A central concern of this presentation to highlight the added value of sociological perspectives in European Studies. While analyses produced by political scientists often focus on formal institutions, policies and elites, the sociological perspective emphasizes individual perceptions, attitudes, and social structures, as well as the formative power these factors possess. Therefore, greater interaction and exchange between the two disciplines is necessary in order to understand Europeanization holistically. A central theoretical element in this presentation is an adaptation of the “Europeanization Circle” model. This model links bottom-up and top-down processes and shows the feedback between social change and political responses. Furthermore, the model differs from conventional linear conceptual approaches insofar as it understands social change as an equal driver of political processes. In contrast to the prevailing models, the Europeanization Circle envisages feedback loops between citizens and political actors, and it positions society as a co-constitutive actor in European integration.

On the basis of this modelling, an argument is made that granting sociology greater visibility and a stronger role in European research will enable a more comprehensive understanding of Europeanization. Sociological approaches are important for detecting processes of social development which can significantly influence European (dis)integration at an early stage, even before they become permanent fixtures in the political sphere. In turn, concepts originating in political science provide sociologists with an awareness of the formative influence of political structures. In the political realm, sociology can play to its strengths in the analysis of informal, unintended and conflictual processes, and it can thus trace the negotiation, genesis and preservation of agency in the EU's multi-level system. Better exchange between the two disciplines could promote more sustainable political structures and policies in the EU, which are more closely linked to the reality of the citizens' lives.

European Studies has seen intensified calls to interrogate its epistemic foundations and the politics of knowledge production; yet we still know relatively little about who produces, evaluates, and legitimises knowledge in the discipline. Building on decentring debates on the spatial configuration of epistemic hierarchies and the scholarship on gendered visibility and knowledge production, this paper examines how multiple centres and peripheries are perpetually (re)made in European Studies. Contributing to recent single-journal analyses in the discipline, this paper offers a ten-year (2015-2024) submission-to-publication analysis of knowledge production and dissemination in the Journal of Contemporary European Studies (JCES). To this end, it maps the geography of knowledge production in JCES across the submission-to-publication pipeline (2015-2024), tracking authors’ institutional affiliations over time and the extent of non-EU participation, including co-authorship configurations. In parallel, it examines gender disparities in published authorship, including overall patterns, team composition, and first authorship in mixed-gender collaborations, while linking geography and gender by assessing women’s authorship share across regions (e.g., EU vs. non-EU). Where accessible, it complements these patterns with decision-stage indicators (e.g., acceptance rates) to better locate dynamics of knowledge production and dissemination during the publication process. Overall, the paper seeks to contribute to critical European Studies by empirically demonstrating how decentring and feminist critiques of epistemic hierarchy illuminate the politics of knowledge production in the discipline, through a pipeline-oriented bibliometric analysis of who produces, evaluates, and legitimises knowledge on “Europe” in a leading journal.

The paper is part of a broader research on multilingualism in the European Commission that grounds on a sample 60 semi-structured interviews with Commission managers. The departing theoretical foundation of the research is the theory of representative bureaucracy. At one level, the research aims to understand how multilingualism is experienced and understood by Commission staff members. At another level the research has a paradigmatic shifting ambition.

This paper is a conceptual paper. Epistemologically, the study aims to show the relevance of studying languages and multilingualism as a legitimate object of research in public administration approaches, in particular in representative bureaucracy studies. Currently, it is as if languages were a blind spot of public administrations studies. They are implicitly studied as an element of ethnicity or culture, which denies them a standalone ontological existence. This “paradigmatic cecity” is surprising given the number of multilingual states and societies. The argument therefore starts with an ontological analysis of languages and multilingualism, showing that languages are different markers of identity than other markers like, e.g., gender or ethnicity. For this particular reason, the paper argues that languages ought to be separated ontologically from the broader markers “ethnicity” and “culture”. This makes it possible to study multilingualism as a specific identity marker and as a vital particularity of the EU’s civil service and administrative-policy work. The paper concludes in the necessity to introduce a research agenda within public administration studies that aim to shed light on how languages and multilingualism impact the work of public administrations and how it affects the legitimacy of these public administrations as well as the political system they serve. The EU is in many respects an exceptional polity (24 official languages; 27 nationalities) which makes it an ideal case to reveal the relevance of studying languages and multilingualism in public administration studies.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has once again transformed sovereignty protection into a particularly urgent and pressing concern on the European continent. This war has become an object of intense academic scrutiny and—coupled with other raging armed conflicts around the world—turned into an analytical battlefield of its own, involving competing explanatory traditions, most notably political realism and postcolonial critique. The former has presented Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as the Kremlin’s attempt to protect its sphere of influence from NATO encroachment—an angle which has effectively sidelined Ukraine’s agency. Postcolonial analyses have sought to remedy this flaw by centering Ukraine’s struggle as a form of resistance against Russia’s resurgent imperialism. In my contribution, I will provide a critique of this popular postcolonial interpretation of the Russo-Ukrainian war, specifically as regards Ukraine. Postcolonial analyses of Ukraine’s response to Russia’s invasion often replicate a Eurocentric, Westphalian understanding of sovereignty as something that a state under assault seeks to reclaim vis-à-vis its subjugator and protect at all costs. After all, it was precisely the struggle for sovereignty that has informed decolonization processes after the WWII. This vision, however, underappreciates scenarios where the state delegates much of its sovereign powers to domestic and foreign non-state actors, thus questioning the precedence of sovereignty in its decision-making amid war. Drawing on a case study of Ukraine’s response to Russia’s invasion of 2014 and 2022, I will show how Kyiv’s decentralization strategies defied common conceptions of sovereignty informed by the Eurocentric tradition and replicated in postcolonial studies. Instead, using ontological security theory, I will demonstrate that state identity may take precedence over state sovereignty, hence such sovereignty, which postcolonialism has venerated as the goal of decolonization, can be paradoxically sacrificed in order to make said anticolonial struggle more effective.