Alasdair Young, professor of International Affairs at Georgia Tech and Chair of the European Union Studies Association (EUSA), introduces a selection of the best papers from the EUSA 2015 Biennial Conference published in the Journal of European Public Policy (JEPP). You can find Alasdair’s recently published contribution to JEPP introducing the selection of papers and reflecting on the state of EU studies here.
By Alasdair Young
The European Union Studies Association (EUSA) is delighted to announce the publication of a collection of some of best papers from its 2015 biennial conference in Boston in the Journal of European Public Policy (JEPP). The contributions went through a rigorous selection process. They had to be nominated by the discussant of the panel on which they were presented. Each nominated paper that was not already published or committed elsewhere was then reviewed by two members of EUSA’s current and out-going Executive Committee. The authors of the papers on the resulting short-list were provided with feedback and given a few months to revise their papers before they were submitted to JEPP’s standard, double-blind review process. Given this bottom-up selection process, the articles in this special issue do not even aspire to coherence. Their (inadvertent) similarities as well as their differences, however, provide a fruitful springboard for reflection on the state of European Union studies, which seems particularly appropriate in the spring of 2016 as the EU confronts multi-dimensional challenges – the lingering Eurozone crisis, the referendum on British membership, the migrant/refugee crisis, and a wave of terrorist attacks. Continue reading “An inflection point in European Union studies?”