Units

REPI Recherche et Études en Politique Internationale

REPI is a research unit, mainly dedicated to research and studies in international politics at the Université libre de Bruxelles. It is linked to the Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences. REPI fosters fundamental research in the field of international relations and aims at providing a high quality framework for the research in this field (PhD dissertations, publications, conferences...). Depending on available resources, members of REPI can also provide specific expertise for national and international institutions. Furthermore, the research centre encourages the dissemination of knowledge in international relations to a larger audience and represents a convenient space for discussing the teaching of international relations within the university.  REPI also organises seminars and summer schools for professionals and young scholars.

Director : Christian Olsson

Projetcs

NAVIGATOR

NAVIGATOR is a 4-year research project set to examine how the EU shall navigate the increasingly complex – and conflict-laden – institutional spaces of global governance to advance a rules-based international order. What factors should be emphasized when considering which institutions to strengthen, which to reform, and which to by-pass when revitalising multilateralism? 

NAVIGATOR’s main objective is to answer these questions and deliver a ready-to-use “search mechanism” and associated pathways of action that the EU and its member states can use as it seeks to strengthen a rules-based international order. 

Overview
To achieve this, NAVIGATOR comprises a strong, global and inter-disciplinary team of researchers that explores institutional variation on six policy issues – climate change, digitalisation, finance/tax, health, migration and security – to identify what institutional mixes that enables the EU to have optimal impact in a given policy issue.

Transforming regionalism: security politics and the 'remaking' of West Africa

This project asks whether transformations in the geographical boundaries of West African security regionalism are a functional adaptation to fluctuating boundaries of criminality and terrorism, or the result of actors’ struggles for legitimacy and to impose diverging security priorities. It analyses the politics of regionalism through the interactions between international and West African actors: the competition around the definition of legitimate security knowledge and of the spatial confines of the region. It analyses the adverse and unintentional effects of these transformations on the (des)institutionalisation of West Africa, the balance between security and development, and the re-shaping of intervention practices.