As globalization and urbanization accelerate, cities seek collaborations across borders to address shared challenges and opportunities. Anecdotic evidence and some initial academic studies suggest that those relations are often built on social contacts established in business, academic, cultural or transnational city networks (TCNs). Personal links and engagement might be more important for developing city diplomacy than formal agreements or material interests.

This paper examines the dynamics of city-to-city cooperation between the European Union (EU) and the United States, trying to answer the question of to what extent networks and social relationships are drivers of these contacts. Drawing on survey data from nearly 750 European cities, supplemented by interviews with city officials, the paper explores different types of relations between cities assessing institutionalization, interdependencies, social contacts and the role of different networks as their drivers. To our knowledge, it will be the first large-N study to map transatlantic relations on the subnational level and employ a relational perspective, highlighting the roles of networks and social contacts.

By deciphering the labyrinthine interplay of these factors, the paper elevates the discourse on transatlantic urban diplomacy, amplifying the recognition of how interpersonal networks and social bonds contribute substantively to the intricate tapestry of cross-border municipal collaboration.

Despite limited formal powers regarding international agreements, the European Parliament (EP) utilizes diverse activities to influence the process through which they are negotiated. Through its activities, such as adopting resolutions or holding plenary debates, the EP is able to voice its preferences about agreements, and potentially to influence their content. However, the mechanisms through which EP activities lead to actual influence (or not) have not been unpacked. Therefore, this paper investigates the processes through which EP activities influence international agreements. Following a ‘similar systems different outcomes’ design, we compare the influence of the EP on the EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (2020) and on the Sustainable Fisheries Agreement with Morocco (2019). While there were numerous EP activities during the whole negotiation process for both agreements, the EP’s influence has arguably been stronger in the first case. Applying a comparative process tracing methodology, we examine how EP activities led (or not) to EP influence. Combining three literature strands, we consider three causal mechanisms: veto anticipation, the effect of democratic norms and effective EP arguing. Empirically, the paper utilizes press articles, documents produced by EU institutions, and interviews with implicated actors from EU institutions and interest groups.Taken together, the paper provides a better understanding of how the EP contributes to the making of EU foreign policy, of which international agreements are an important component.

This paper analyses the interactions between ‘radical’ and ‘moderate’ actors and their discourses in the case of EU foreign policy towards Israel and Palestine. European politicians, civil society groups and other stakeholders have held divergent views on how theMiddle East conflict could or should be solved. While some have advocated a so-called ‘radical’ agenda by promoting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign,others have engaged in more technical and ‘moderate’ discourses. In this paper we examine the positions of pro-Palestinian interest groups in relation to two cases that concern EUtrade and development policy respectively: labelling (2009-2021) and textbooks (2019-2023). While the former concerns the issue of labelling/banning trade imports from Israeli settlements, the latter concerns EU development aid to Palestine’s education sector. Specifically, we analyse how the temporal dimension (short-term and long-term impact), the external context (favourable and unfavourable), and the type of lobby topic (active versus reactive) matter for the moderate-radical interaction. Based on analysis of documents and semi-structured interviews, we find that while the radical flank initially strengthened the moderates in the case of labelling, this has proved to be a Pyrrhic victory in the longer term due to the relatively weak implementation of this measure and an increased call for more radical measures such as a trade ban. In contrast, the moderate flank has arguably strengthened the radical flank in the case of textbooks, preventing the latter from engaging in debates outside its core struggles. In doing so, we aim to contribute to the literature on EU external relations, on EU-Israel-Palestine relations and on the radical flank effect. The paper will also generate wider insights on the potential relevance of so-called radical and heterodox perspectives on European politics.

Science diplomacy – defined as “the direct or indirect use of science, scientific knowledge and scientific cooperation to advance diplomatic goals” (Royal Society, 2010) – has gained significant relevance in recent years. Such efforts across Europe have, however, remained uncoordinated and characterized by an absence of an EU-wide approach. In this paper, we propose a new conceptual framework to understand how the EU’s science and education diplomacy could tackle the challenge of a fragmenting world, engaging with the notions of the relation-building approach to public diplomacy, collaborative diplomacy and co-creation, all considered here within the perceptual approach to EU foreign policy (Chaban and Elgström 2021a,b, 2022, 2023). We argue that genuine collaboration helps to recalibrate perceptions and expectations of cooperating partners, thereby decreasing perception gaps and hope/expectation-performance gaps. We investigate empirically both a) the existence of perceptual gaps between the EU and its Strategic Partners, and possible changes in these over time, and b) the nature and degree of collaboration and the mechanism to arrive there. Empirically, we examine external perceptions of the EU in the RSTI and education issue-areas in ten EU Strategic Partners (the US, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, Russia, China, Japan, South Korea, and India in 2015 and 2021. We explore images and perceptions among local elites, university students, in public opinion and news media - relating these data to the existence of perceptual gaps and to the nature and extent of collaboration with the EU. Our findings corroborate the interconnectedness between genuine collaboration, mutually positive perceptions and increased trust. Our conclusions focus on the ways in which our relationship-building perceptual approach may help to advance theorization of EU science diplomacy as one type of the EU’s “sectoral diplomacies” (Damro et al. 2018) and its practice. Science diplomacy seems to be a fruitful field for intensified collaboration and improved relationships between the EU and its Partnership countries in world characterized by increasing geopolitics and geoeconomics tensions.