Speaker Richard Youngs is a senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program, based at Carnegie Europe. He works on EU foreign policy and on issues of international democracy.

Youngs is also a professor of international relations at the University of Warwick. Prior to joining Carnegie in July 2013, he was the director of the European think tank FRIDE. He has held positions in the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office and as an EU Marie Curie fellow. He was a senior fellow at the Transatlantic Academy in Washington, DC, from 2012 to 2013.

Youngs has authored fifteen books. His most recent works are Rebuilding European Democracy: Resistance and Renewal in an Illiberal Age (Bloomsbury/Tauris, 2021), The European Union and Global Politics (Macmillan, 2021), Civic Activism Unleashed: New Hope or False Dawn for Democracy? (Oxford University Press, 2019) and Europe’s Eastern Crisis: The Geopolitics of Asymmetry (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Link to Richard Youngs’ new book: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/european-union-and-global-politics-9781352011883/

Richard Youngs’s webpage at Carnegie: https://carnegieeurope.eu/experts/828

Abstract

Facing a daunting array of international challenges, the EU has in recent years changed the way it approaches geopolitics. It has moved from being a transformative to protective power. The Union's international identity has changed in far-reaching ways and this requires us to rethink some long-held assumptions about EU foreign and security policy. In some ways this shift strengthens the EU's ability to confront the most pressing geopolitical issues, but it has also narrowed the Union's strategic vision in worrying ways.