This workshop, held to mark Professor Nicolaidis’ years at Oxford University (1999-2023), will feature her former and current DPhil students as impulse givers and bring friends and colleagues together candidly to discuss our contemporary European predicament and take stock of the trajectory of the European project and its global ramifications. The hope is that we can engage honestly in scrutinising our concern for human betterment and transformative potential in the European and global context. In doing so, we may wonder whether conversations we had 20 or 10 years ago are still relevant, how do we productively engage in immanent critique to connect positive, normative and prescriptive takes, and what difference can scholarship make.

Our thread for the day will be to ask whether “Europe” (a term we never finish to unpack) can effectively act as a transformative force in today’s world of power politics, and whether it should even try. We will rely on a series of ‘provocations’ at the beginning of each of three sessions and see where the question takes us.