Globalisation, Europe & Multilateralism – Sophistication of the Transnational Order, Networks, and European Strategies (GEM STONES)

The project will actively contribute to the internationalisation of research and higher education through the institutionalisation of “joint doctorates”. Concretely, this means that each of the 15 PhD candidates will be jointly supervised by two academics from two universities belonging to the consortium, and by a mentor from one of the non-academic partners. GIGA colleagues are supervising one and mentoring two of the early stages researchers. GEM-STONES will deliver international double PhD degrees that are further enriched through the inclusion of a non-academic professional dimension. The project will facilitate the emerging of an integrated community of early stage researchers and their supervisors through a variety of joint activities that will also bring together academics, officials and civil society representatives.

With an eye on delivering a coherent common scientific agenda, GEM-STONES research design is set up in such a way as to encourage a common focus on the research programme’s core concept (i.e. purposeful management of regime complexes) as well as a smooth articulation between the various constituent projects. For that reason, the 15 Early Stage Researchers and their associated supervisors are clustered into four complementary Research & Innovation Work Packages (WP) each one reflecting a given approach to the EU’s capacity to provide purposeful management of regime complexes. WP1-EMERALD analyses the EU’s ’institutional capacity’ to externalize its policies from a causal perspective, WP2-CITRINE studies the EU’s ‘network capacity’ to ensure greater policy coherence in light of social interactions, WP3-RUBIES looks into the EU’s ‘relative capacity’ compared to other regional organisations through comparative heuristic categorisations, and WP4-SAPPHIRE deals with the EU’s ‘Framing Capacity’ to define appropriate behaviour by unpacking underlying socially constructed realities. The two early stage researchers who stay at the GIGA are part of the WP3-Rubies studying Brazil’s and Germany’s capacity to shape the outcomes in regional integration processes and comparing regional security governance in Europe and South-East Asia. GEM-STONES’ research methodology and approach are fully committed to interdisciplinarity. This allows for mutual learning opportunities between individual research projects, whether it is to consolidate a shared analytical perspective within a given Work Package, or to challenge those developed in other WPs.

Over the course of 36 months, the GEM-STONES project will deliver individual dissertations and a jointly edited volume; policy briefs and executive briefings; a shared data set and expertise directory as well as further training material such as methods textbook and a manual for highly-skilled job seekers. The GIGA organised and hosted the second methods workshop on concept building and consistency in March 2017, which prepared the early stage researchers theoretical work and positioning and aimed at building a common lexicon by developing a shared list of theoretical concepts and definitions.