PhD

The focus of my research is European cooperation in the area of Justice and Home Affairs. In my recently completed PhD thesis I investigated the implementation of the common European visa policy by member states. Today, the majority of the world's citizens have to apply for a Schengen visa to legally enter the European Union for a short stay. This visa regime has not escaped public and academic attention. The policy is often argued to be exclusionary, and an example of the new restrictive border policies of liberal democracies.

The aim of the research project was to investigate how the member states apply the common policy in practice, and identify what factors and dynamics explain the balance struck between open and closed borders.

Specifically, the project delivered:

• Indicators capturing the restrictiveness of visa regimes and the structure and extent of transgovernmental cooperation between EU-Schengen states
• A publicly avaliable database enabling us to compare the EU/Schengen members visa practice
• Tests of the relative explanatory power of different theoretical accounts of variation in the restrictiveness of visa regimes and state cooperation practices

The project was jointly supervised by Eiko Thielemann and Jennifer Jackson-Preece.

If you are interested in learning more about the project please contact me.