Steven Blockmans

Steven Blockmans is a Senior Research Fellow and the head of the EU Foreign Policy Unit at the Center for European Policy Studies (CEPS), an independent, non-partisan think tank based in Brussels which has been consistently ranked as one of the world’s top 10 think tanks in the Global Go To Think Tank Rankings, and has received the European Public Affairs Award for Think Tank of the Year on three occasions in the last six years. Steven is also Professor of EU External Relations Law and Governance at the University of Amsterdam (part-time) and one of the founding members of the Center for the Law of EU External Relations (CLEER). He holds a PhD in Law from Leiden University. He is the author of ‘Tough Love: the EU’s relations with the Western Balkans’ (Asser Press/CUP 2007) and the (co-)editor of more than 10 volumes, including ‘The EU’s Role in Global Governance’ (OUP 2013) and ‘Differentiated Integration in the EU: From the Inside Looking Out’ (CEPS 2014). For the past 15 years, he has worked on numerous technical assistance projects in pre-accession countries in Central and Eastern Europe, the Western Balkans and Turkey. From 2007 to 2009 he served as a long-term expert on legal approximation in the framework of a EuropeAid project in support for the Ministry of European Integration of Albania.