The Politics and IR programme was honoured to host Professor Christian Lequesne, Senior Research Professor at the distinguished Sciences Po University in Paris, to give the inaugural European Review of International Studies (ERIS) Journal annual lecture.

While the substance of Professor Lequesne’s lecture was concerned with his research on the European External Action Service (EEAS), he took the opportunity to make a strong argument for scholars in international relations to seek to bridge the gap between actors and the foreign policy decisions that they enact.  Too often he argued the focus was on one or the other.  His research leads him to conclude that the unique characteristics of the EEAS can only be understood by a focus on the practice of how the policy is created.  At the heart of this practice is a tension between the member state diplomats and officials drawn from the European institutions.  Only by deconstructing the habitual actions of these two different sets of actors can the policy outcomes of the EEAS be appreciated.  His lecture was extremely well attended by the politics and IR student body, for whom the material was directly relevant to their current modules.