[Call for Papers] The EU as a Regional International Organisation

The Asser Institute and the Amsterdam Centre for European Studies (ACES) are pleased to announce a call for papers on the topic of The EU as a Regional International Organisation (RIO). The deadline for submitting an abstract is 1 May 2023.

Regional international organisations (RIOs) are exponentially growing and play an active role in a wide range of global governance fields, from economic governance to security to the shaping of cultural identities.

These organisations are heterogeneous in terms of their powers, degree of institutionalisation, aims, and how they structure their relations with the outside world. As entities that lie at the intermediate level between States and international organisations (IOs), RIOs pose a wide array of questions for international (institutional) law.

The European Union (EU) is a RIO of particular significance, yet the ‘regional’ perspective is often absent in debates about the EU’s identity and external presence. Therefore, we invite papers that reflect on how the ‘RIO’ lens may influence and contextualise our understanding of the EU as a global actor.

We welcome papers that explore the following (non-exhaustive) topics: 

• How the concept of ‘RIO’ may add to the framework for assessing the legal identity, democratic legitimacy and/or accountability of the EU and/or of other RIOs.
• How the EU compares to other RIOs, such as ASEAN, Mercosur or others, notably with respect to the role of the individual within the regional legal order, the EU’s claim to ‘uniqueness’ and similar claims made by other RIOs, and the different normative visions on how to shape the international legal order.
• How the EU (and its courts) interact with other RIOs (and their courts).
• How regional identity narratives shape EU values internally and how these values are projected externally.
• How the EU and other RIOs contribute to the development of international law, including international institutional law and substantive fields of international law, and whether we can speak of distinctive ‘regional’ approaches to international law.
• Whether, and how, the EU’s practice of international law can be seen as threatening the coherence of international law or/and as enriching it.
• The everyday practice of RIOs has the potential to substantially influence the development of international law, and we encourage submissions that explore this aspect. We also welcome papers that reflect on the broader implications of RIOs for international law and global governance.

Abstracts of up to 800 words should be submitted by 1 May 2023.

For details on submission, please read the full call.