Dear friends and colleagues of the Kolleg-Forschergruppe,

Welcome to our final newsletter edition!

Sadly, the vivid time of the KFG has come to an end and we are going to close down the KFG on October 31, 2018, as the second DFG funding period will then be over.

At this place, we want to thank all of you for your interest, dedication and contributions to the KFG! Without your effort, the KFG would not have been as successful as it came out to be! We are sure that our paths will cross again as there are numerous new research projects on their way. Now, we want to inform you a very last time about what happened at the KFG during the last months.

In June, our closing conference “The Transformative Power of Europe Re-Visited” took place. You will find a detailed report about the conference in this newsletter edition, written by our PostDoc Stefano Palestini Céspedes, who was deeply involved in organizing this event. Furthermore, we invite you to watch the Opening Address and two roundtable sessions, recorded at the conference, online.

One of the promising new research projects is EU-LISTCO. Designed as a three-year project under the EU’s Horizon 2020 program, EU-LISTCO recently kicked-off with the conference “Europe’s External Action and the Dual Challenges of Limited Statehood and Contested Orders”. We invite you to inform yourselves by reading a short report on the conference and a short project description in this newsletter.

We have also been present at this year’s ISA. Our joint reception together with the SFB 700 "Governance in Areas of Limited Statehood" and the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA) will be reviewed by PhD candidate Stephan Lutzenberger in the following.

Furthermore, we would like to congratulate KFG-Alumni Etel Solingen, who received the 2018 William and Katherine Estes Award. Read about her outstanding work in this newsletter edition. And of course we congratulate Oheneba Boateng, Maria Debre and Dingnan Wang on successfully defending their dissertations. In the “Famous Last Words” section, you will find goodbye statements with some brief impressions about their time at the KFG.

Our Working Paper authors have been very active within the last months. Therefore, we proudly present to you No. 80-90 of our KFG Working Paper Series in this newsletter edition. Below, you will find the abstracts and download links to access every single new-published Working Paper. Please note that No. 84-89 are pre-published book chapters of the upcoming publication “European Integration Theory” (3^rd edition/ Oxford University Press). Additionally, we invite you to have a look at a list of selected publications, (co-)authored by current and former KFG fellows and published in 2018.

Again, thanks to all of you for accompanying the KFG during the last years. We wish you all the best for your future activities!

Best regards,

Tanja A. Börzel, Thomas Risse & the KFG Team