DCU wins €3.6 million EU grant for PhD programme on Tensions in former Soviet region

Dr John Doyle, Dr Eileen Connolly and Dr Donnacha O Beachain have been awarded a grant of €3.6 million to establish a world class PhD training programme focused on tensions during the transition in the post-Soviet area. 14 PhD students will work over four years in an international network led by DCU and including the University of Bremen, the University of Oslo, the University of Warsaw, Tallinn University and St Andrews in Scotland. All the PhD students will gain experience of studying and researching in other countries, will carry our fieldwork in the post-Soviet region and will have a work placement in a non-academic environment, ensuring that they will be highly employable at graduation. Such experts are in high demand and this programme will lay the basis for ensuring that Europe is self-sustaining in creating the best early career researchers in the world with an expertise on the former Soviet space. The project, in addition to creating the next generation of experts in this field, will also contribute a significant body of knowledge in its own right. The individual issues to be addressed by the research programme will include: the issue of unrecognised states; changing gender relations in the transition period; State-citizen relationships and the construction of “new nations”; Energy relations between Russia, transit countries and the EU; ethnic tensions in the region; the EU’s contribution/response to tensions; and international and regional security Issues.

Applications for the programme are now open here