Integrated Project 2

This 3rd year undergraduate course focuses on real life challenges and practices, engages students in ‘doing security’ via ‘policy-advising’ tasks and trains and assesses their professional skills. Students will consult on a real-life security or safety challenge presented to them by organisations and practitioners from the security domain, including organisations working on topics related to the Jean Monnet Chair on the European Union’s role in Security and Global Affairs (EURISGA). Thus, for example, in the 2023 edition of this course, topics and core challenges included, rather presciently, the issue of ‘Strategic Autonomy’ and Greenland as well as whether the addition of Finland and Sweden to NATO enhances European security (both topics posed by former Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials). In 2024, EURISGA topics included, inter alia, NATO-EU cooperation in security and EU-OSCE cooperation in addressing ethnic conflicts.

For this course, students work in think tank groups on a security and/or safety challenge introduced and explained by a practitioner. Each group is expected to apply the three step approach of ‘explore, understand and do’ in order to respectively collect facts and contextual information on the case at hand (explore), deepen their understanding of several elements of the case by applying disciplinary lenses (understand) and merge these insights to assess and design policy recommendations to address the challenge at hand (do). This will result in a policy advice report in which each group presents their security and/or safety challenge, adopts several disciplinary lenses, integrates their findings and formulates recommendations for further action. Moreover, students will present their findings and recommendations to solve security and safety issues to the organisations in the context of a 2-3 day policy conference in The Hague.