Prof Giselle Bosse (G.)

Prof. Dr. Giselle Bosse is Full Professor and holds a personal chair in EU External Democracy Support at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University. She also holds the Jean Monnet Chair in EU Foreign Policy and International Relations and is a Fellow at the European Democracy Hub in Brussels.

Her research focuses on EU external democracy support, EU enlargement and the EU’s relations with the countries of the Eastern neighbourhood, particularly Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. She examines how the EU supports democratisation and responds to democratic backsliding and autocratisation through the European Neighbourhood Policy, the Eastern Partnership and enlargement policy.

A central strand of Bosse’s research concerns EU enlargement. Her work analyses the legitimacy and transformative capacity of geopolitical enlargement, the development of democratic institutions and the rule of law in accession countries, and the participation of citizens, civil society and national parliaments in the enlargement process. She is particularly interested in how enlargement can become more visible, inclusive and responsive to citizens in both EU member states and candidate countries. In 2026, she joined the pool of female societal leaders advising European Commissioner for Enlargement Marta Kos.

More broadly, Bosse studies the role of values, emotions and solidarity in EU foreign policy and international relations. Her work investigates how normative and rights-based commitments shape EU external action, including the Union’s response to Russia’s war against Ukraine (Bosse 2022, 2023). Her research also develops people-centred approaches to democracy support, examining how democratic practices are sustained in everyday life and through networks of citizens, activists and civil-society organisations. Across these areas, she is especially concerned with the visibility, legitimacy and societal connectivity of EU policies and with the EU’s simultaneous role as an international democracy-support actor, an arena of democratic contestation and a target of autocratising pressures.

Bosse has received several major research grants. These include an NWO VENI Grant for her research on EU relations with authoritarian regimes (2013-2016), an NWO ASPASIA Research Grant on non-state actors in EU foreign policy (2018-2022), and an NWO Open Competition L Grant for the five-year project Invisible Heroines: Women and the Democratisation of Everyday Life in the EU’s Eastern Neighbourhood (2026-2031). The project examines how women in Armenia, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine sustain and reshape democratic practices through everyday life, including under conditions of war, displacement and autocratisation.

She is also scientific lead in the EU Horizon Europe project CitiSense - Making Sense of EU Enlargement for, with and by Citizens (2026-2029). CitiSense investigates how citizens in EU member states and candidate countries understand and experience enlargement and develops participatory approaches - including youth labs, hackathons and citizens’ assemblies -to strengthen its democratic legitimacy. Bosse also leads research within the Horizon Europe projects EMBRACE and INVIGORATE-EU, which examine barriers to democratisation, democratic resilience and political reform in the EU’s neighbourhood and enlargement countries.

Bosse has published widely in international journals and books, including the Journal of Common Market Studies, Geopolitics, Europe-Asia Studies, Cooperation and Conflict and Manchester University Press. She regularly presents her work at leading European think tanks and has contributed to numerous commissioned studies for EU institutions, including the European Parliament. She frequently appears as an expert commentator in national and international media, including NPO Radio 1, Euronews, Deutsche Welle, AFP, Libération and L1.

She is co-coordinator of the EmergEU Jean Monnet Centre at the Centre for European Research in Maastricht(CERiM), a Board Member of the Trans European Policy Studies Association (TEPSA), a Research Associate at the Martens Centre in Brussels, and Visiting Professor at the College of Europe in Bruges and the Diplomatic School of Armenia in Yerevan. From 2020 to 2022, she served as Vice-Dean for Education at Maastricht University’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, and from 2016 to 2020 she was Programme Director of the Research Master in European Studies. She has also been a visiting fellow at the Brussels School of International Studies and the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels. Bosse holds an MA from the College of Europe in Natolin and a PhD from Aberystwyth University.