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The appointment of a new editorial team for an academic journal is an occasion for reflecting not only about the goals of a specific publication, but also about the relevance and intricacies of editorial work within the contemporary scientific landscape. Additionally, the process provided food for thought on the openings and limits of a disciplinary tradition - in this case, political science - within an institution, a country, a region and the larger academic community. Keywords: editorial, academic journals, political science as a discipline, scientometrics, standards, scientific integrity, open access

Discourse analysis has become a mantra for many young international relations scholars that would like to place their research within the camps of postmodern theorizing, increasingly fashionable yet still marginal enough to be attractive to those that do not set for the usual mainstream topics or methods. However, their work has been frequently put under much methodological pressure by positivist social scientists that sometimes reject the discourse analysis framework as too fluid to be a "proper" social research tool. Premising that discourse is a social practice, this paper proposes a non-Marxist argument for pushing forward this debate and for helping especially social constructivists in advancing their methodological concerns beyond the positivist-interpretativist dichotomy.

In this paper I deconstruct the foundations of regional integration and propose a social constructivist reconstruction of the ontological field of regionalism. More specifically, I first show that regions are notions not only of space but also of time and culture. Then, I reconstruct its related conceptual field (regionalism, regionalization, regional identity etc.), arguing that regional integration is an incomplete category of regionalism. Within this framework and as an alternative to regional integration, I build the concept of regional cohesiveness defined as the degree to which a group of actors inhabiting a contiguous space act and represent themselves as a group. This analytical model builds a multidimensional space for comprehensively mapping and exploring all forms of contemporary regionalism, from both institutional and normative/representational perspectives.

Academic and policy literature frequently supports the idea that the process of accession to the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization might have triggered the emergence and development of functional regional cooperation in the former communist space. In this article, using the cases of the Baltic Cooperation and Visegrád Group, I argue that, far from being enhanced by the EU and NATO enlargement processes, the regional dimension rarely found itself at ease with the institutional requisites for accession to these two Western organizations.

This is an edited and revised version of an interview recorded in September 2021, which served as closing remarks for the 3rd edition of the Research Methods School on Corruption and Anti-Corruption Analysis (CORAN), Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon (Portugal), 27-30 September 2021. The event was organized jointly with the Centre for International Cooperation and Development Studies (IDC) of the University of Bucharest, as part of the 7th edition of the International Interdisciplinary Conference of Political Research SCOPE: Science of Politics. The notes and specific references were added to support especially younger researchers who may not be very familiar with the field or with certain past events. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

This article introduces the special issue on the evolution of European Union development policy, against the background of fundamental challenges that have emerged since the 2009 Lisbon Treaty. The special issue's objective is to highlight the complex dynamics of a policy area that is called on to address the massive challenges of poverty, inequality, healthcare capacity, climate change, insecurity and weak governance in countries of the global south, and at the same time support European foreign policy objectives including political stability, migration management, access to resources and markets. In this introductory article, we attempt to sketch the broad outlines of the conceptual and practical dilemmas faced by a policy area that is supposed to be able to fix almost any problem. We observe that European development policy's evolution is driven by the tension between its raison d'etre as a concrete expression of global solidarity and international cooperation, and its increasing instrumentalisation in the service of European economic and security interests. We highlight some of the key challenges that have emerged in the last decade, including rising populist nationalism and Brexit within Europe, the changing nature of relationships between Europe and countries who receive EU aid, and the changing nature of development cooperation itself, exemplified by the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals. We outline the specific contributions the articles in this special issue make to research and policy debates on the themes we raise in this introduction. We conclude that the battle between the forces of solidarity and instrumentality has evolved EU development policy into an impossibly complex arena of competing norms, practices and institutions, which raises many open questions for future research.

This is an edited and revised version of an interview recorded in September 2021, which served as closing remarks for the 3rd edition of the Research Methods School on Corruption and Anti-Corruption Analysis (CORAN), Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon (Portugal), 27-30 September 2021. The event was organized jointly with the Centre for International Cooperation and Development Studies (IDC) of the University of Bucharest, as part of the 7th edition of the International Interdisciplinary Conference of Political Research SCOPE: Science of Politics. The notes and specific references were added to support especially younger researchers who may not be very familiar with the field or with certain past events.

This is an edited and revised version of an interview recorded in September 2021, which served as closing remarks for the 3rd edition of the Research Methods School on Corruption and Anti-Corruption Analysis (CORAN), Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon (Portugal), 27-30 September 2021. The event was organized jointly with the Centre for International Cooperation and Development Studies (IDC) of the University of Bucharest, as part of the 7th edition of the International Interdisciplinary Conference of Political Research SCOPE: Science of Politics. The notes and specific references were added to support especially younger researchers who may not be very familiar with the field or with certain past events. Keywords: corruption, political corruption, definitions of corruption, corruption studies, court cases, criminal investigations, scandal, methodology, legal protection of scholars, deregulation, super-rich, impact of COVID-19