Lorenzo SANTINI

Bio

Lorenzo Santini is a PhD Candidate in Politics at Luiss University in Rome. His research interests lie at the intersection of gender, parliamentary institutions and foreign policy.

In his PhD research project, “Gendering European Parliament’s Diplomacy: Rules, Discourses and Practices in Global Context”, he studies the parliamentary diplomacy of the European Parliament as an intersectionally gendered institution.

He is also interested in ethnographical practices and approaches to political institutions, in particular parliamentary ethnography, with a sensitivity to feminist, queer and intersectionality theories. He has conducted a study visit at the Directorate-General for External Policies of the European Parliament’s Secretariat in Brussels (2025).

He serves as teaching assistant for the courses of Sociology, Political Sociology and Qualitative Methods of Social Research at Luiss University, where he coordinates a research module of ethnographical approaches to sociological phenomena in the urban context of Rome.

CV

• 2025                Visiting Researcher at CEVIPOL, ULB, Brussels (Belgium)
• 2025                Visiting Researcher at the European Parliament, Brussels (Belgium)
• 2023 –              Teaching Assistant in Sociology, Political Sociology and Methods of Social Research, Luiss University, Rome (Italy)
• 2022 –             PhD Candidate in Politics, Luiss University, Rome (Italy)
• 2020 – 2023     Research and Teaching Assistant in EU Foreign Policy, University of Bologna, Italy

Full CV

Areas of research

• Gender and Politics
• European Parliament
• Parliamentary Diplomacy
• EU External Relations
• Intersectionality
• Feminist Research and Methodologies
• Ethnography
• EU-Africa Relations
• EU-US Relations

Research

Gendering European Parliament’s Diplomacy: Rules, Discourses and Practices in Global Context (2022-2026)

My doctoral research project studies the European Parliament and diplomacy from a gender perspective across the ninth (2019-2024) and tenth (2024-2029) legislatures. I look at how relevant EP actors (Committees, Delegations, political groups, administration, presidency) discursively construct and perform gender, intersecting race and LGBTI+ identities, in international parliamentary arenas. My cases included bilateral and multilateral engagements, such as EP relations with the United States, the NATO Parliamentary Assembly and the Organization of African, Caribbean and Pacific States. Methodologically, I combine ethnography, interviews and document analysis, with a particular attention to the role played by positionalities and reflexivity.

Gendering Parliamentary Leadership in the European Parliament’s External Delegations (2025-2026)

In this project, I study gendered patterns of parliamentary careers and leadership, specifically focusing on the positional and behavioral leadership in the interparliamentary delegations of the European Parliament at the onset of the tenth legislature.

The European Parliament’s Institutional Leadership in EU Foreign Policy towards Turkey (2020-2023)

In a previous research project at the University of Bologna (2020-2023), I studied the role of the European Parliament in EU foreign policy towards Turkey between 2014 and 2019, framing the European Parliament as a principled institutional leader across policy areas (enlargement and democracy promotion, migration, foreign and security policy).

Publications

Miller, C., & Santini, L. (2024). Women’s Leadership in the European Parliament’s External Delegation. ECPR The Loop, November 4. https://theloop.ecpr.eu/womens-leadership-in-the-european-parliaments-external-delegations/

Baracani, E., & Santini, L. (2023). The European Parliament’s Political Leadership: The Case Study of EU Foreign Policy towards Turkey. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, 61(5), 1377-1393. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.13469