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Economic sanctions and natural resources : a property-based theory
No full textDefence date: 24 November 2025Examining Board: Prof. Andrea Sangiovanni (King's College London, Former European University Institute, Supervisor); Prof. Ian Carter (University of Pavia); Prof. Juho Härkönen (European University Institute); Prof. Leif Wenar (Stanford University)This thesis addresses a considerable theoretical lacuna in political theory: the disconnect between ideal theories of global distributive justice and non-ideal theories of international coercion. While discussions on global justice and economic sanctions abound, the moral permissibility of sanctions aimed at enforcing distributive justice, particularly concerning natural resources, has been largely overlooked. To bridge this gap, I propose a novel propertybased theory, grounded in the widely shared idea of humanity’s pre-institutional equal claims to natural resources. This ecumenical approach synthesizes three major philosophical traditions: Steiner’s left-libertarianism, Risse’s Grotian sufficientarianism, and Beitz’s cosmopolitan Rawlsianism. The argument progresses from a conceptual analysis to an actionable policy framework for morally permissible sanctions. I argue that justice in rectification justifies sanctions in response to violations of humanity’s common natural resource ownership. Due to this special ownership status, sanctions targeting trade in natural resources face a lower threshold of moral permissibility compared to those targeting manufactured goods or services. As in class action litigation, aggregating minor property rights violations globally yields enforceable claims to redress. Adopting Pattison’s non-ideal approach, I argue sanctions are morally preferable to inaction and war due to their fairness in distributing unavoidable harms. I outline a three-tier policy framework of tariffs, price caps, and embargoes, building on Wenar’s Clean Trade proposal. Each policy is tailored to varying degrees of common resource ownership violations, liability of domestic social groups, and the target government’s accountability. To refine the theory’s implications, I examine in reflective equilibrium the cases of injustices of three distinct levels of natural resource distribution: (i) intra-nationally, Russia’s resource curse; (ii) internationally, Norway’s over-appropriation of fossil fuels; (iii) globally, climate impact of Brazil’s Amazon deforestation. Finally, the thesis culminates in a policy table mapping permissible resource sanctions for any constellation of the said variables
Feeling the border : everyday solidarity activism at the internal borders of Europe
No full textDefence date: 10 March 2025Examining Board: Prof. Jeffrey Checkel (European University Institute, Supervisor); Prof. Martin Ruhs (European University Institute, Co-supervisor); Prof. Donatella della Porta (Scuola Normale Superiore); Prof. Kim Rygiel (Wilfrid Laurier University)How does activism in solidarity with migrants in border areas transform activists’ political subjectivities? Based on ethnographic fieldwork with the solidarity movement with migrants at the internal borders of Europe, I explore how the intersection between space and affect shapes the creation of meaning, coherence and ambivalence in activists’ experiences at the border. Building on social movement research that has focused on the role of emotions and that of space in explaining movements’ existence and strategies, I argue for a conceptual framework that considers these elements together to study everyday activism. Spatiality matters for activists’ subjectivities as the border amplifies a series of interconnected issues, creating a space where political and moral questions regarding human rights, the freedom of movement or the legitimacy of borders become particularly dense. Affects and emotions are also key to meaning-making and the constitution of one’s subjectivity. They shape political mobilisations, drive collective dynamics, and make some action possible; they underpin attachment to people and political causes, and place bodies and feelings at the centre of politics. I argue that considerations from and about the border are inseparable from their emotional dimension, as they engage with questions of justice and are oriented towards social change. The dissertation is based on a multi-sited ethnography of the solidarity movement with migrants along the Italian borderlands between 2021 and 2023. Methodologically, I conducted political ethnography in four border areas, sharing daily activities and informal discussions with informants. I engaged with various political collectives and associations, through activities such as the distribution of goods, regular assemblies, and the monitoring of critical areas; I volunteered in a day facility, attended public events and demonstrations, shared living spaces, and participated in collective reflections. I develop the thesis through fieldnotes, around thirty in-depth interviews with activists, and documents and newspaper articles. Throughout the thesis, I analyse the relationship between the border – understood as material and symbolic – and affect – encompassing emotions, sensations and feelings – from different angles. First, I show how involvement in a movement is intertwined with emotional connections and experiences. Second, I use the body as a scale of analysis to unveil how we can observe both the blurring of borders and, at the same time, the enactment of social boundaries through spatial dynamics. It brings to light the ambiguities between political goals and the means to reach them. Third, I focus on the emotional connection built around and with space in everyday life. I build on the concept of emotional geographies to demonstrate how activists sense the border and engage in practices that transform it, materially and symbolically. Finally, I explore what this thesis can bring to the conceptualisation of the border itself by suggesting ways to bridge social movement studies and conceptual analysis with an emotional sensibility
Printing plague knowledge : early printed plague tracts (1472-1520)
No full textDefence date: 06 March 2025Examining Board: Prof. Ann Thomson (European University Institute, Supervisor); Prof. Lauren Kassell (European University Institute); Prof. Unn Falkeid (University of Oslo); Prof. Andrew Pettegree (University of St Andrews)Boccacio opens his Decameron with an apology to the reader: “I recognize that this present work will, to your thinking, have a grievous and a weariful beginning, inasmuch as the dolorous remembrance of the late pestiferous mortality, which it beareth on its forefront, is universally irksome to all who saw or otherwise knew it.” However, he continues, once the plague talk is over and done with, there will be “the pleasance and delight which I have already promised you.” I can echo the apology, as I will spend some pages of this introduction in dolorous remembrance of the Covid-19 pandemic, but I do not think I can go so far as to promise that a PhD thesis dealing with past plague knowledge will be a source of pleasance and delight. Setting my sights only somewhat lower, I have tried to make it as accurate, interesting and useful as I can. When the first lockdown in Italy began in March 2020, it scuppered a half-formed plan I had to bring some friends along and read from Boccaccio’s Decameron at the Villa Schifanoia outside Florence. Whether or not the villa really did serve as an inspiration for the countryside refuge Boccaccio’s characters fled to, seeking to escape the plague of 1348, it is a lovely place with a particularly beautiful garden. We left it a little too late; all non-essential movement became restricted. Photographs and videos showing empty, silent Italian cities circulated: tranquil canals in Venice; the Trevi fountain for once bare of the usual tourist crowd pushing close to drop their coins into the basin; empty piazzas and quiet streets. It was eerie, this view of seemingly depopulated cities, and insofar as it looked like anything familiar, it looked like the opening montage of a post-apocalyptic film. I experienced the first lockdown as an unprecedented situation, one in which the basic rules of society had changed and kept changing. The future grew dim and uncertain while the present both stretched out interminably and contracted to almost nothing
Women loving women in 18th century Paris : figurations of alterity
No full textDefence date: 25 November 2025Examining Board: Prof. Benno Gammerl (European University Institute); Prof. Carlotta Sorba (European University Institute); Prof. Anne Montenach (Université d’Aix-Marseille); Prof. Inken Schmidt-Voges (Philipps-Universität Marburg)Paris in the eighteenth century was not only one of the most important capitals in western Europe, influenced and inhabited by the great thinkers of the time. Paris and its environs were also a space where women formed historical identities simply by acting on their desires, openly or hidden, and creating different intimacies. Usually, when thinking of female same-sex intimacy, historiography resurrects a canon of tropes that seem globally accepted. Commonly agreed upon is that women loving women could be legally persecuted and that ‘romantic’ friendships often surpassed our contemporary understanding of friendships.1 Likewise, we are aware that sexuality was regulated and subject to norms. Nevertheless, if one examines the relationship between woman loving women in certain spaces, it becomes evident that there was frequently a significant degree of fluidity in sexual matters, and that the boundaries of propriety could be significantly extended. In Paris in particular, gender dynamics underwent significant transformations and were subsequently challenged, especially at the court in Versailles and the Théâtre-Français in the very centre of la capitale. Despite sexuality being strictly controlled on paper, women loving women challenged these restrictions and therefore the traditional, binary gender order. Taking this into consideration, one must ask how these spaces contributed to changing gender dynamics in society at large, or if the women within these spaces challenged and changed them. Is what we can observe in Paris the emergence of a historical ‘sexual identity’ that is a precursor of female homosexuality, and if so, how was it perceived? How were the women at the core of this project an alterity and how did this influence their trajectories? This then raises the question of the social function and impact of female same-sex intimacy in mid-to-late eighteenth-century Paris
The accommodation of the conquest Jesuit missions in West Central Africa (1548-1681)
No full textDefence date: 05 November 2025Examining Board: Prof. Regina Grafe (University of Cambridge); Prof. Giancarlo Casale (European University Institute); Prof. Carlos Alberto de Moura Ribeiro Zeron (University of São Paulo); Prof. Lexie Cook (Northwestern University)This dissertation focuses on the activity of the Jesuits in West Central Africa from the midsixteenth until the mid-seventeenth century. This period was marked by deep historical transformations, in a context of fluid frontiers. I based my research on the hypothesis that Jesuit missionaries continuously played a fundamental role in negotiating religious, political, military, and commercial alliances with diverse African authorities. This effort of intercultural mediation involved many agents, such as other Catholic missionaries, Portuguese officials, and Dutch merchants. However, unlike all these different groups, the Jesuits conserved a collective unity that no other group in the region would maintain throughout all these decades. This coherent presence in the region explains the social relevance that the Jesuits gathered, expanding their activities far beyond the mere religious conversion of the “gentiles” and the instruction of Christian elites. The Jesuits also acted as healing specialists, diplomatic facilitators, military strategists, slave traders, etc. Thus, departing from the perspective of the Jesuits proved to be a strategic choice to frame my research from a global and relational perspective. I observed how, according to the circumstances, the Jesuits and their African interlocutors were keen to build communicative bridges between them. However, one of the main findings of my research was that, as far as the Portuguese presence in Angola expanded in the second half of the seventeenth century, the space of communication between the Christian missionaries and their African interlocutors diminished
Litigating colonial self-determination
No full textDefence date: 20 June 2025Examining Board: Prof. Sarah M.H. Nouwen (European University Institute, Supervisor); Prof. Arnulf Becker Lorca (European University Institute); Prof. Gleider Hernández (KU Leuven); Prof. Jamie Trinidad KC (University of Cambridge; University of Gibraltar)The right to self-determination of colonial peoples is a keystone in the modern international legal order. But as decolonization dropped off the agenda, the last remaining colonial peoples found themselves with a formidable but ageing right, and no means of exercising it. Denied meaningful access to the UN or the ICJ, various state, quasi-state, non-state, civil society, and individual actors have turned to litigation in an attempt to retool this twentieth-century right for twenty-first century decolonisation campaigns. Taking the situations of Western Sahara and the Chagos Archipelago, I investigate what Mauritius, the Front Polisario, and the Chagossians sought to achieve through litigation before domestic, European, and international tribunals, how they deployed international law in court, and whether these strategies worked on their own terms. To better understand the grievances behind these litigations, what the litigants sought to achieve, and why certain arguments were raised in certain contexts, I conducted month-long stays in the Saharawi Refugee Camps and Mauritius, and over fifty interviews with legal officials, diplomats, community leaders, and the lawyers they instructed. Combining close analysis of generally overlooked and previously unaccessed court submissions with a rich body of qualitative data, my thesis shows what these actors sought to do with international law and how this panned out at the level of legal argument in court. Taken together, these cases refine our understanding of who does international law, where it gets done, and what it can and cannot achieve. In doing so, I provide an account of international law as a powerful if imperfect instrument that can be deployed against the old powers outside the old forums by new, sometimes self-taught, and increasingly strategic Third World actors
Children's rights in Regional Organizations : bureaucratic agency and normative change
No full textDefence date: 15 April 2025Examining Board: Prof. Jeffrey T. Checkel (European University Institute, Supervisor); Prof. Stephanie C. Hofmann (European University Institute); Prof. Andrea Liese (University of Potsdam); Prof. Tobias Lenz (Leuphana University of Lüneburg)How do regional bureaucrats shape the institutionalization of children’s rights in Regional Organizations (ROs)? In this thesis, I draw on a most-different case design tracing institutionalization processes in the African Union, the Council of Europe, and the European Union to answer this question. Although ROs in both regions differ in contextual factors (e.g., historical backgrounds and staff size of RO secretariats), they exhibit surprisingly similar for-mal children’s rights institutionalization, including mainstreaming attempts, in 2022. Based on an abductive research approach, I develop a constructivist theoretical framework, foregrounding three mechanisms of regional bureaucratic agency: subsidiarity, consistency, and orchestration. I argue that regional bureaucrats shape children’s rights institutionalization by relying on either subsidiarity (referring to a low voice level of RO member states during UN treaty-making) or consistency (referring to a high voice level of RO member states during UN treaty-making). In both cases, bureaucrats also employ orchestration techniques, engaging intermediaries, including NGOs, UN entities, and bureaucrats in other ROs. Moreover, I offer exploratory insights into the differing timing of initial agenda-setting and the substance of agenda-setting over time. Empirically, I draw on 60 interviews, archival, and online policy documents. Theoretically, I contribute to the literature on bureaucratic agency in IOs and norm contestation. I highlight the relevance of RO member states’ voice levels during UN treaty-making as a reference point to understand how regional bureaucrats set the agenda, institutionalize issues, and re-act to member state contestation
Multinational corporations and economic inequality : rethinking corporate governance and human rights
No full textDefence date: 09 December 2025
Examining Board: Prof. Neha Jain (European University Institute, Supervisor); Prof. Simon Deakin (University of Cambridge, external supervisor); Prof. Mathias Siems (European University Institute); Prof. Claire Bright (Nova School of Law).Economic inequality has grown dramatically within many countries in recent decades, with far-reaching consequences for society. Rising disparities in income and wealth can undermine economic growth, reduce access to healthcare, education, housing, and contribute to political and social unrest. These consequences underscore the urgency of addressing inequality. States have traditionally led efforts to address inequality, typically through tax-and-transfer programs. Yet economic globalization, capital mobility, and political polarization increasingly constrain the effectiveness of these domestic measures, while international coordination remains limited. This context creates transnational distributive governance gaps in which no single state can correct the distributional outcomes of global economic activity. As they operate within these governance gaps, multinational corporations (MNCs) play a central role in shaping the global distribution of economic value through decisions on wages, global value chains, and tax strategies. Their decisions have important implications for inequality. Yet the potential role of MNCs in mitigating inequality alongside states remains little examined. In response, this thesis examines how MNCs can address economic inequality within their existing corporate governance and human rights responsibilities. First, it argues that where state action is constrained and the efficiency costs of inequality are significant, it may be more effective for corporations to internalize their inequality externalities. Second, it contends that certain business practices with important impacts on inequality, such as wage disparities and tax avoidance, can amount to adverse human rights impacts under the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), and thus fall within the scope of human rights due diligence. This thesis ultimately contributes a practical legal and policy framework, grounded in corporate governance and human rights, for MNCs to play a more active role in addressing economic inequality.Chapter 2 'Corporate human rights responsibilities : a European Union takeover of business and human rights?' of the PhD thesis draws upon an earlier version published as an article 'Human rights in EU sustainable finance' (2025) in the journal 'Journal of financial regulation'
I sanction therefore I am : a genealogy of the emergence of international sanctioning as an EU foreign policy practice
No full textDefence date: 17 September 2025Examining Board: Prof. Jeffrey Checkel (European University Institute, Supervisor); Prof. Stephanie Hofmann (European University Institute, Co-Supervisor); Prof. Niklas Bremberg (Stockholm University); Prof. Clara Portela (University of Valencia)This thesis proposes a genealogy of the European Union sanctions policy by tracing the emergence of ‘unilateral sanctioning’, conceptualised as a foreign policy practice, through 4 episodes of European sanctions’ history. The dominant approaches investigating sanctions have mainly conceptualised sanctions as mere instruments of foreign policy, neither particularly surprising nor questionable. Actors of international politics have objectives, and sanctions are simply instruments to achieve those objectives. The sanctioners’ ‘objectives’— the belief that sanctions’ goals are worthy foreign policy objectives—and rationalities—the belief that sanctions are an adequate tool to pursue those objectives—has usually remained outside of the purview of the sanctions literature. This thesis, on the contrary, takes this ‘normalisation’ of international sanctions as a foreign policy tool as its central theme, focusing on the question of how some international actors become frequent users of international sanctions. To that aim, it studies the European Union's conversion from being reticent about the use of unilateral sanctions in the early 80s to being a ‘mass-sanctioner’ in the 21st century. Building on the Practice Turn, I argue that in order to understand this shift, one has to understand unilateral sanctioning as a social practice. Theoretically, this thesis conceptualises sanctioning as a specific type of international practice, a foreign policy practice (FPP). The distinctive characteristic of foreign policy practices is that they are the practices of collective assemblages centred around states’ bureaucratic capabilities and legal sovereignty. Thus, FPPs emerge from an assemblage of discourses, objects, techniques, legal texts, and foreign policy-making practices. The conceptual innovation here is that foreign policy practices produce their assemblages as much as the assemblages produce the foreign policy practices. The practice (re-)makes the practitioners, while the practitioners (re-)make the practice. Therefore, investigating the emergence of sanctioning as a foreign policy practice requires tracing the practice of sanctioning at two distinct levels: as a state behaviour and as an emerging ‘sanctioning assemblage’ on which this foreign policy practice relies. Europe’s conversion to international sanctioning thus serves to illustrate how foreign policy practices emerge, evolve and get inscribed in the state’s foreign policy-making assemblages. 8 Empirically, building on original archival sources, interviews and secondary literature, the thesis offers a historical account of the conversion of European policy-makers to sanctioning through four episodes of Europe’s sanctions history. It first introduces how multilateral sanctioning emerged as an international practice at the end of World War I, in the wake of the re-modelling of international politics around the League of Nations and its sanctioning powers. The second empirical chapter investigates how the European Community reluctantly started to use unilateral sanctions in the 80s and how it contributed to remodelling the European integration model, most notably by mending the rift between the intra-European foreign policy coordination through the European Political Co-operation (EPC) and the economic and trade governance inside the European Community (EC) framework. The next chapter turns to the sanctions reforms movement of the 90s and early 2000s. In doing so, it investigates how the contestation of existing sanctions practices led to the crystallisation of a generative Community of Practice of sanctioners, which collaboratively redefined what counts as competent sanctioning and thus participated in a transformation of the foreign policy practices of both the United Nations and the European Union. Finally, the last empirical chapter, focusing on EU sanctions regimes against Russia from 2014 to 2024, studies how the EU moved away from its 2000s ‘European way of sanctioning’. In doing so, I show how the de-targetisation of EU sanctions contributed to reshaping the EU foreign policy-making assemblage, notably by putting the European Commission at its centre
Why are some public servants more professional than others? : how individual-institution interactions make-or break-good governance
No full textDefence date: 30 September 2025Examining Board: Prof. Ellen Immergut (European University Institute, Supervisor); Prof. Arnout Van de Rijt (European University Institute); Prof. Victor Lapuente (University of Gothenburg, External Supervisor); Prof. Robert H. Cox (University of South Carolina)Despite a century of bureaucratic reforms aimed at ensuring ethical conduct, legal and structural measures often fall short. These persistent differences in state performance raise an important question: Why are some public servants more professional than others? Chapters One and Two conceptually suggest that ethical behavior arises from the interaction between individuals and institutions—a relationship not yet modeled theoretically or empirically in the field of governance. Consequently, similar characteristics may activate different psychological responses depending on the institutional context, leading to diverging, even opposite, ethical outcomes. Chapter Three empirically validates this framework, showing that conscientious individuals uphold impartiality within merit-based systems but are less committed in contexts of favoritism. By contrast, individuals with high Public Service Motivation (PSM) consistently maintain impartiality even in non-meritocratic contexts. Chapter Four evaluates civil servants’ responses to political directives in Spain and Sweden. A list experiment, employing a novel measure of ideological alignment, indicates that ideological alignment increases impartiality violations among temporary employees but reduces them among permanent staff in Spain. A vignette experiment further shows that individuals with high PSM resist political innovation directives in Spain but follow them in Sweden, while peer initiatives produce exact opposite responses. Chapter Five identifies civil servants at risk of corruption based on demographic and political characteristics. Analyzing administrative records from Brazil’s federal executive, I find that men, long-serving employees, temporary political appointees, and those at the lowest and highest salary levels face a higher risk of corruption sanctions. By contrast, civil servants politically aligned with the governing coalition are significantly less sanctioned, suggesting political protection. By theoretically and empirically linking psychological characteristics with institutional contexts, this dissertation contributes to the understanding of how good governance emerges. The evidence suggests that neither individual traits nor institutions alone can produce reliable outcomes. Instead, only through their interaction can we truly understand the causes of ethical behavior and, ultimately, why some states are better governed than others