FIIA Forum 2024: The European Union in a year of change

Elina Valtonen is the current Minister for Foreign Affairs of Finland and has been serving in this role since June 2023. She is a Finnish politician representing the National Coalition Party of which she has been Deputy-Chairman since 2020 and a member of the Finnish Parliament since 2014. Valtonen was also a Deputy Member for the Finnish Delegation to the Council of Europe from 2019 to 2023. She has Masters titles in both Engineering and Economics which she has received from the Helsinki University of Technology and Aalto University respectively.

Juha Jokela is the Programme Director of the European Union research programme at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. Jokela’s previous academic and policy studies projects and publications include the EU’s sanctions policy, political implications of Brexit for the EU, political and security developments in the Arctic, Europeanisation of foreign policy, EU’s Asia relations, and Finland’s EU policy. His current research interests include differentiated integration in EU’s foreign policy, and the role of G7 and G20 in multilateral cooperation.

Jokela has previously worked at the EU Institute for Security Studies as a Senior Associated Analyst and Senior Visiting Research Fellow, as an Advisor at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland, and as a Research Fellow and the Director of the Network for European Studies at the University of Helsinki. Jokela is a member of the board of Trans European Policy Studies Association (TEPSA), member of the Steering Committee of EuroMesCo, the main network of research centres and think-tanks in the Euro-Mediterranean area, and member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Institut für Europäische Politik (IEP). He holds a PhD from the University of Bristol (UK), which focused on Europeanisation and foreign policy in Finland and the UK, and a Bachelor of Social Sciences from the University of Birmingham (UK).

Elizabeth Sidiropoulos is the Chief Executive of the South African Institute of International Affairs. Her areas of expertise lie in South African foreign policy, Africa and external powers, global governance and south-south cooperation. Her most recent publications include co-edited volumes on Values, Interests and Power: South African Foreign Policy in Uncertain Times (2020), and The Palgrave Handbook of Development Cooperation for Achieving the 2030 Agenda (2021). She is the editor-in-chief of the South African Journal of International Affairs, a policy-oriented, peer-reviewed and interdisciplinary forum for discussion on Africa’s and South Africa’s international affairs. She is a regular commentator in South African and foreign media. In December 2020 she was appointed to serve on the UN’s Second High-Level Advisory Board on Economic and Social Affairs. She is currently on the Secretariat of the T20 Brazil’s International Advisory Council.

Toni Haastrup is a Chair in Global Politics in the Department of Politics at the University of Manchester. Previously she was a Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Stirling. Over the last decade Haastrup has established a formidable reputation as a leading expert and scholar on Africa-EU relations, on feminist foreign policy, and on the politics of knowledge production and race within the Women, Peace and Security agenda.

Haastrup is a recipient of the Flax Foundation’s Emma Goldman Award, which honours substantial contribution and engagement to feminist knowledge making in Europe. She is a recent recipient of the Independent Social Research Foundation Mid-Career Fellowship, for the project Towards a Feminist Peace. She has been a visiting researcher at the LSE’s Centre for Women, Peace and Security, the Universities of Addis Ababa, Lund and Leipzig. She is a former editor in chief of the Journal of Common Market Studies and incoming Associate Editor of Security Dialogue. Using her expertise, Haastrup has worked with a number of international organisations and government departments like the UN, World Bank, the EU, Scottish, Canadian, South Africa and UK governments providing reports, briefings and rapid analysis on issues in global politics.

Ilke Toygür is a Director of the Center for Innovation in Global Politics and Economics (CIGPE) at the IE University. In her position, she leads the hub for applied research and policy, enhancing its programmes and initiatives on Global Affairs, Transatlantic Relations, the European Union, and Latin America, while designing and implementing its research agenda.

Toygür holds a Bachelor degree and MS in Economics, an MA in Democracy and Government, and a PhD in Political Science. Her doctoral research focused on the impact of European integration on the vote and party system change in Western Europe in times of crisis. Along her career, Toygür has worked for institutions such as the Elcano Royal Institute in Madrid and the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) in Brussels. Toygür has also been a lecturer at the University Carlos III of Madrid, and a visiting researcher at the European University Institute (EUI), the University of Mannheim, and the Brookings Institution. Toygür is a Senior Associate with the CSIS Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program in Washington DC and serves as a Board Member of the Trans-European Policy Studies Association (TEPSA) in Brussels.

Niklas Helwig is a Leading Researcher at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. He is also an Associate Professor in International Relations at Tampere University. His research focuses on EU foreign and security policy, German foreign and security policy, as well as EU-US relations. He currently co-leads an Academy of Finland-funded project on “Transforming strategic cultures in contemporary Europe” (STRAX). He worked at various think tanks in Europe and the US, including the RAND Corporation in Arlington VA, Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik in Berlin and the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels. He was a DAAD Fellow at the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies in Washington D.C. in 2018.

Helwig has published extensively in peer-reviewed academic journals, including Journal of Common Market Studies (JCMS) and Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft. He served as special issue editor of German Politics and European Foreign Affairs Review. He completed his PhD on the transformation of European foreign and security policy after the Lisbon treaty at the Universities of Cologne and Edinburgh. He holds a Master in Economics from the University of Cologne.

Johanna Kantola is a Professor of European Societies and their Politics in the Centre for European Studies (CES) at the University of Helsinki. She was previously Professor of Gender Studies at Tampere University (2017-2022). She obtained her PhD in Politics at the University of Bristol in 2004 and became Docent in Politics at the University of Helsinki in 2007. She is the Distinguished Visiting Professor of Gender and EU Studies in the University of Tübingen, Germany (2022-2025).

Sophia Russack is a Researcher in the Institutions unit at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) in Brussels. Her main research interests lie in the fields of EU institutional architecture, decision-making processes and institutional reform, with a particular focus on the European Commission. She covers topics such as the European Parliament elections and the lead candidate (Spitzenkandidaten) process; EU democracy and accountability; and the concept of differentiated European integration.

After obtaining her BA in Political Science and Sociology from the University of Frankfurt, she specialised in European affairs. In the course of her Master’s degree in European Studies at Maastricht University, she received in-depth instruction on the politics and policies of the European Union as well as in qualitative and quantitative research methods. Besides her responsibilities at CEPS, Sophia is currently conducting PhD research at Maastricht University, investigating the European Commission’s politicisation and the ‘political’ Commission under Jean-Claude Juncker.

Manuel Müller is a Senior Research Fellow in the European Union research programme at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. His research focuses mainly on institutional reform of the EU and supranational democracy. His interests also include the EU as a community of law, the European public sphere, and narratives on the purpose and finality of supranational integration. Since 2011, Manuel has ran the blog Der (europäische) Föderalist.

Müller has studied Contemporary History and Spanish Philology in Bamberg, Granada, and Berlin and completed his doctoral thesis at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Before joining FIIA, he worked at the Institut für Europäische Politik (IEP) in Berlin and the University of Duisburg-Essen. He has also been a visiting researcher at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence and at the University of Helsinki’s Centre of Excellence in Law, Identity and the European Narratives (Eurostorie).

Sanna Salo is an Academy of Finland post-doctoral fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. She earned her PhD in 2017 from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy and has since worked at the Universities of Stockholm and Helsinki.

Salo’s field of expertise is comparative European politics, especially the Nordic countries and, most recently, Germany. Her recent research has focused on the European center-left and center-right parties’ strategies towards the rising radical right. Together with Professor Jens Rydgren (Stockholm University) she has published a book titled The Battle Over Working-Class Voters: How Social Democracy Has Responded to the Populist Radical Right in the Nordic Countries (2021), which studies the responses of Nordic labor movements to the rise of the radical right in the region. In March 2024, Salo will begin her new Kone Foundation-funded project titled Divided and Lost? The Strategies of Center-Right Parties to the Radical Right Challenge in Finland, Sweden and Germany.

Anders Adlercreutz is the Minister for European Affairs in the Cabinet established by Petteri Orpo in June 2023. He represents the Swedish People’s Party and has been a member of the Finnish Parliament since 2015. Adlercreutz is also a Vice-Chairman of the Swedish Peoples Party. He has a Master’s Degree in Architecture from the Helsinki University of Technology.

Kristi Raik is the Deputy Director and Head of the Foreign Policy Programme of the International Centre for Defence and Security (ICDS) as of 1 January 2023. She is also an Adjunct Professor of International Relations at the University of Turku. From 2018 to 2022, she was the Director of the Estonian Foreign Policy Institute at the ICDS, and prior to that served as a Senior Research Fellow and Acting Programme Director at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs in Helsinki and an official at the General Secretariat of the Council of the European Union in Brussels. Raik has published, lectured and commented widely on European security and EU foreign policy, including the EU’s relations with Russia, Ukraine and other Eastern neighbours. Raik is also an expert of the foreign and security policies of the Baltic states and Finland. She has provided expert contributions to the Estonian, Finnish, EU and NATO institutions. She has a PhD from the University of Turku.

Tyyne Karjalainen is a Researcher in the European Union research programme at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. Her research focuses on European Union foreign and security policy, EU enlargement and differentiated integration in the EU. Her publications also cover peace-building, crisis management and peace mediation. Before joining FIIA, Karjalainen worked at the Civilian Security Sector Reform Component at the European Union Advisory Mission (EUAM) in Ukraine, the Research and Development Unit of the Crisis Management Centre (CMC) Finland, and the Finnish Permanent Representation to the United Nations in New York. Karjalainen is a doctoral student in political science at the University of Turku focusing on the EU’s Eastern neighbourhood policies. She holds a degree from the Master’s Programme in Peace, Mediation and Conflict Research at the University of Tampere.