IBEI's pre-doctoral fellow Lewin Schmitt has won the Global Challenges Talent Award, within the "Talent Global Programme" jointly organized by CIDOB (Barcelona Centre for International Affairs) and Banco Sabadell Foundation.

The Talent Global Programme aims at promoting quality research by young researchers. The Award recognises cutting-edge research on global issues, promoting studies with an original analytical approach to today’s international relations challenges. Read more

Congratulations, Lewin!

In the winning paper, Lewin uses textual data from almost 1,000,000 Tweets to explore the state of the EU's foreign relations regarding three key countries (China, India, and Russia). By measuring changes in sentiment over time, he introduces a novel methodology to the study of international affairs. Furthermore, by comparing the wider Twitter base to a set of official EU accounts, he demonstrates that EU accounts tend to speak much more positively about the EU's external affairs, except in the case of EU-Russia relations. To zoom in further, a keyword analysis highlights political priorities vis-a-vis each of the three counterparts and shows the shifting topical concerns over time.

The paper will be presented together with the winners of two other categories at a conference on 30 June 2021.

Lewin Schmitt is currently an IBEI Predoctoral Fellow at the H2020 project "Global Governance and the European Union: Future Trends and Scenarios (GLOBE)"