Academics of the National Security Department have been involved in a new Horizon Europe project – InvigoratEU: Preparing Europe for its future, a three-year research endeavour which started in January 2024. Artur Gruszczak, Chair in National Security, Piotr Bajor, Associate Professor and Agata Mazurkiewicz, Assistant Professor, will contribute to the study of the EU’s relations with with its eastern neighbours and the countries of the Western Balkans. Professor Gruszczak, as a coordinator of the project team at the Jagiellonian University and a co-coordinator of WorkPackage 8 „Security and defence and EU’s robust capacity building together with the neighbourhood”, will promote research which takes up such matters as European security, resilience building in the EU and its partners and associates in the neighbourhood, defence transformation, especially as a result of the war in Ukraine, and – last but not least – changing dynamics of the EU’s (and NATO’s) cooperative frameworks and their impact on European and transatlantic security.

Academics of the National Security Department have been involved in a new Horizon Europe project – InvigoratEU: Preparing Europe for its future, a three-year research endeavour which started in January 2024. Artur Gruszczak, Chair in National Security, Piotr Bajor, Associate Professor and Agata Mazurkiewicz, Assistant Professor, will contribute to the study of the EU’s relations with with its eastern neighbours and the countries of the Western Balkans. Professor Gruszczak, as a coordinator of the project team at the Jagiellonian University and a co-coordinator of WorkPackage 8 „Security and defence and EU’s robust capacity building together with the neighbourhood”, will promote research which takes up such matters as European security, resilience building in the EU and its partners and associates in the neighbourhood, defence transformation, especially as a result of the war in Ukraine, and – last but not least – changing dynamics of the EU’s (and NATO’s) cooperative frameworks and their impact on European and transatlantic security.

The InvigoratEU project coordinated by the EU-Chair at the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE) together with the Institut für Europäische Politik (IEP) in Berlin will examine how the EU can structure its future relations with its eastern neighbours and the countries of the Western Balkans. Bringing together more than 50 researchers from various EU and non-EU countries, the Consortium aims at pursuing three key objectives:

1. New strategies for a strong Europe: In light of a geopolitical turning point, the researchers primarily want to investigate how the enlargement and neighborhood policy needs to be reformed, how to respond to the political, military and economic ambitions of Russia, China, the US and Turkey in the Eastern neighborhood and the Western Balkans, and how the EU's foreign policy arsenal needs to be rebuilt so as to prepare for the new era of military interventions. New data sets will be created - e.g. a public opinion survey, an external influence index and a social compliance scoreboard.

2. Development of a future-oriented vision: New institutional frameworks will be designed - both for politics and for education in schools and universities. To this end, the researchers are developing scenarios, visions and strategies and organizing youth labs, workshops for young professionals and political debates throughout Europe. The aim is for the young Europeans to develop policy recommendations for European and national political actors, which will be presented in Brussels and European capitals at the end of the project.

3. Broad communication of the results: A CDE ("Communication, Dissemination and Exploitation") strategy is central to achieving the project's objective - the recommendations derived from the research findings will be communicated, disseminated and utilized as from day one.

The researchers from the National Security Department will take advantage of some inputs derived from the ongoing Future Democracy Lab research projects, focused on security, instability, resilience and mitigation of disruptive activities. They will exploit outcomes of FDL WorkPackage 4 investigating the issues of security-driven contexts of democratization and systemic transformation.