The challenges for EU foreign policy increase in complexity and urgency. Scientific knowledge and networks contribute to the solution of a number of these challenges. The prospects for these contributions are promising, not least in light of Europe’s scientific capacities and the efforts towards open science, which the European Union is leading. However, the opportunities science and science cooperation offer for European Union foreign policy are underexploited. While the EU’s foreign policy landscape is now better set up to develop and exploit science diplomacy, the scientific and diplomatic communities often do not communicate with each other. Organising science diplomacy in a multi-level governance system is a challenge, as is dealing with interdependency. There is also no clear model for recruiting and employing science diplomats. The goal of the S4D4C project is to support current and future EU science diplomacy for the benefit of the Union’s strategic capacities, foreign policy goals and the development of solutions for societal challenges. In order to achieve this, S4D4C brings together scholars of foreign and science policy, advisors, science diplomacy professionals and diplomatic training institutions. We analyse cases of EU science diplomacy that relate to foreign policy goals, relevant EU-level instruments and important scientific developments. Employing a co-creation approach with stakeholders, we craft a governance framework for science diplomacy. It contains recommendations and models for science diplomacy interfaces, processes and knowledge resources. Furthermore, we develop training modules for current and future science diplomats. At the end of S4D4C, the EU will have strengthened science diplomacy capacities, which will contribute to its foreign policy goals and commitments. The EU will also be more visibly positioned as a global thought leader in exploiting science and science diplomacy for the benefit of foreign policy and society.

The doctoral network EUFOG will contribute to a better understanding of the ways in which the EU is reconsidering key tenets of its international role in the face of the geopolitical turn in international politics. The liberal international order, i.e. the collection of norms, institutions and power relationships that have defined the last decades of international political and economic relations, is undergoing major transformations. Although the final destination of these changes is still to be seen, the situation is shaped by a return of competition between great powers in a multipolar world (US, China, EU and Russia), facilitated further by growing geopolitical ambitions of many regional powers. These developments should lead to a systematic overhaul of research about the international role of the EU. Over the past decades, the EU’s role in international politics was perceived through the prism of two assumptions. First, the external relations of the EU were understood as reflecting the kind of polity the EU was: an integration-through-law project, and a community of values. Support for multilateralism and the promotion of certain international norms were seen as the unproblematic externalization of internal consensuses. Second, even when the EU entertained projects of reform for the international order, they sought to strengthen its institutions and norms, in a moment when such strengthening was perceived as being broadly in line with the trajectory of international politics. This state of affairs has ceased to exist. EUFOG will train a generation la scholars to enable them to address the politics (the political conflicts and debates), policies (decisions and measures) and partners (relationships and perceptions) associated with the ways in which EU foreign policy responds to these new international realities in a broad range of issue areas, from security to trade to human rights.