Tiffany G. Williams

PhD defence

Tiffany G. Williams defended her PhD thesis Selling Normative Power Europe: Analyzing the unexpected outcomes of the European Union's normative power in the South Caucasus at the University of Vienna on 25 January 2022.

Current position

Postdoctoral researcher on the project Jena-Cauc at the Institute for Caucasus Studies, Friedrich Schiller University of Jena.

PhD project

Contributing to international relations scholarship and EU studies, my PhD analyzes the European Union’s evolving political strategy in the South Caucasus. It demonstrates how the perception of extant Eastern Partnership agreements as exclusionary and dogmatic rather than fair and pragmatic limits their attractiveness to Eastern Partners, and impacts the EU’s political effectiveness in the region. Despite an attempt to address this with a reconfiguration of its external action policy, the EU’s internal decision-making structure complicates the reforms necessary to implement such policy change. In the meantime, the Eastern Partners in the South Caucasus are setting their own terms for strategic partnership with the EU..

• Supervisor: Guido Tiemann, Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna
• Co-supervisors: Johannes Pollak, Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna and Colin Hay, Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics, Sciences Po, Paris

Secondment

• Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP), Berlin and Brussels

Background

I have a background in evaluation including working at the Cornell Office for Research on Evaluation and the Independent Office of Evaluation of the International Fund for Agricultural Development. Additionally, I have worked with public sector and nonprofit clients as an independent research and evaluation consultant. My academic training and professional experience corroborate the value of the methodology I employ in my PhD project for policy analysis, impact evaluation, and other forms of evaluative and analytical practice. As such, I enthusiastically aim to bridge research to practice and policymaking in all of my work, and will do the same with my PhD project. Because PLATO involves a broader research community beyond academia, it offers me a unique opportunity to achieve this important goal. Nationality: American.

• Master of Public Administration, Cornell University
• Bachelor of Arts, Philosophy, Portland State University

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