1 January 2018 — Kickoff Horizon 2020 Project SEnECA
On 1 January 2018, the project “SEnECA – Strengthening and Energizing EU-Central Asia Relations”, funded by the European Commission, will be launched by the project coordinators Dr. Katrin Böttger, Deputy Director of the Institut für Europäische Politik (IEP), Berlin and Prof. Dr. Michael Kaeding, Professor of European Union politics at the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE).
Together with their international consortium, Dr. Böttger and Prof. Kaeding applied to a call of the EU research and innovation programme Horizon 2020 in February 2017. The EU Commission chose SEnECA from a total of 13 project proposals on the topic of “The EU and Central Asia” and signed the grant agreement on 3 October 2017. The funding by the European Commission for the two-year project totals 1.5 mio. Euro.
The aim of the project is threefold: (1) It will establish a network of researchers working on Central Asia in Europe and on European integration in the Central Asian region. (2) It will accompany the revision of the EU-Central Asia Strategy by providing policy recommendations for Europe’s future policy towards the region. (3) It will promote the relations between the European Union, its member states and Central Asia. Therefore, in addition to other methods, stakeholders from politics, economics and the cultural sphere of the involved regions will be interviewed to analyze the current relations between the regions and make policy recommendations to the EU.
In addition to the UDE and the IEP, ten organizations from the EU and Central Asia are members of the project consortium: the Central Asia Institute for Strategic Studies (CAISS) from Kazakhstan, the Center of Sociological Research “Zerkalo” from Tajikistan, the University of World Economy and Diplomacy (UWED) from Uzbekistan, the Kyrgyz National University named after Jusup Balasagyn (KNU) from Kyrgyzstan and Ynanch-Vepa from Turkmenistan as well as the French Centre international de formation européenne (CIFE), the Trans European Policy Studies Association (TEPSA) based in Brussels, the British Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), WiseEuropa from Poland and the Latvian Institute of International Affairs (LIIA).
Project Team
Dr. Katrin Böttger
Julian Plottka