The EU and the Changing Architecture of Global Governance

Abstract

This panel examines how the European Union’s proclaimed geopolitical turn and pursuit of strategic autonomy reshape, and are reshaped by the wider architecture of global governance. It foregrounds the EU’s external agency in interaction with other major powers and with state and non-state actors that negotiate, appropriate, resist, or repurpose European templates across multiple arenas. These include universal multilateral institutions (UN, WTO, IMF/World Bank), plurilateral and major-power groupings (G7, G20, BRICS, SCO and related formats), transnational regulatory and standard-setting regimes, and sectoral or bilateral arrangements in issue areas such as climate, finance, trade, connectivity, and digital governance. The panel invites contributions that analyse how the EU deploys geoeconomic and regulatory instruments—such as connectivity initiatives, carbon markets and border adjustments, financial market-building, or digital and security regulation—as tools of authority, hierarchy, and competition in a changing international order. Equally welcome are papers that investigate how other powers and recipient or partner polities respond to, adapt to, or contest EU initiatives and governance models. The panel is open to all methodological approaches and to both theoretical and empirical work. We particularly welcome contributions that connect EU studies with debates in International Relations, International Political Economy, post/decolonial and Global South perspectives, and that conceptualise governance as a system-level phenomenon involving cross-venue dynamics, institutional spillovers, and shifting capacities to set and enforce rules in an increasingly contested global order.

Title	Details
From Superficial Convergence to Strategic Divergence: Global Gateway vs. BRI from a strategic perspective	View Paper Details
From Rule-Taker to Rule-Maker? BRICS Carbon Markets and the EU’s CBAM	View Paper Details
Interpreting China, Constructing Europe: Narrative Contestation and the EU’s Geopolitical Capacity	View Paper Details
The role of EU coercion and incentives in shaping Central Asian cooperation and adaptation strategies amid sanctions against Russia	View Paper Details