Steven BLOCKMANS

Steven Blockmans is an Associate Senior Research Fellow, and previously Director of Research and Senior Research Fellow, at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS, Brussels). He is also Senior Fellow at the International Centre for Defence and Security (ICDS, Tallinn), Visiting Professor at the College of Europe (Bruges, Natolin, Tirana), and Editor-in-Chief of the European Foreign Affairs Review.

He is a frequent commentator on EU affairs at major media outlets and regularly briefs senior policy practitioners from the European Union, its member states and G20 country governments. Blockmans has testified at the foreign affairs and international trade committees of the European Parliament and the UK House of Commons. He was also a member of a track 1,5 process between the EU and Russia and track 2 processes between the EU and India, Mexico and the UK.

Blockmans is the author of Tough Love: the EU’s relations with the Western Balkans (Asser Press 2007) and The Obsolescence of the European Neighbourhood Policy (Rowman & Littlefield 2017) and has (co-)edited more than 20 volumes, including The EU’s Role in Global Governance (Oxford University Press 2013), The EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (Edward Elgar 2018) and a trilogy on Democracy in the EU (Rowman & Littlefield 2020). He served as rapporteur of high-level task forces on European Defence Union (chaired by Javier Solana, 2015), EU Institutional Reform (chaired by Danuta Hübner, 2017) and the European External Action Service (chaired by Pierre Vimont, 2021).

For more than 25 years he has combined his academic work with contract research carried out for EU and national donors, consultancy activities and training for professionals. He has advised governments of third countries on their relations with the EU and worked on numerous technical assistance projects in wider Europe and Asia. From 2007 to 2009 he served as a long-term expert on legal approximation in the framework of an EU-funded project in support for the Ministry of European Integration of Albania.

Blockmans was a tenured Professor of EU External Relations Law and Governance at the University of Amsterdam (2012-2022). Before that, he was Head of Research at the Asser Institute, an international law centre based in The Hague. From 2010 to 2014, he was a Special Visiting Professor at the Law Faculty of University of Leuven.