I love writing grant proposals. I know that is not what most people expect to hear — but it genuinely is the best part of my job. A grant proposal is the one moment in the life of a project where anything is possible, where you can dream the research exactly as you want it to be. It will never go the way you put it on paper. People leave, results surprise you, life intervenes. But in the proposal, for a few glorious weeks, the project is perfect.
In this blog, I want to share with you, the reader, what I have learned through the past fourteen years about securing research funding. I am currently running an ERC Consolidator Grant — Break the Bias — examining how victims access international human rights jurisdictions, and whether these forums are effectively available only to people with money, from the Global North, with good lawyers. Before that, I completed an ERC Starting Grant called Human Rights Nudge, which looked at how states comply with human rights judgments and what internal networks of actors either facilitate or disrupt that compliance. Before those two big grants, I held a UK Research Council grant and a series of smaller awards from Cambridge and the British Academy. That trajectory matters, and it is where I want to start.
1. Start Small, Build a Track Record
It is significantly easier to get a bigger grant if you have held smaller grants first. When a peer reviewer sits down with your proposal, one of the first things they assess is whether you are a trusted pair of hands. Have you managed money before? Have you delivered? Have you produced outputs?
There are three types of smaller grants worth pursuing before a major application: conference grants, which fund workshops and bring people together; pilot projects of perhaps £10,000 to £50,000, which let you employ research assistants and manage other people; and postdoctoral fellowships, which buy you out of teaching and fund your research time. A large grant like an ERC funds all three simultaneously — it buys your time, enables you to build a team, and pays for conferences. If you can show you have already handled each element separately, you are telling reviewers you are a proven investment, not a risk.
2. Find an Idea You Care About — and Make It Fundable
Running a project for three to five years is a long time. It is like choosing a PhD or a habilitation topic. Find something you are genuinely interested in. That is the baseline.
Beyond interest, the trick to making an idea fundable is embedding it in the broader conversation in your field. I keep close track of what is being published in the leading journals — what questions are live, what problems remain unsolved — and I look for ways to take an issue from one context and apply it somewhere it has not been tested before.
My Break the Bias project grew out of a finding from Human Rights Nudge: women were almost entirely absent as victims in cases before the European Court of Human Rights. That puzzle triggered the idea of examining how victims access human rights courts. But a focus on female victims before one court would have been too narrow, so I widened the lens to look at access across different regional human rights systems — in Africa, Latin America, and Europe — and connected it to broader debates about inequality and the Global North/Global South divide. The move from a specific observation, through the wider field discussion, to a new application is the most reliable route to a fundable idea. You want to start somewhere you are confident — where you already have findings, publications, expertise — and then push outward. That way you are building on your strengths and ask questions embedded in the current debate but also taking the field somewhere new.
3. Know What Kind of Project You Are Writing
Once you have an idea, there are two fundamentally different ways to conceive an ERC project, and it is worth being clear from the outset which one you are writing.
The first is to think of the grant as building a team. This is how I think about my own projects — as an opportunity to bring talented people together and create something none of you could produce alone. Under this model, work packages build on one another sequentially, team members must talk to each other, and the project depends on that collaboration. The second is to think of the grant as writing a book, where each work package is essentially a chapter and postdocs are responsible for discrete, independent components. The PI’s singular vision holds it together, and people can largely work in parallel.
Neither approach is good or bad. But you must choose — and then be consistent. The methodology, work packages, team structure, budget, and Gantt chart all need to cohere around whichever model you have adopted. The most common weakness I see as a reviewer is incoherence between these elements: a PI who claims to want a team but designs isolated work packages, or one who wants to write a book but has hired five overlapping postdocs.
4. Think Seriously About Methods
Methodology is, in my experience, the most important section of your proposal. There is substantial empirical research — I would point especially to Daniel Peat and Cecily Rose’s work in the Yale Journal of International Law — showing that interdisciplinary projects using social science methods are significantly more likely to be funded than purely legal or theoretical ones. Quantitative analysis, qualitative interviews, ethnographic observation, experimental approaches: these are the tools that let you answer questions legal analysis alone cannot reach.
As a lawyer, coming from a doctrinal legal background, you may not have the expertise to conduct all of the work yourself. In the proposal, you want to show that you understand the methods (here and here) and what they can answer — describe the variables, explain the approach, demonstrate command of the terminology. But you can also acknowledge how much you have to learn. I started my first project as a doctrinal lawyer who did not know what a correlation coefficient was. I went to summer schools, took online courses, and found a mentor — a psychologist — who taught me what I needed to know. On my next application, I could point to the work I had already produced using those methods. You build the credibility gradually, step-by-step, and you learn by doing.
Once you have decided on methods, that choice has consequences that ripple through the entire proposal — determining when you need team members (and from which discipline), how long for, and therefore what your budget looks like. I think of methods as the structural skeleton of the project, not an add-on.
Finally, think of methodology also as something to experiment with. As one of my work packages, I like to include at least one genuinely ambitious element — something that, if it works, will push the project into a different register entirely. For Human Rights Nudge that was agent-based modelling, a technique never previously used in this area of human rights research. That kind of experimentation, properly grounded and explained, is exactly what panels find exciting.
5. Be Explicit About Why Your Project Should Be Funded
Every proposal needs to answer one central question: why this project, why now, and why you? Modesty is not your friend. Spell it out in plain language.
There are three dimensions to this. First, your track record — the evidence that you are the person to deliver. Grants held, publications produced, conferences organised, PhD performance: gather these and present them as evidence of capability, not just a biography. You want to present a narrative of who you are as a researcher — what you have overcome, what obstacles you have faced, what makes you an emerging leader in your field. Use that space honestly and provide a narrative of your career that makes the case that you and your team will deliver.
Second, the intellectual contribution — spell out what is genuinely new about the question or the method. Either you are asking something never asked before, something asked but never answered, or something answered but not in your specific context. The method itself does not need to be novel to scholarship, but it should be novel to your field, and you should be able to explain why that matters.
Third, and often overlooked: impact. If your findings are likely to matter to judges, lawyers, policymakers, or victims, say so and build it into the design. Impact is not just a box to tick in the dissemination section; it is one of the most compelling answers to why your project should be funded at all. When panel members sit around a table comparing proposals, the ones that speak to the world beyond the seminar room tend to stand out. Build your users into the project from the start — both as sources of information and as audiences for the findings.
6. Do Not Agonise Over Timings
One of the questions I am asked most often is when to apply for an ERC. My honest answer: it is almost entirely your call. Panel members are very conscious of where you are in your career, and people succeed whether they apply two years out of their PhD or five years into a teaching post. The panel calibrates its expectations accordingly. What matters far more than timing is whether you have an idea worth developing. Ask that question first.
If you have an idea, do not postpone it to next year. There will always be something more urgent — a peer review to return, a chapter to finish, a student to examine. But keep in mind also, that our field moves fast, geopolitical situations change and new (old) topics become relevant. If you are informed by all these developments and writing in our field, there is probably a reason you are thinking about your idea right now. So seize the moment.
A final word on how long it takes to write an ERC proposal. From my experience, it takes six months to think about a project; the actual writing, with a clear idea and a plan, takes six weeks to two months of concentrated, full-time work. I find it helpful to break the proposal into parts — state of the art, methodology, dissemination, team, CV. I work through each part in turn, and leave two weeks at the end for trusted colleagues to read and give feedback.
7. Panels, Peer Reviewers, and Persistence: Know your Audience — and Write to It
Your proposal will be assessed by two types of reviewers. Panel members read around 12 proposals each at the first stage, compare them, and rank them. Panel members are not necessarily experts in the particular topic of your proposal, they may not even be working in your field. They make the ultimate decisions about funding. In contrast, external peer reviewers read your proposal alone and provide feedback that shapes the questions you face at interview. External peer reviewers are likely to be closer thematically and in terms of specific expertise to your proposal.
This mix of expertise means your proposal has to do two things: it needs to speak to a wider audience whilst still speaking to the experts in your field. How do you achieve this?
Where possible avoid jargon and pitch the project as more generally, widely relevant. Clearly show why the project is important (think impact!) both to the colleagues within and outside your field. Be explicit about how you are addressing the specific boxes around which ERC structures its assessment — excellence of the researcher, going beyond the state of the art, methodology, overall evaluation. You want to address the precise criteria and do so clearly and head-on. Both sets of reviewers will be looking for the same things: coherence, feasibility, and evidence that you will deliver. When panels debate proposals, the questions that occupy most time are: Do the work packages fit together? Do they achieve what was promised? Has it been done before? Answer these and you make their job easier.
To do all of this, of course, it helps to know who is sitting on your panel. As a rule, between half and two third of the panels remain the same (every two years). This means that the majority of members who formed a panel in 2024 (eg look at type of grant: Starting or Consolidator grant, then specific panel: SH1, SH2, etc) will sit on the same panel also in 2026. Look at their biographies, study their publications, think about how your proposal speaks to them.
My final point
Getting the proposal right takes time: you may find yourself applying multiple times to the same funder, you may end up turning a proposal into several smaller proposals with different funders, or you may use the work done on the proposal as part of an article you eventually publish. Whichever route you end up taking, you have to believe in yourself, and that you can do it. That you can write the proposal, that you can get the funding for the project, and that you can successfully execute the project. Good luck!
Note by the Editorial Team: This contribution is published under “Völkerrechtsblog Resources“, which serves as a repository for materials relating to international legal scholarship, thought, and practice. You are warmly invited to contribute.
Photo by Ivan Weiss
Veronika Fikfak is Professor of Human Rights Law and International Law at University College London. She is currently in charge of a five-year project funded by the ERC/UKRI called Break the Bias, which looks at unequal access to international human rights courts and quasi judicial bodies. She previously led interdisciplinary research teams on topics of compliance and reparations in human rights.