The EU and Russia in Their 'Contested Neighbourhood' ─ Multiple External Influences, Policy Transfer and Domestic Change

Literature on European Union influence in its Eastern neighbourhood has tended to focus on EU-level policies and prioritize EU-related variables.

This book seeks to overcome this EU-centric approach by connecting EU policies to the domestic and regional environment in which they are implemented. It looks at the way in which the EU seeks to influence the post-Soviet countries participating in the European Neighbourhood Policy/Eastern Partnership and domestic receptivity to EU's policies and templates. In explaining change, it brings together the multiple dimensions, including EU policy mechanisms, incentives, and conditionality, domestic elites' preferences strategies, regional interdependences and Russia's policies and reactions to EU's actions. Based upon extensive empirical investigation on EU policies in four countries Armenia, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine – and in four pivotal policy sectors - the book provides systematic and nuanced understanding of complex forces at work in the policy transfer process.

This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of international relations, European studies, democratization studies, East European Politics and area studies (post-Soviet/Eurasian studies).

Laure Delcour is Scientific Coordinator and Senior Research Fellow under the EU-funded FP7 project "Exploring the Security-Democracy Nexus in the Caucasus" (project CASCADE, FMSH, Paris). She holds a BA in History from Paris IV-Sorbonne as well as a MA and a PhD in Political Science from Sciences-Po Paris. Her research interests focus on EU policies and the adoption of EU templates in the post-Soviet space, as well as region-building initiatives in the post-Soviet space. She has an extensive experience in advising EU institutions and the French government on these topics.