Awardee

Kaija Schilde

BU affiliation

Associate professor of international relations, Jean Monnet Chair in European Security and Defense, and associate dean of studies, Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies

What is the honor you’ve received? 

I received a Jean Monnet Module EURYDICE award from the European Commission to study the European Union’s (EU) defense industrial capacity and role as a geopolitical security actor.

Why did you receive the grant?

The EURYDICE award builds on the momentum of my 2021-2024 Jean Monnet Chair in European Security. The new project launches a three-year program of teaching, research, and public engagement, focused on the EU’s evolving role as a global security actor. My driving questions are: what does it mean to be a state in the 21st century? How do states generate national security tools? States used to tax their populations to raise money for security and purchase arms outright. But modern states no longer solely generate the tools of security through these mechanisms. Instead, states use monetary policy (debt), regulatory authority, market coordination, contracting with private firms, and infrastructural capacity to generate military power. The EU, often dismissed as a “soft power,” increasingly exercises these same tools to shape defense markets, coordinate supply chains, and respond to geopolitical threats, particularly since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Why is this honor meaningful?

This award allows me to connect theory, policy, and pedagogy in a way that reflects the complexity of contemporary security governance. I can bring students, scholars, and practitioners into a conversation about how the EU and other modern polities respond to threat, build capacity, and shape global security. The award also allows me to participate in and inform innovative policy thinking at the EU level. For example, in June 2025, I testified before the European Parliament on the €150 billion SAFE Act [loans to member nations for defense spending], advising the EU on which policy instruments can best develop European defense capabilities.

The award is also personally and academically meaningful. I have watched the EU grow as a security actor for the last 20 years, and I have long predicted its authority would increase for two reasons: increasingly bellicist threats from Russia and the EU’s central and often state-like authority over markets. Markets underpin security power, a connection I have been agenda-setting since 2014 in the Project on the Political Economy of Security, an interdisciplinary initiative I convene at the Pardee School with another BU faculty member, Rosella Cappella Zielinski, a College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of political science.

The EURYDICE project also links to my parallel research agenda on “outsourcing security,” which traces how national security policy and activity has shifted from the public to the private sector globally over the last 40 years. Security is now a more private than public activity, making it fundamentally a market activity. The EU is a market power that can regulate and generate market activity more effectively than many other actors and states, positioning it as one of the most important latent security actors in the world.

What’s next for you? 

Over three years, I will teach a course on the EU as a 21st-century security actor, complete a book manuscript examining EU security capabilities, and host an annual workshop series on EU defense industrial development. The workshops will bring together academics and policy practitioners. The book will contribute to both state formation theory in sociology and political science and a practical policy understanding of how the EU generates security through regulation and market coordination.