COST Action ENTER Short Term Scientific Mission grant: Dr Kateryna Zarembo, Guest Researcher at the Technical University Darmstadt

Dr Kateryna Zarembo, Guest Researcher at the Technical University Darmstadt, Political Science Department, and a senior lecturer at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, received a Short Term Scientific Mission (STSM) grant to finalize the work on her article “Normative Power at Its Unlikeliest: EU Norms, Soviet Legacy and Security Sector Reform in Ukraine” (in coauthorship with Gergana Noutcheva, University of Maastricht).

The article is scheduled for inclusion in the Special Issue “Normative Power in the Planetary Organic Crisis” in Cooperation and Conflict, edited by Ian Manners (2022, forthcoming) and concluded by Thomas Diez and Ben Rosamond, to mark the 20th anniversary of the Manners’ original Normative Power Europe article. The paper traces the effects of EU normative power on the security sector reform in Ukraine.  It examines the encounter between EU’s norms of political governance and domestic political norms, emphasising the agency of domestic societies and the importance of domestic normative structures in the process of norm diffusion. The evidence is provided from the security sector reform in Ukraine which goes against an EU incentive-based explanation and reveals the internal struggle between liberal democratic norms and deeply engrained attitudes, institutions and behaviour linked to the Soviet legacy. The paper shows how EU normative power gradually empowers domestic constituencies and overcomes domestic structural resistance to change leading to democratic advances in a sector least likely to reform.

The STSM grant allowed Dr Zarembo to finalize her work which was interrupted by the Russian full scale invasion in Ukraine and at the same time emphasized the relevance of the article’s argument.