The EU’s state-building agenda in the Middle East prioritises policies and actions on security, rule of law and democracy, and economic growth. However, the EU’s health-related priorities and actions through the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) are also an important yet understudied driver of state-building. We assert that a functioning health system is critical to any state being able to perform its core functions, to have legitimacy, and to create a supportive environment for development and prosperity.

This scoping review aims to elucidate whether and how the EU’s health-related policies and actions in the 10 Southern Neighbourhood countries contribute to state-building and strengthening health systems in that region. The framework for analysis is the World Health Organization’s six ‘building blocks’ of functioning health systems (e.i. financing, workforce, information systems, medical products and technologies, leadership and governance, and service delivery), which we argue are important avenues of action for any EU state-building exercise. First, the European Neighbourhood Policy, bilateral action plans, and related documents since the ENP’s inception are searched for explicit health priorities and actions, which will be categorised according to the WHO building blocks. Second, scholarly literature (six academic databases) is systematically searched and the selection is refined using inclusion/exclusion criteria in line with the PRISMA-ScR guidelines. Data is extracted and synthesised according to the type (e.g. proactive systems strengthening/reactive crisis response), mechanisms, nature, and impacts of EU actions and the WHO building blocks to which they correspond. Where possible, explicit EU priorities and actions in the Southern Neighbourhood (step 1) are matched with the mechanisms and impacts reported in step 2.

Preliminary results show that the EU’s actions have had intentional and short-term impacts on certain areas of the health system (e.g. humanitarian medical products) and unintentional, normative influence on institutional decision-making (e.g. pharmaceutical regulation) in the region. An initial analysis suggests that some of these impacts arise from EU actions undertaken outside the ENP. The results of this study will elucidate the opportunities and gaps in the ENP for enhanced state-building and health systems-building through EU-Middle Eastern cooperation.

Over the past decade, Moldova has made substantial progress in its path towards European integration, culminating in the granting of candidate status in June 2022. However, Moldova remains a country with strong links to corruption and had been acknowledged to be a 'captured state' by the European Parliament. However, throughout the 2010's, Moldova was widely seen to be the 'poster child' for reforms in the Eastern Partnership. Indeed, throughout this period, the European-orientated elite are now seen to have been engaging in corrupt practices. This raises questions regarding the extent to which the European Union can successfully project its norms, such as in the areas anti-corruption and rule of law in countries in which there is a high level of corruption.

Therefore, this paper will examine the extent of Europeanisation of anti-corruption policies in Moldova, during the period of 2014-2020. This period was chosen while considering that this was the period between the Association Agreement coming into force, the classification of Moldova by the parliament as a state captured by the interests of the oligarchs, and the rule of the socialist elite. It will investigate to what extent genuine Europeanisation can be observed, or was it a case of declarative Europeanisation in which the elites were engaging with symbolic compliance with the EU's acquis. Finally, the conditions under which successful Europeanisation can occur in the context of countries with high level of corruption will be posited.

This paper sets out a research agenda to analyze how European Union law is implemented in non-EU Member States in the EU´s vicinity. While the impact of Europe in the EU´s Eastern and Southern neighborhoods has been extensively studied through the prism of the Europeanization theoretical framework, its attention has been largely directed to the transposition of EU law in domestic legislation and has neglected how EU law is implemented on the ground. This theoretical and empirical gap comes with no surprise, due to the lack of data on implementation in non-EU Member dates and the methodological challenges in measuring such variable. This article argues that legal geography has the potential to fill such gap. Legal geography looks at how law is experienced by citizens, and how spaces, time and law are co-constituted and transformed in the implementation phase of legislation. EU law is an interesting case for legal geography, since on the one hand, the ‘uniform application throughout the Member States’ is one of its core constitutional tenets, while, on the other hand, domestic implementing actors and courts have the ability to mediate the demands of EU law to account for local peculiarities and contexts. As a result, bridging legal geography and Europeanization could allow us to flip our analytical lens and depart from how domestic actors acted and re-acted during the implementation phase of EU law in the EU´s vicinity. Three different directions of this new research agenda will be proposed: 1) the policymaking of EU law implementation, 2) the legal technicalities behind EU law implementation and 3) the governance of EU law implementation.