26 students from the Department of Politics, International Relations, and Philosophy took part in the Brussels Trip 22-24 April 2024.

Royal Holloway students outside the European External Action Service

The group was led by Giacomo Benedetto (Jean Monnet Chair), Nicholas Allen, Lyn Johnstone, and Ivica Petrikova. We visited and heard talks from officials at the European Commission, including from Royal Holloway alumnus Giles Goodall, the  European External Action Service (which is the EU’s foreign and security policy institution), the European Parliament, and the Wilfried Martens Centre, which is the thinktank associated with the centre-right European People’s Party, where we heard about the role of thinktanks in the EU’s policy-making process. (For balance, last year we visited the Foundation of European Progressive Studies, whose anchor is on the centre-left.) A theme of the trip was decolonisation and, to that end, we heard about the Commission’s perspective on international partnerships and we visited the Africa Museum on the edge of Brussels, once a notorious museum of colonialism that has undergone a recent effort at reform, which our students debated with interest.

The trip was organised by the Jean Monnet Chair for EU Cred, and it was co-funded by the European Union.