Publications

The EU’s 2020-2024 Action Plan on Human Rights and Democracy, in its third iteration under the 2012 Strategic Framework, marks a renewed commitment to democracy as a stand-alone issue and introduces several new priority areas. However, it lacks clear guidelines for the implementation of its objectives, including specific timelines and designated responsibilities. Crucially, the Action Plan has struggled to adapt to rapidly evolving global dynamics, including full-scale conflicts that challenge the EU's core democratic values. The decision to extend the Action Plan till 2027, so that it aligns with the Multiannual Financial Framework, delays the prospect of major qualitative improvement to European democracy support. This policy brief critically assesses the 2020-2024 Action Plan and its Mid-Term Review, examining the implications of their design and implementation. It provides insights to inform the development of future policies in democracy and human rights, linking those with SHAPEDEM-EU approaches.

As the EU accelerates the process of adding new member states, it also needs to rethink the relationship between enlargement and democracy. The union should develop a “Copenhagen plus” approach to encourage more comprehensive democratic reforms in candidate countries.

This article addresses the puzzle of why the European Union (EU) struggles to learn from ineffective attempts to support democratization in the Arab world but instead continuously (re-)produces democracy support malpractices. To better understand this phenomenon, we draw from practice theory and conceptualize EU democracy support as practices performed by a community of insiders who act within a complex constellation of communities of practice. Due to the way in which communities function, decision-makers do not critically reflect on the background knowledge on which they base their practices and thus do not learn how to improve them. This constellation model offers a unique take on non-learning within the EU and in (policy-making) groups more generally. We illustrate the proposed conceptual framework through an empirical analysis of EU democracy support in Egypt, showing that the EU performs practices similar to those before the 2011 Revolution due to its inability to learn.

The EU’s failure to leverage strict conditionality emboldened Georgia’s government to pursue regressive policies. Ongoing protests should prompt Brussels to empower Georgian grassroots as catalysts for democratic change.

This Paper gives insights in the projects integrated analytical design and its implementation in three phases as well as two additional perspectives which SHAPEDEM-EU perceives to be of focal relevance to both democratisation and autocratisation. It concludes with an outlook on the expected impact of the project on society, policy and science.

The SHAPEDEM-EU Concept Manual represents the project’s common understandings of its essential terms. SHAPEDEM-EU’s goal is to rethink, reshape and review the EU’s support for democratic politics in its Eastern and Southern Neighbourhoods. The diverse and multi-perspective constellation of SHAPEDEM-EU’s partners, objectives and activities require a unified set of concepts to contextualise the ongoing work. Over the course of the project’s first 8 months, its partners collaborated to define the concepts listed in the manual. It serves as a guidance for users to familiarise themselves with how SHAPEDEM-EU perceives democracy support and its related concepts.

Through a bird’s eye view of thirty years of EU democracy support, highlighting the controversies in its pursuit as well asits endurance as a foreign policy goal, this paper explores the under-researched question of how democratic contestation inside the EU and its member states influences EU foreign policy and democracy support.

The paper discusses the juxtaposition of digital transformation (DT) and democracy support and democracy contestation. While the DT is defined as an adaptation and implementation of digital technologies into political and social processes, digital tools are seen as such that could be used both by democratic and non-democratic systems and are perceived as ‘neutral’. The paper aims to reveal how digital transformation in governance, public services, civic engagement, and more broadly in everyday social practices impacts democracies and democracy support. The digital transformation instruments are reviewed in the context of democracy support and democracy contestation and the conceptual framework for understanding of the role of DT as a cross-cutting issue in the SHAPEDEM-EU work packages is provided. The paper sets the ontological framework for the nexus of DT and democracy support or contestation. It discusses digital democracy and digital authoritarianism first on a conceptual level and then through the analysis of digital instruments and solutions. While they are sorted into two toolboxes – democratic and autocratic – almost all of them could be applied equally to enhance democratic support or to contest democracy and both to facilitate and to circumvent democratic practices and rights. Also, the interconnection of two cross-cutting issues of the SHAPEDEM-EU project: gender equality and DT, is outlined. Finally, the paper reviews EU policies concerning DT and the question of media literacy and its relation to democracy support and democracy learning.

The clandestine standoff between Belarusians and Lukashenka’s regime continues. To ensure regional and global security, the EU needs a coherent strategy in support of the Belarusian people.

Brussels is overlooking Egypt’s lack of democratic reforms to secure Cairo’s cooperation in other fields. This short-sighted approach is emboldening the regime and hurting Egyptian civil society.