EUCE/ESC May Conferences

The Changing Security Environment of the Black Sea

Policy Conference

EU Center of Excellence/European Studies Center

University of Pittsburgh

May 1-3, 2013

In recent years, the area of the Black Sea region has seen several momentous changes, including: the emergence of several new states—some as a result of violent conflict; the appearance of a variety of governing systems, nominally based on democratic models but varying widely in terms of the practices of democracy; the end of the long-standing status quo of the Cold War with a resulting change of alliance patterns; increasing prominence as European, and Russian, energy highway. For all of these reasons and uniquely in Europe, the region draws the intersecting attention of powerful regional actors, including Russia and Turkey, but also the EU, which now has a Black Sea littoral, and both the United States and NATO. At the same time, like the rest of Europe, the region and its actors are being buffeted by fundamental changes at the global level—including financial turbulence, restructuring of global power balances and, perhaps most crucially, a rapid change in perspectives on production and distribution of energy resources. 

This conference will draw together experts from the United States and Europe to assess both the nature and impact of global changes on the Black Sea region and the responses of powerful international actors.  A series of workshops sessions will cover, among other topics, the military, economic, ethnic-religious and energy dynamics of the Black Sea region and the strategic responses of the United States, European Union, Russia, Turkey and Ukraine. 

The conference program can be found here.

EU Global? The EU and Global Health Governance

Jean Monnet Conference

EU Center of Excellence/European Studies Center

University of Pittsburgh

May 22, 2013

View a copy of the flyer HERE.

Organized in collaboration with Wulf Reiners of the Jean Monnet Chair for Political Science of the University of Cologne, the workshop will serve to bring together practitioners and academic scholars to discuss the collaboration of state and non-state actors, such as the European Union, as well as those from civil society, within the system of global health governance.  Participants will include Bernard Merkel, European External Action Service, who works on Food Safety, Health and Consumer Affairs at the EU Delegation of the EU to the USA in Washington; Donald Burke, Dean, Graduate School of Public Health; Guy Peters, Department of Political Science; and Nidhi Bouri and Amesh Adalja, UPMC Health Security.

The draft of the conference program can be found here.

For more information, please contact Eleni Valliant, EUCE/ESC at env1@pitt.edu or 412-648-7405.