a significant actor in world politics, what the repercussions of this are for international relations, and how other world regions compare with the EU’s efforts of foreign policy harmonisation.

Dr Markus Kornprobst is RJ Vincent Post-doctoral Fellow at the Department of Politics and International Relations and Lecturer at Magdalen College.