CO-FUNDED BY THE ERASMUS + PROGRAMME OF THE EUROPEAN UNION

EUROPEAN UNION: INSTITUTIONS AND POLICIES

The proposed project represents an innovative and multidisciplinary approach to introducing European Union Studies at Nazarbayev University (NU) in Kazakhstan. The project consists of one core teaching activity, a European Union: Institutions and Policies (EUIP) course, whose objective is to both promote first teaching experience for a young scholar and nourish interest in the European Union (EU) in a country where students have limited knowledge about it. The reason for introducing this course at our University is the identified need to teach our undergraduate students enrolled in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences about the most advanced example of regional integration. This subject is particularly relevant for Kazakhstan which is undergoing regional integration within the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU). The project entails few other auxiliary activities, such as: i) guest lectures delivered by experts from Europe aimed at bringing in multidisciplinary perspectives to the proposed project, ii) creation of a blog where students enrolled in the EUIP course will be able to publish their research output on comparative regionalism, whereby they will apply the learned concepts from EU Studies to the integration efforts of the EAEU, iii) workshops dedicated both to disseminating the findings of the proposed project and to building bridges between the Kazakh policy-making community and the world of academia with the objective of facilitating transfer of knowledge and stimulating the generation of policy-relevant knowledge in academia and the development of evidence-based policies in the public sector, and iv) outreach sessions meant to stimulate interest in the EU among a target group not immediately involved in the project, such as high school students in Astana.