Every year, the Brussels School celebrates its freshly graduated students with two academic awards. At our Congregation ceremony in November 2023, Conrad Helminger was awarded the John Groom Prize for best Politics student, while Politics student Hope Robinson received the John Macgregor Prize for best student overall. Both have shared some thoughts with us on their dissertation and time at BSIS.
Conrad Helminger:
“This award adds a special note to my journey – being recognized in this way is both humbling and motivating. My decision to study International Political Economy at Kent’s Brussels campus was driven by a desire to explore the distribution of power, wealth, and agency in a global context, all the while experiencing Brussels – a key center of international politics.
In my dissertation, I set out to investigate the strengthening economic relations between the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the EU considering that both regions are trying to navigate the instabilities caused by increasingly competitive US-China relations. The research led me to explore the intricacies of the EU’s trade policy making and the goals it pursues in Southeast Asia. Focusing on European business activities in Southeast Asia, I analyzed EU-ASEAN trade and investment flows and the web of treaties that govern interregional trade, investment, and taxation. The data revealed the key role of Singapore, whose regulatory environment, extensive network of international treaties, and large density of service providers are leveraged by businesses to channel goods, services, and investments in the region in a manner that minimizes their tax and tariff bills. As such, Singapore plays an important role for corporate strategies of European businesses and their global competitiveness, which is also reflected in the fact that it was the first ASEAN country the EU and UK concluded trade and investment agreements with.
My time at BSIS was enriching not only academically but also personally, having shared the journey with great classmates. My gratitude goes out to the supportive Brussels staff and the dedicated teachers and practitioners who went above and beyond to explain to us the intricacies of politics, economics, law, and Brussels.”
Hope Robinson:
“I’m sincerely honoured and humbled to be awarded the John Macgregor Prize of BSIS. Receiving this award is a testament to the unwavering support I received from friends, family, and faculty this past year.
At BSIS, I was lucky to find the ideal environment in which to study politics as strategic relations, that shape lives in what they assume, what they emphasize, and what they conceal – with significant effects for the governed. My dissertation was an attempt to apply this lens to the ongoing and deeply distressing drug toxicity crisis occurring in my home province of British Columbia, Canada, which is marked by an elevated level of opioid- and stimulant-related overdoses and deaths. For the last seven years, the provincial government has targeted this issue by adopting a comprehensive public health approach to drug use, that has been lauded as some of the most progressive drug policy in the world – yet has failed to improve the situation. In my analysis, I impute this failure to what I describe as “discursive depoliticization”: arguing that production of the “crisis” of “addiction” taking place at a discursive level limits the conditions of possibility and forecloses larger systemic change, by harnessing conceptual logics of health, addiction, risk, and harm that align with and reproduce the same register of rationality as that which it purports to differ from – that of a prohibitionist, criminalized, “eradicative” approach to drugs. I then point to a paradox at the heart of this new politics of drugs: that valuing biological life, “even of” an “addict”, does not equate to valuing and improving the conditions that shape one’s lived experience.
In pursuing this research, leaning on the brilliant scholarship of Carol Bacchi [1], I learned how challenging implicit and explicit causality and correlation within discourse can point to why troubling situations may persist despite continual political attention: because of how the problem itself is shaped within the policy designed to solve it . Further, I sought to shed some light on how power can work to disavow responsibility for the health and social inequities experienced by marginalized populations, even while claiming to care for their lives – as evidenced by the drug policy approach espoused by the BC government.
It is with immense gratitude that I acknowledge the opportunities for growth and intellectual exploration I had this past year at BSIS, and all those who helped me get here.”
[1] Carol Bacchi, Foucault, Policy and Rule: Challenging the Problem-Solving Paradigm. Institut for Historie, Internationale Studier og Samfundsforhold, Aalborg Universitet. FREIA’s tekstserie No. 74 (2010). https://doi.org/10.5278/freia.33190049