Dr Sarah Wolff, lecturer in the School of Politics & IR, has won two prestigious awards for her research from the Leverhulme Trust and Fullbright-Schuman Program.
Dr Wolff's Leverhulme Trust Fellowship will look at the European Union's engagement, or lack thereof, with Moroccan and Tunisian Islamist parties.
Until the Arab revolts, security concerns, and Islamist political parties' alleged non-adherence to Western liberal values, explained the lack of EU engagement. Nonetheless, empirical evidence has shown regular EU engagement through its foreign policy. Drawing from literature on risks and policy networks, Dr Wolff intends to demonstrate that domestic specificities, rational preferences and past legacies contest this security-Political Islam-‘one-size-fits-all’ argument. This project will also inform EU foreign policy in the Arab world by furthering research on religious-oriented political parties.
Her Fulbright-Schuman award, in collaboration with the Transatlantic Academy, will support research on whether religion matters in transatlantic partners’ engagement with Islamist political parties.
This research project will seek to demonstrate that networks of engagement exist between transatlantic partners through looking at two case studies: (i) a comparative analysis of the European External Action Service and State department foreign policies since 2011, and (ii) a comparative analysis of the US National Endowment for Democracy and the European Endowment for Democracy.
Dr Wolff joined the School of Politics & IR in 2012 and conducts research on EU public policies, Justice and Home Affairs (JHA), migration and border management policies, as well as EU-Arab Mediterranean relations. Her latest monograph is The Mediterranean Dimension of the European Union’s Internal Security (Palgrave, 2012). Further details on Dr Wolff's research are here.