Antonio Salvador M. Alcazar III

Dr Antonio Alcazar III

First Book Fellow 2025-26

Brussels’s burden: (Un)making the global souths in the European Union’s preferential trade policy

This interdisciplinary research contributes to global political economy and European studies in three ways. First, it empirically advances the nascent interpretive scholarship on EU trade policy outside positivist approaches. Second, it wrestles with normative assumptions about EU trade policy as a well-intentioned act of partnership with the global souths by engaging with decolonial thought to unmask how trade encounters continue to be colonially configured today. Last but not least, it challenges existing critical approaches for their refusal or inability to critique the coloniality of EU trade policy.

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Areas of interest

Political Science Global South European Union Global Trade Politics of Knowledge Decolonisation Praxis Global Politics

Cohort

FBF2

Biography

Antonio Salvador M. Alcazar III is a Visiting Researcher at the University of Barcelona for the duration of his ISRF First Book Fellowship. He is a political scientist by training, with a PhD from Central European University. He has taught at Parami University in Myanmar and served as a Global Teaching Fellow funded by the Open Society University Network at Universidad de los Andes in Colombia. From 2021 to 2025, he was also a Visiting Research Fellow at Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals.

Grounded in epistemologies from the Global Souths, Antonio’s work interrogates the European Union’s entanglements as a global (trade) power. More broadly, he is interested in the politics of knowledge, decolonial thought and praxis, and interpretive methodologies, and how these forces trouble colonial/modern discourses and practices around norms, development, and hierarchies in world politics. He has published in, among others, Journal of Contemporary European Research and Politics and Governance.

Antonio writes as a Buhi’nən from the Bikol region in what has been colonially constructed as ‘the Philippines’.

Biographical details correct as of 20.05.25