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Areas of expertise
Biography
I have been Professor of International Politics at the University of Turku since 2010. I studied at the Universities of Helsinki and Oxford (St Antony's College), and received my doctorate from the latter in 2001. Before joining the Faculty in Turku, I worked, inter alia, as Senior Research Fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, as Director of the University of Helsinki's Network for European Studies, and as a Visiting professor of European Studies at Saarland University in Germany.
Teaching
Teaching is the most important value of academia. I therefore regard the ca. 200 master's and fifteen doctoral theses that have been completed under my supervision as my most important academic achievement. Please be in touch, if you are intellectually ambitious and interested in pursuing doctoral studies in Turku! My annual teaching responsibilities include master's thesis seminars in International Politics and two lecture series related to the current predicaments of European and global affairs. I also actively contribute to the excellent research seminar of the Political Science Section.
Research
The conditions of democracy and democratisation, primarily in Europe, have been the cornerstones of my research. I spent the 1990s trying to understand postcommunist transformations in East Central Europe. These efforts led to a doctoral thesis, later published under the title "Between Utopia and Disillusionment" (2005). In the 2000s, I turned to studying the European Union, above all its foreign policies and people's attitudes to it. Over the past decade or so, I have also written on such themes as the state of International Relations research, general problems of globalisation, and the fate of liberal democracy. Crisis politics and governance and the temporal underpinnings of democracy have entered my research agenda in the 2020s. In 2017-22, I acted as deputy director of the research consortium "Participation in Long-Term Decision-Making" (www.paloresearch.fi), and in 2021-24, I am one of the leaders of the consortium "Just Recovery from Covid-19?" (www.jure.fi); both consortia have been funded by the Strategic Research Council of the Academy of Finland.