Dr Giselle Bosse is Associate Professor and Jean Monnet Chair in EU International Relations at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University. She is also a Fellow at the European Democracy Hub in Brussels.
Her research focuses on EU relations with countries in the post-Soviet area, and EU democracy promotion through the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) and the Eastern Partnership (EaP), with an emphasis on EU policies towards Belarus and other autocratic regimes in the region. Bosse’s work focuses specifically on the role of values in the EU’s international relations, including recent publications on how norms- and rights- based justifications influenced the EU’s response to Russia’s war against Ukraine.
She has acquired several major research grants as principal investigator, including a VENI Grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) for her project on: ‘Explaining Europe’s failure to deal with autocratic regimes: Which actors make and break effective democracy promotion?’ (2013-2016), an NWO ASPASIA Research Grant for her project on: ‘Non-state actors in EU foreign policy?’ (2018-2022) and an NWO grant for Refugee Scientist fellowships (HESTIA) in 2019. In 2020, she was awarded a Jean Monnet Chair in EU Politics in a Changing Global Context (CHANCE). She is also work-package leader in two EU Horizon-funded projects, EMBRACE (2022-2025) and INVIGORATE (2024-2027), which examine obstacles to democratisation in the European neighbourhood and identify ways to overcome them. Bosse also participates in the Jean Monnet Networks EUCTER and RELAY.
Bosse has widely published her research in many international journals and books, inter alia in the Journal of Common Market Studies, Geopolitics, Europe-Asia Studies, Cooperation and Conflict and with Manchester University Press. She frequently presents her work at leading think tanks in Europe, and has contributed to several commissioned studies for EU institutions. She regularly appears as an expert commentator in the media, including NPO1, Euronews, Deutsche Welle, AFP, Libération or L1 Limburg.
She is co-director of the Centre for European Research in Maastricht (CERiM) and founder and co-coordinator of the Research Colloquium on ‘Geopolitics, Democratic Reform and Resilience in Central and Eastern Europe’, hosted and funded by the Netherlands Institute of Governance (NIG). Bosse is Research Associate at the Martens Centre in Brussels, and visiting professor at the College of Europe (Bruges) and the Diplomatic School of Armenia (Yerevan). Between 2020-2022, she served as Vice Dean Education at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and from 2016-2020 she was Programme Director of the Research Master European Studies. She has also been visiting fellow at the Brussels School of International Studies (BSIS) and at the Center for European Policy Studies (CEPS), Brussels.
Bosse holds an MA degree from the College of Europe (Natolin) and a PhD from the University of Aberystwyth, UK (Department of International Politics).