On April 7, Anna Antonova successfully defended her Masters thesis, “Fair Fishing: Human Rights and Sustainability in Bilateral Fishing Agreements between the EU and Developing Countries.” Anna is completing the two year MAMA program at the Department of Marine Affairs. She is a graduate of Williams College, where she attended the Williams-Mystic Maritime Studies Program. Her interests in the marine affairs include international ocean law and the European Union’s ocean and environmental policy. Anna’s project, supervised by Seth Macinko, Jesper Raakjaer, and Richard Burroughs, investigated how successful bilateral fishing agreements between the EU and developing states are at implementing international law principles of human rights and sustainability. These normative principles have at times been framed by official rhetoric as an integral part of the European Union’s legal and political international identity. In practice, however, the bilateral agreements have often come short of European Union aspirations, facing criticism for hindering rather than aiding local development. Anna’s project explored the bilateral agreements from an international law perspective, engaging in grounded theory, discourse analysis, and a detailed case study on European Union-Senegal fishing relations. For the European Union, the study has raised questions about conflicts between national and supranational fishing goals and about the challenges these conflicts present to its goal of normative leadership. More generally, the project has suggested implications for enacting international law principles on the ground, as well as for the inherent power dynamics of post-colonial relations fifty years on. Anna will be presenting her research this summer in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, at the MARE People and the Sea 2015 Conference. After graduation, she hopes to pursue a Ph.D. in marine and environmental governance.