Conversations on Europe. “The Role of the European Union in the Global Governance of Transnational Crime.”

In the current context of transition within the power structure of the international system, this talk will analyze how the European Union behaves when faced with increasingly adverse conditions in different multilateral settings. The talk will consider the role of the EU in a specific area of global governance: the fight against transnational organized crime. The United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (Palermo Convention) is the main international juridical instrument for fighting this phenomenon. Since 2008, negotiations over the adoption of a mechanism for evaluating the application of the Palermo Convention have been unsuccessful—the main obstacles being how to finance this mechanism and the level of civil society participation in it. During these negotiations the EU has adopted an “entrenchment strategy” in order to defend and further promote its norms and interests, especially against the proposals made by emerging powers such as Russia, China, and India.

Juan Pablo Soriano is lecturer and researcher in international relations at the Faculty of Political Science and Sociology of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and associated lecturer and researcher at the Barcelona Institute of International Studies. He is a member of the research group “European Foreign Policy Observatory,” which currently is developing a project titled “The EU in an unsettled international system: crisis, polarity and multilateralism,”funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, and based as a scientific research project at the Barcelona Institute of International Studies. Soriano’s research and teaching subjects include: foreign policy analysis, international security, EU foreign and security policy, and Euro-Latin American relations. He has a BA in political science from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), an MA in security studies from the University of Hull, UK, and a master’s and PhD in political science from the Autonomous University of Barcelona.