Securitisation of the Neighbourhood: EU-Driven Frame Alignment and Projection on Southern and Eastern Neighbourhood Partner Countries

Tamar Gamkrelidze & Arto Väisänen

This paper is the first deliverable of ENGAGE Work Package 8, “Engaging with the EU’s Neighbourhoods”. It scrutinises the EU-driven strategic framings of “neighbours” and “neighbourhood” through a critical and thorough investigation of the European Neighbourhood Policy’s (ENP) documents and related official EU texts.

The paper enquires into how the EU has discursively framed the ENP since 2003. Based on a discursive and empirical analysis of key ENP documents and the ENP itself, this paper argues that the EU’s internal understanding of the ENP has changed over time.

The main change the paper identifies is that increased securitisation of the ENP has taken place between 2003 and 2022, along with a simultaneously increasing diversification and overlaps across different policy fields within the ENP. In turn, this change has occurred as a result of growing perceptions and notions of external threats and an ever-increasing interlinkage of different policy areas with the different ENP partner countries.