Ronald Holzhacker is assistant professor for political science at the University of Twente, the Netherlands. He is founding director of the European Research Colloquium of the Netherlands Institute of Government. He holds the PhD from the University of Michigan and the J.D. from the University of Minnesota. He is broadly interested in processes of Europeanization and transnationalization, in particular the impact of the European Union on democratic processes in the member states. He has been appointed by the European Commission as a senior EU expert for a network of experts in the area of non-discrimination, providing a particular emphasis on the role of civil society in multi-level governance.
His recent research has been concerned with civil society organizations in Eastern and Western Europe striving for equality for gays and lesbians. He has now begun working on an edited volume, bridging law and politics, with scholars and activists working throughout the world called Global Movements, Global Rights: Transnational activism, international human rights law, and national contexts for LGBT. He is an editor of three books, The Transnationalization of Economics, States, and Civil Societies (Springer 2009), Democratic Governance and European Integration: Linking Societal and State Processes of Democracy (Edward Elgar 2007), and European Research Reloaded: Cooperation and Integration among Europeanized States (Springer 2006), as well as a special issue of the Journal of European Integration, “Democratic Legitimacy and the European Union,” (29: 3, 2007).