Dr Nicolas Baygert

Nicolas BAYGERT holds a PhD in Information and Communication at CELSA (Paris IV-Sorbonne) and at the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL). University of Kent Alumni, He teaches at Sciences Po Paris, CELSA (Paris-Sorbonne), the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and at the Institute for Higher Social Communication Studies (IHECS), where he leads PROTAGORAS, a Think Tank dedicated to political and public communication. Dr. Nicolas Baygert has a broad experience in EU public affairs: after working for a Think Thank (CEPS) and for a communication and PA agency, he joined the European Commission as communication and press officer. Since 2012, Dr. Baygert has been working as an external consultant, providing strategic advice on political communication and PA. 

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Dr Gavin Sullivan

Gavin joined Kent Law School (KLS) as a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in January 2016. Prior to joining KLS he worked as a doctoral researcher in the Department of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands). His doctoral thesis – which examined the post-9/11 terrorism listing regime of the United Nations Security Council from a global socio-legal perspective – was awarded the distinction of cum laude and nominated for numerous international prizes.
Gavin’s current research focuses on the politics of global security law and data infrastructures. He uses socio-legal and ethnographic methods to critically examine contemporary security practices and problems of transnational and algorithmic governance. Gavin is especially interested in understanding how law changes when trying to counter unknown future threats and how new technologies, forms of expertise and knowledge practices help create and shape what law is.

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Dr María Vivas-Romero

María Vivas-Romero holds a PhD from the University of Liege (ULg), Belgium. She earned her Bachelor’s Degree at the University of Monterrey (UDEM), Mexico and her Master’s Degree on Population and Development Studies at the ULg. Her PhD dissertation explores the practices through which Peruvian and Colombian migrant domestic workers in the city of Brussels, negotiate their access to social protection. Her fieldwork took place in the city of Brussels as well in the cities abroad in which the migrant domestic workers she followed, negotiated their access to social protection, meaning: Lima-Chimbote (Peru) and Bogota-Medellin (Colombia). Her current research interests are migration and family studies as well as the reproduction of global inequalities in access to social protection. Other areas of interest are multi-sited ethnographic approaches, intersectional and post-colonial feminist approaches.

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Dr Luis Eslava

Dr Luis Eslava is a Senior Lecturer in International Law and Co-Director of the Centre for Critical International Law (CeCIL).

Luis teaches and researches in the areas of International Law, International Legal Theory and History, International Development, International Human Rights Law, Comparative Public Law, Anthropology of International Law, Global Governance and Global Political Economy, and Urban Law and Politics. Luis is an active member of the network Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL).

Bringing together insights from anthropology, history and legal and social theory, his work focuses on the multiple ways in which international norms, aspirations and institutional practices, both old and new, come to shape and become part of our everyday life, arguing that closer critical attention needs to be paid to this co-constitutive relationship between international law ‘up there’ and life ‘down here’.

In this spirit, his publications advance a series of new methodological parameters and applied case studies that aim to shed light on the simultaneously ideological and material, ground-level work that is done, each day, by international law, inviting the reader, in turn, to question what our response to it should be.

Luis is also a Senior Fellow at Melbourne Law School, an International Professor at Universidad Externado de Colombia, and a core member of the teaching faculty at Harvard Law School’s Institute for Global Law and Policy.

Luis is also a Co-Director of International Law and Politics Collaborative Research Network at the Law and Society Association (LSA) and a member of the editorial boards of Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development; the Latin American Law Review; and Contexto: Revista de Derecho Económico.

To read more about Luis’ research, you can visit his Beyond KLS page.

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Daniel Fiott

Daniel Fiott is a Visiting Lecturer at BSIS on the ‘European Foreign and Security Policy’ module. Daniel has also been a defence analyst at the EU Institute for Security Studies since 2016, where he analyses European defence policy and defence industrial issues. Prior to this, he worked for four years as a researcher at the Institute for European Studies at the Free University of Brussels (VUB) (2012-2016). At the VUB he analysed and lectured on various aspects of European security. From 2014-2016 he served as a fellow of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO). He was awarded this prestigious scholarship for his research on European defence industrial cooperation. In 2016 he was awarded the IISS’ ‘Palliser Prize’ for his work on EU-NATO cooperation. Daniel was educated at the University of Cambridge and the Free University of Brussels (VUB).

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Peter Claeys

Peter Claeys is an Assistant Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, in the research group APEC. He obtained his Ph.D. at the European University Institute, and after a Marie Curie Fellowship at AQR, became an Assistant Professor at the Universitat de Barcelona. His work focuses on the econometric modelling of various aspects of fiscal policy, including the macroeconomic effects of government spending, fiscal consolidation, spillover of budget decisions, fiscal federalism and more generally the interaction between monetary and fiscal policies. He has worked on various projects on fiscal policy for the European Commission, the ECB, the OECD, the European Parliament, and the Spanish and Swedish government. He is coordinator of the Erasmus Mundus Master on Globalisation and European Integration, and Research Fellow at the United Nations University.

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Azize Sargin

Azize Sargin started reading for her PhD in International Relations at the Brussels School of International Studies in January 2017. Her research focuses on the impact the transnational engagements of migrants on their political integration in receiving states. Azize’s general research interests include migration, political transnationalism, political integration of migrants, Turkish foreign policy and European integration. Her research supervisors are Dr. Amanda Klekowski von Koppenfels and Dr. Bojan Savic.

She has an MA degree in European Studies from the University of Birmingham and a BSc. in Political Science and Public Administration from the Middle East Technical University in Turkey.

Before starting her studies at BSIS, Azize worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Turkey as a diplomat for 15 years.

She is currently a  teaching assistant for Fundamentals, Dissertation and Research (FDR).

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Laura Skillen

Laura’s research concerns how we come to see the EU as a ‘four-letter word’, which encompasses studies into populism, Euroscepticism, emotion, and identity politics.  She is investigating the key role of ‘blame’ in the Brexit campaign, and has also conducted research into the role of blame and self-victimisation in Trump’s presidential campaign.

Laura started her PhD in International Relations at the Brussels School of International Studies in September 2017.  Prior to that, she worked as a consultant, policy writer, and marketing/PR professional in Australia; as a consultant to the diamond industry in Antwerp; as a teacher in Russia; and as a sailor in the United Kingdom.

She obtained her MA in EU External Relations at BSIS in 2016, after writing her dissertation on ‘Gayropa’ in the discourse of Russian political elite, and whether that was in aid of countering EU hegemony or due to local understandings of homosexuality.  She was awarded the John Groom Prize for the Best Taught Performance on a Politics Program, and later completed a Diploma in Federalism, Decentralisation, and Conflict Management at the Institut fur Federalism in Switzerland, summa cum laude.  Prior to that, she gained First Class Honours for her BSc in Politics and International Relations via the University of London’s international programmes (London School of Economics) in 2010, and has further qualifications in management, project management, and teaching.

She is originally from Tasmania, Australia, and needs people to know that both Tasmanian Devils and drop-bears are real.

Laura is graduate teaching assistant for the courses International Relations Theory, Foreign Policy Analysis, Negotiation and Mediation, and Fundamentals of Dissertation and Research (FDR).

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Daniel Lopez

Daniel started reading for PhD in International Relations at the Brussels School of International Studies in September 2017. His research focuses on the transnational conditions of possibility of the Colombian conflict. More specifically, he explores how a hegemonic international common sense on the agrarian mode of production – necessary for the reproduction of a particular world order – has been a vehicle for the origin and persistence of the conflict in Colombia.

He obtained his BA in Political Science at the Andes University in Bogota, Colombia and his MA in International Political Economy at the Brussels School of International Studies. He has also studied the use of qualitative methods in writing conflict scenarios at the National University of Colombia.

Daniel has done extensive field work in Colombia to collect information for the development and management of regional plans. He has also worked for the Organization of Ibero-American States to assist in the creation of Plans for Development with Territorial Approach (PDET) to implement the agreements of the Colombian peace process.

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Caitlin Marshall

Caitlin Marshall started reading for PhD in International Relations at the Brussels School of International Studies in September 2017. Her research addresses how stigmatized communities participate in advocacy through technologically hidden digital communities on social media. More specifically, her research focuses on American LGBT military members. 

She earned her BA in Political Science and her MA in Public Administration at Arkansas State University in the United States. Additionally, she obtained her MA in International Migration, with a secondary focus on Conflict Analysis, at the Brussels School of International Studies.

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