The EU-IANUS researcher Raül Hernández Sagrera obtained this last December the PhD in International Relations and European Integration at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). His PhD thesis, supervised by Esther Barbé (IBEI-UAB), had the title of ‘The European Union and Eastern Europe migration policy convergence beyond Europeanisation: the cases of Russia, Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia’.
The dissertation falls within the EU-Ianus project and addresses the question of what norms are adopted in the EU-Eastern Europe migration policy convergence, in the context of the European Neighbourhood Policy. Three models of policy convergence (towards EU norms, towards international norms and towards bilaterally-agreed norms) are identified, depending mainly on the structure of power and perceptions of legitimacy in Eastern Europe. Migration policy convergence is applied to the cases of readmission, visa, border management and labour migration. The doctoral thesis concludes that the EU-Eastern Europe migration policy instruments are much more oriented at promoting security than mobility.
Raül Hernández i Sagrera is European Neighbourhood Policy Coordinator at the Directorate General for Neighbourhood and Enlargement Negotiations of the European Commission. He has been a member in the research group Observatory of European Foreign Policy since 2007. During his PhD, he has been visiting researcher at the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels and the International Centre for Policy Studies in Kyiv.