Topic: In 2002, he joined Egmont - the Royal Institute for International Relations, the think tank associated with Belgian Foreign Affairs, as a senior research fellow in the newly created Security & Global Governance Programme, where he focuses on the foreign, security and defence policy of the European Union.

Since 2007-8, he is a visiting professor for European security at the College of Europe in Bruges. He has been professor of European security at Ghent University (2003-7), has lectured at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and the Université de Liège (ULG), and has been a visiting professor at Renmin University in Beijing and Carleton University in Ottawa.

He is a member of the scientific committee of the Centre for Defence Studies of the Belgian Royal Defence College (IRSD-KHID, Brussels) and co-ordinator for Egmont of the Higher Studies in Security and Defence, a course for security practitioners organized in collaboration with the Royal Defence College. He represents Egmont in the Executive Academic Board of the EU*s European Security and Defence College (ESDC).

He is editor in chief of Egmont*s journal Studia Diplomatica; member of the board of the Flemish United Nations Association; foreign languages book review editor of the journal European Foreign Affairs Review; and member of the editorial boards of the journals Internationale Spectator (Clingendael Institute, The Hague) and Vrede & Veiligheid and of the yearbook on international humanitarian law of the Red Cross - Flanders.

His recent research and publications have focussed inter alia on the European Security Strategy, on which he has published The European Security Strategy - A Global Agenda for Positive Power (Ashgate, 2005) and The EU and the European Security Strategy - Forging a Global Europe (Routledge, 2007, co-edited with Jan Joel Andersson).

Lecture Summary: The adoption of the European Security Strategy (ESS) by the December 2003 European Council was a landmark event for the European Union (EU) as an international actor. Of course, the ESS was not handed down in the shape of stone tablets. It is not because something is written in the ESS that it necessarily will be so, nor is everything written in the ESS. But the simple fact that it is omnipresent * in EU discourse, in statements by European as well as other policy- makers, in the debate in think tanks and academia * proves that its importance should not be underestimated either. It is after all the first ever strategic document covering the whole of EU foreign policy, from aid and trade to diplomacy and the military. As such it is first of all a statement of the EU*s ambition as an international actor, and has therefore become the reference framework guiding the EU*s performance as well as the benchmark to judge it. Through its performance the EU at the same time is developing a strategic culture of its own, the maturation of which is helped forward by the ESS. Ultimately however, what really counts, and what determines the consolidation of the EU*s strategic culture, is whether the EU, through its policies and actions, is able to achieve results and realize its ambitions.