FORNET was a project aimed at setting up a network for European research on governance in the field of Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), based on the interaction among various research centres and academic institutions. The project was supported by the European Commission and coordinated by the European Foreign Policy Unit of the London School of Economics (LSE), the Institute of European Studies of the Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, the Trans European Policy Studies Association (TEPSA) in Brussels and the Jean Monnet Chair for Political Science at the University of Cologne.

IAI's pluriannual activity regarding the debate on Europe's future continued in 2005 with the monitoring of the ratification processes of the new Constitutional Treaty in various European countries. Starting with considerations voiced in 2004 (see G. Tosato, E. Greco, "The EU Constitutional Treaty: How to Deal with the Ratification Bottleneck" presented in Rome in November 2004), the debate continued with the examination of potential scenarios in the event of countries failing to ratify the Treaty.

EU-Consent was a network of excellence for joint research and teaching that analysed the construction of a new Europe over the period between 2005 and 2008. It addressed questions of the mutual reinforcing effects of deepening and widening by developing and working with three sets of expectations for analysing the past and developing an innovative framework for the future integration beyond Western Europe. Within such a conceptual framework 25 teams tested lessons from the past in view of their academic and political validity for discussing visions and scenarios for the future.

The project aimed to develop analyses and proposals to strengthen European democracy and renew the approach of citizens to EU institutions in view of the June 2009 European Parliament elections. The project addressed four main topics: the powers of the European Parliament; the role of European parties; the priorities of the next European legislature's agenda; and the involvement of EU citizens in selecting the new President of the EU Commission.

The EU-28 Watch - edited by IEP, Berlin - monitored debates on EU policy since 2004 and provided a rich set of material compiling national debates on European policy. It reviewed the discourses on European policies in 31 countries in a comparative perspective.

The research aims at examining the latest developments in the area of ESDP/CSDP and to outlininge future scenarios for crisis management carried out by the European Union. 

This two-year research project was focused on the role of the European Union in the United Nations reform process, looking both at previous efforts and at current trends. The research is was conducted together with the University of Kiel (Germany) and entailed the establishment of two working groups, composed of experts and high-level political stakeholders, who were called upon to address the issue of Security Council reform (Working Group I) and cooperation between the EU and the UN in the fields of peacekeeping, peace-enforcing and peace-building (Working Group II).

The project was aimed at assessing the European Union's possible contribution to peace and security in Africa, focusing on the development of the African Union's security policies, conflict prevention instruments and crisis management capabilities. It originated from a joint initiative of the IAI (Rome), the project leader, the EU Institute for Security Studies (Paris) and Chatham House (London). African researchers institutions, including the Centre de Recherches sur l'Etat en Afrique (CREA), were involved in both the research and dissemination phases.

In this project, lasting 14 months, IAI acts as project leader. The study intends to provide a comparative analysis of the EU-US relationship with regard, in particular, to the definition of the security strategies of both actors, the evolution of their internal security, the security industry in the transatlantic context and the different approaches and perspectives of the respective transatlantic policies. The project includes two series of workshops to be held in Rome, Washington, Paris and Stockholm which involve both researchers of the four partner institutes and external experts.