Master specialisation: Europe: Borders, Identity and Governance

• Description

• Career prospects

• Programme

• Course descriptions

• Elective courses at the Radboud University Nijmegen

• Elective courses off campus

• Contact

Description

In this master specialization we will train our eyes on the much debated issue of national and European identity, national and European borders and national and European governance. Specifically, we will focus on the dialectical relationship between national sovereignty and identity, on the one hand, and pan-European identities and institutional community cohesion on the other. In addition, we will study in detail the highly important as well as contested external policy of the European Union and her role in the world. Concrete themes in this master specialization are e.g.: European internal market, forms of European citizenship and degrees of European identity, the power of ‘’Brussels’’, national identity, transnational governance, multi-level governance, cross-border co-operation, the EU’s external border regime, Frontex, border regions, geopolitics of states, geopolitical identity conflicts, multicultural society, and European post-colonialism.

Career Prospects

With the master Europe: Borders, Identities and Governance you enter into a very interesting and rapidly growing sector of the job market. The master prepares students for a professional career in many attractive (international) jobs in all sectors of society, be it government, semi-government, business or academia. You will be able to apply the scientific insights and the practical skills you have acquired to topics including Europeanisation, internationalisation, borders, identities, cross-border governance, conflicts, as well as international cooperation and politics.

Working for a local, provincial, or national (e.g. Foreign Affairs) government, you could become responsible for sharing expertise and delivering advice on cross-border cooperation, international mobility, the location of international firms and investments, or for advising on acquiring European Union funds.

Another major category of jobs can be found in the field of consultancy and advisory firms. As a consultant or advisor, you may find yourself writing a programme or project on the internationalisation of a region or city, or you may assist regional and city governments in getting and managing EU funds (project and process management).

This master is focused of course not only on preparing for jobs on the national market. It is also very well-suited as a preparation for an international career. One could think of working for the European Parliament, European Commission or related institutions throughout Europe. The master can serve, for example, to prepare you for a career working as a programme officer with a European Organisation or as an international European affairs expert in a firm.

The last category that we wish to mention is the rapidly growing job market for academic researchers and/or lecturers with one of the many Dutch or international research institutes and schools studying European border, identity and governance issues.

Programme

Course descriptions

Our Common Ground: Human geographic research colloquium

This course is a commons course for all Human Geography master students. This course has the form of a seminar or colloquium, in which students can partly co-determine the research issues it will deal with. This course focuses current debates in our discipline and how they are related to our own research. It also provides the opportunity to inform fellow students about the progress in your research and ask them advise. A mix of different activities will be employed in this course, such as jointly discussing selected articles from the latest issues of the 'top'-jounals in our field, present and discuss research proposals and the intermediary results of our research, invite professional experts who are relevant for our research for contributing to the colloquium. As far as feasible also the activities developed in the framework of the renomated Alexander von Humboldt Lecture series in Human Geography will be part of this course. Students will report on the different activities in this course, from the perspective of their own research.. In this way students will be actively involved in the real research. Students will learn to independently critically reflect on and relate to the developments in the scientific community of our discipline and will gather highly topical knowledge about latest developments in our field.

Geopolitics of Borders

Drawing and marking spatial boundaries is one of the fundamental ways in which human societies organise themselves. This course will provide incoming masters students an advanced seminar in the field of the geopolitics of borders. To this end, the course adopts a largely critical geopolitical perspective. Critical geopolitics refers to a body of scholarship that emerged in the early 1990s and bridges the academic disciplines of Geography and International Relations. Setting itself in opposition to ‘classical’ Geopolitics, critical geopolitics conceptualises geopolitics as a set of discourses, representations and practices, rather than as a coherent, neutral and objectivist science.

Amongst others, within geopolitics this has also lead to the analysis of popular manifestations of geopolitics, such as through films, pop stars, novels and media. A recent interesting example that could be an interesting topic of studying for instance is how the conflict in Belfast is related to the fight for democracy in Iran by U2 during their concert in Spain, Barcelona:

More in general, this course seeks to understand the practices of debordering and rebordering in societies. We will notably analyse thinking about the borders at significant geo-political conjunctures such as the rise of late 19th-century European imperialism, post-WWI nationalism(s), Cold War frontier geopolitics, the rhetoric of post-1989 ‘borderless’ globalisation and the emergence of cross-border cooperation, the contemporary period of (re)securitised boundary-making and (re)bordering of the ‘west’ vis a vis the Moslim civilisation). Literature that will be used will be coming from statesmen, intellectuals of statecraft, geo-politicians, geographers and like-minded folk who have had and have a significant influence in setting the conceptual framework for understanding the borders – both internal as well as external – of the world we live in today.

Cross-Border Governance

The nation-state is no longer what it once was, or so it seems. Once the privileged bearer of history, society and all forward-oriented politics, its powers have now purportedly been eroded and ‘hollowed out’ by the economic forces of globalisation, as decision-making capacity has been siphoned upwards to supranational institutions (e.g., EU, WTO, IMF, United Nations) and downwards to ‘global city regions’, ‘splintered’ metropoles, post-Fordist industrial districts, and other myriad sources of localised urban ‘buzz’. This course examines the shift from an exclusive and centuries-long reliance on a firmly bounded national government and its associated interstate system to novel configurations of cross-border governance operating above, below and through the classic post-Westphalian system of individualized nation-states. A central premise of the course is that in our current world issues of political and economic governance must be grasped today through a transboundary lens, addressing matters that can no longer remain under the exclusive control of individual nation-states.

Specifically, the course will undertake a selective reading of literatures grouped around five (5) key philosophical perspectives on bordering practices within the EU today: Marxist political-economy approaches; Foucauldian ‘governmentality’ perspectives; Europe-orientated liberal intergovernmentalist narratives; ‘cosmopolitan’ theories of transnational democracy, and postcolonial engagements with ‘empire’. By carefully scrutinising these often discrepant conceptual frames, and via a range of case study analyses, key categories of political geographical analysis will be critically re-examined: state, territory, sovereignty, scale, community, border, city and citizenship.

Preparing the Master Thesis

This course is aims to teach you how to structurally develop and reflect upon your research design and the methods used for data collection and analysis. After completing this course, you will have completed your research proposal for the master thesis, including a detailed project planning. By doing this you will be able to make a 'flying start' with your actual master thesis project. In this course you will further develop your skills in preparing and elaborating a research proposal. The final goal is to prepare a concrete written research proposal in the format of a research proposal for the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). This will be evaluated by the thesis supervisor and if possible also by an (external) 'expert'. You will be assigned a thesis supervisor as soon as possible to provide feedback on drafts versions of the proposal and related exercises building up to the proposal. Furthermore you will be expected to also use the expertise gathered during your study to discuss, evaluate and criticise methodological aspects of the proposals of your fellow students. To stimulate this process we will deal explicitly with ways to set up a bibliography, an expert network (consisting of scholars but also practitioners and policymakers concerned with themes of relevance to the topic of the master thesis. Before starting the actual research for your master thesis the proposal has to be graded by your supervisor as sufficient. An important focus therein will be on the degree to which translation of research questions into a concrete research design and empirical methods has been achieved.

Master Thesis (including Research Apprenticeship)

On the basis of your approved research proposal you start your master thesis research at the organisation of your choice where you do your research apprenticeship. You will be supervised by both a supervisor in the apprenticeship organisation and by your master thesis supervisor at the university. Since this is the 'proof of the pudding' you will be expected to conduct your research independently. Your supervisors will of course provide the necessary support you as advisors and coaches, but you will have to direct your research work yourself, and take the first initiative. You are also responsible for the time management of the research and of your research apprenticeship. Our experience shows that such a master thesis research project will take at least six months, although not always full time. Your master thesis research should be a scientific theory led empirical research project taking a practical socio-spatial problem as the starting point. Ultimately your research efforts should result in a complete and innovative academic report: the master thesis.

Possible Thesis Themes

• National and European borders
• National and European identities
• Europe in the world
• European citizenship
• Multicultural society
• Geopolitics of states, nations and regions
• European federalism
• European post-colonialism
• European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP)
• European transnationalism
• Transnational and multilevel governance
• Crossborder cooperation
• External and internal migration policy
• European internal market
• (Im)mobility and labour markets
• Open Borders

Elective courses at the Radboud University Nijmegen

Department of Human Geography

• Conflicting Theories: Applying theoretical approaches of conflicts, territories and identities (specialisation: Conflicts, Territories and Identities)
• Political and Geographical Conflict Resolution (specialisation: Conflicts, Territories and Identities)
• Multi-Cultural Society (Geography)
• International Migration and Development (specialisation: Globalisation, Migration and Development)

Department of Spatial Planning

• European Spatial Planning and the EU Territorial Cooperation Agenda
• Comparative Planning
• International Environmental Politics

Elsewhere at the Radboud University Nijmegen

• Dutch Courses on Europe
• Dutch Courses on the European Union
• English Courses on Europe

Elective courses off campus

• Courses of European Studies (University of Amsterdam)
• Courses of Master of European Studies: European Diversity and Integration (University of Leuven)
• Courses of European Studies (University of Leiden)
• Courses of European Studies (University of Maastricht)
• Courses of European Studies (University of Twente)

Contact

For more information please contact the study advisor: MSc. Jackie van de Walle (j.vandewalle@fm.ru.nl), Room TvA 3.1_38, telephone: +31-(0)24 - 361 60 49.

You can also download a flyer on this master specialisation.