Published on October 19, 2026 – Updated on October 19, 2026

Frank Goossens is a PhD candidate at the Department of Legal Theory and Legal History at the Faculty of Law. In 2024, he graduated with a Master of Logic (MSc) from the UvA Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation. He also holds a bachelor’s degree in law (BA). In his PhD project, he investigates the limits of deliberation under circumstances of deep disagreement over the Rule of Law in the European Union from the perspective of argumentation theory and political theory. Frank will be a visiting researcher at the IEE-ULB under the supervision of Ramona Coman until the end of November.

Stay at IEE-ULB

During his time at the IEE-ULB, Frank will work on the contextualization of his argumentative discourse analysis of European Parliament Rule of Law debates in his dissertation. By working in the interdisciplinary research environment of the IEE, he expects to gain important insight into the interaction of empirical political science and political theory and learn where argumentation theory can complement more classical methods of discourse analysis in political science.
 
Together with Ramona Coman and Nathalie Brack, he will work on the organization of a workshop that builds upon the RED-SPINEL project on dissensus, by further conceptualizing the concept from different disciplinary perspectives.
 
Finally, to get a more practical understanding of the dynamics in the European institutions, Frank will also carry out interviews with political actors involved in the Rule of Law debate.
 

Research project

Frank’s PhD project examines the limits of deliberation in the EU's destructive dissensus over the Rule of Law. He argues that this dissensus has the structure of a deep disagreement: opponents hold irreconcilable views on the identity of the EU, which challenges the deliberative ideal of settling conflict through shared reasons.
 
The central question of his thesis is: Can there be meaningful argument when fundamentally irreconcilable views about the identity of the European Union are imposed in debates on the Rule of Law? He investigates how these irreconcilable views are presented in the discourse and which argumentative practices are used to antagonistically impose these views.
 
To answer these questions, he carries out a qualitative, argumentation-theoretical discourse analysis of European Parliament plenary debates on the Rule of Law. He evaluates these practices against deliberative and agonistic models of democracy to identify which argumentative practices are conducive to democracy and which practices break it down. Based on this evaluation, he considers the implications for institutional design of Rule of Law deliberation in the EP and implications for the EU's broader response.