Now out: DIIS 2008A presentation of DIIS' research and activities, staff, and basic facts and figuresOn 30 June, DIIS published a report on developments in the areas of the four Danish EU opt-outs. Commissioned by the Danish Parliament, the report was expected to provide a platform for debate on the opt-outs, leading to a Danish referendum. The Irish ‘no’ to the Lisbon Treaty changed all that. However, the conclusions are still valid: over the last sixteen years, the areas affected have changed in ways that were hardly foreseeable when the opt-outs were initially formulated in 1992. |
| Extensive changes have occurred at the global, European and national levels. Combined with a new political agenda, the consequences of opting-out are quite simply different from what could have been expected in 1992. The opt-outs must be reconsidered on the basis of the new conditions. The DIIS report provides important knowledge as a basis for such reconsideration. DIIS also fully exploited its multi-disciplinarity in a commissioned study of fragile situations and aid. The synthesis report provides a set of recommendations with respect to the guiding principles for Danish engagement in fragile states and situations. In 2008, DIIS was subject to an international evaluation conducted by the Danish Evaluation Institute (EVA) and an international panel chaired by Dr Raimo Väyrynen, Director of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. The panel concluded that DIIS has successfully established an effective research organization and that it conducts and publishes independent research and policy studies of good, and in some cases excellent quality. According to the panel, DIIS’s broad mandate and modest resources make it difficult to be excellent in all domains, especially given strong international competition, but what makes DIIS special is our wide portfolio, the mix of research and policy studies, and the breadth of its theoretical and methodological approaches. As the panel points out, this is an important advantage for the Institute. We shall try to exploit this advantage even more in the years to come. The panel encourages us to draw up a comprehensive strategy addressing all DIIS activities, and it also points out that serious thinking should be given to developing a career path at DIIS. It will be one of our tasks in 2009 to follow up on these to recommendations, and indeed we are already well on the way to achieving this. To me personally, it was a great pleasure that the panel spoke with most of the staff at DIIS, concluding that we have a good working atmosphere, and that the staff expressed satisfaction with their jobs and working conditions. It confirmed and emphasized that enthusiastic, competent and hardworking staff are the real driving force of DIIS. Finally, in 2008, DIIS was ranked 26 out of more than a thousand think-tanks in Europe in a study undertaken by University of Pennsylvania. Since we do not consider ourselves a think-tank, perhaps an even greater pleasure was our classification among the top ‘scholarly’ institutions. Nanna Hvidt Director |
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