Steven Blockmans is Professor of EU External Relations Law and Governance at the University of Amsterdam (part-time) and a member of the Amsterdam Centre for European Law and Governance (ACELG), a centre of excellence of the Faculty of Law at the UvA.
He is Head of the EU Foreign Policy Unit of the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), a Brussels-based think tank, a visiting professor at the University of Leuven, and one of the founding members of the Centre for the Law of EU External Relations (CLEER).
His expertise lies at the crossroads of international and EU law and governance. He has published widely on the institutional structures for EU external action, the Union’s role in global governance, norm promotion (inside out) and norm absorption (outside in), CFSP, CSDP, enlargement, ENP, trade and development.
Before joining CEPS and UvA, he was head of the department of research at the T.M.C. Asser Institute, an inter-university research centre based in The Hague. For more than 10 years, he has combined his academic work with contract research carried out for EU and national donors, consultancy activities and training for professionals. He has worked on numerous technical assistance projects in wider Europe and Asia. From 2005 to 2010, he was a lecturer in the in-service training provided by the European Institute of Public Administration (EIPA) for DG Relex and other external relations DGs of the European Commission. From 2007 to 2009 he served as a long-term expert on legal approximation in the framework of an EU-sponsored project in support for the Ministry of European Integration of Albania.
He holds a PhD in law from Leiden University, where he worked as a lecturer from 1998 until 2002.