Putting security in its place: EU security politics,

the European neighbourhood policy and the case

for practical reexivity
Julien Jeandesboz
Department of Political Science, University of Amsterdam, Oudezijds Achterburgwal 237,
1012 DL Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
E-mail: julien.jeandesboz@ulb.ac.be
This article will be included in the JIRDs forthcoming special issue on Securitization Theory and
European Security.

This article advances the discussion on reexivity among students of the EU security politics,
in particular those scholars who foreground the critical dimension of their work. It argues that
reexivity is a practical concern in, and an integral part of, the research process. Efforts to
locate security within a given political ordering need to be combined with an effort from
scholars to examine their own knowledge-producing practices. Such an undertaking should
not be considered as indulgence, narcissism or as an ex-ante or ex post, meta-theoretical
commitment, but should take place in the research process itself, and particularly in the presentation of ndings, as a fruitful contribution to research rather than as a safeguard or
defence of ones critical credentials. The article furthers this argument by mapping practical
reexivity onto research on the EU security politics and the European neighbourhood policy.
Journal of International Relations and Development advance online publication,
17 June 2016; doi:10.1057/jird.2015.11
Keywords: critical approaches to security; European neighbourhood policy; reexivity;
securitisation; the European Union

Introduction
This article advances the discussion on reexivity among students of the EU security
politics, in particular those scholars who foreground the critical dimension of their
work. It argues that reexivity is a practical concern in, and an integral part of, the
research process, rather than a theoretical, ex-ante or ex post pre-occupation.
The piece furthers this argument by mapping practical reexivity onto a revisited
(Kurowska and Tallis 2013) research on the EU security politics and the European
neighbourhood policy (ENP; Jeandesboz 2007).
This foray into reexivity is motivated by the observation and direct personal
experience of increased promiscuity in the study of the EU security. Promiscuity
refers to two aspects of the research process. The more classical aspect involves
the engagement of scholars with security actors for research purposes, mostly by way
Journal of International Relations and Development, 2016, (124)
2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1408-6980/16

www.palgrave-journals.com/jird/

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2016

of interviews and observation. The second aspect covers the increasingly systematic
involvement of security practitioners in research endeavours fostered by the
considerable nancial investments of the EU bodies in security research through the
Security Theme of the seventh Framework Programme, now Horizon 2020. Sharing
panels, workshops and research activities with ofcials from the EU security
agencies, from national security bodies or private sector experts, is increasingly
frequent for students of the EU security politics. The nancial resources committed by
the EU bodies to security research also mean that a growing number of scholars
are called upon regularly to generate applied research or expertise on the EU security
politics. In this context, the seminal distinction between problem-solving and
critical work (Cox 1981) becomes increasingly difcult to uphold. The EU-funded
projects, such as European Liberty and Security (ELISE, FP5), The Changing
Landscape of European Liberty and Security (CHALLENGE, FP6) or The Evolving
Construction of Threats (COST Action A24), have all contributed to bringing together
standard bearers of European and North American critical literature on security.
Promiscuity poses a singular challenge for critical approaches to security (c.a.s.e.
collective 2006). For all its variety, this body of work is organised along interpretive
lines (Yanow and Schwartz-Shea 2006) insofar as it refuses to assume an external
reality to which security refers and approaches security as self-referential, that is,
as a meaning-making practice performing a specic kind of ordering (Huysmans
1998a: 232). In conditions of promiscuity, however, such an outlook raises the
question of the contribution of (critical) security knowledge to the furtherance of
a given political order, that is, of the standing of scholarly sense-making as a
specic kind of meaning-making practice. If one is told constantly, by practitioners
and peers, that security matters, how is it possible to put security in its place, both in
the political ordering being studied and in the research practice of security scholars?
These, I argue, should not be addressed as separate concerns. Putting security in its
place, in the political ordering under study and in research practices, constitutes two
sides of the same coin, that is, of critical engagements with security politics that take
stock of the fact that scholars are part and parcel of the social universes they study.
My aim here is, rst, to examine the analytical framework where such a claim can be
located and, second, to demonstrate how it can be deployed in order to contribute to
relevant research ndings. In so doing, the article builds on the discussion on
methodology and methods unfolding in IR and security studies (Jackson 2011;
Aradau and Huysmans 2014), but it does not constitute a methodological intervention as such. In these methodological discussions, the reexivist position is
associated with the aim of freeing researchers from the social conditions of
production of the knowledge they create in order to generate genuine science
(Jackson 2011: 174). While I agree with the notion that reexivity is not intellectual
indulgence, I argue here that it need not be simply a purication exercise (Bueger
and Mireanu 2015) for critical thought either. It can, in fact, contribute to generating
useful knowledge (Friedrichs and Kratochwil 2009) as well.

Julien Jeandesboz
Putting security in its place

In the following pages, I draw from an M.A. and doctoral research conducted
on the ENP between 2003 and 2010. This research was promiscuous, deriving
material, social and theoretical prots from involvement in critical endeavours in the
eld of security studies as well as from access, subsistence and eldwork funding
from contributions to reports for a national ministry of defence, the European
Parliament and Community-funded FP6 and FP7 projects. In so doing, I use both the
materials that were collected during the research through archive and interview work,
and those that I generated in keeping track of this work (research and eld notes,
communications). The paper falls into two parts. First, it discusses the case
for practical reexivity on the basis of an examination of existing research on the
production of security knowledge. It subsequently deploys this discussion through
an analysis of the EU security politics and the ENP.

Security research and the case for practical reexivity

This section makes the case for practical reexivity. The scope of my claim is the
following. I am not arguing that critical scholarship on security has not addressed the
question of reexivity. It has done so, however, in a particular way, by drawing
attention to the political implications of security knowledge, described by Huysmans
(1998b, 2002) as the normative dilemma of security studies. The discussion
is valuable insofar as it addresses the way in which students of security and IR craft
their research objects, that is, their practices of objectivation. It is also limited, insofar
as it leaves the objectifying subject, that is, the researcher themselves and the
conditions of possibility of their research practices, untouched. After briey
surveying the debate over the normative dilemma, I examine the on-going
engagements with the question of reexivity in critical approaches to security.
On this basis, I outline the possibilities for proceeding with what (Bourdieu and
Wacquant 1992: 63) call a labor of anamnesis a socioanalysis of the subject
of security knowledge through the deployment of practical reexivity.
The normative dilemma
To a large extent, the question of the conditions under which security knowledge is
generated and its effects on politics drove the effort to develop critical perspectives
on security following the end of bipolarity. The staging of great debates in the
1990s signalled that the unravelling of bipolarity had profoundly affected positions
within the small world of security scholars and experts, established since the uneasy
mainstreaming of the notion of national security in the 1950s and the advent
of strategic studies (Bigo 1996; Buzan and Hansen 2009). The newly appointed
traditionalists sought to uphold the state-centric, military focused agenda of the
Cold War security studies, while the so-called wideners and deepeners worked

Journal of International Relations and Development

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towards a conceptual expansion of the notion to other objects and subjects

(Buzan and Hansen 2009). The dissatisfaction with the relative sterility of these
discussions led a number of scholars, including the researchers from the Copenhagen
Peace Research Institute and their securitisation framework (Buzan et al. 1998),
to forego denitional battles altogether and focus on the exploration of the wider
cultural framework(s) within which security receives its meaning and which are often
implied in the daily use of the label security (Huysmans 1998a, b: 238).
However, tasking security scholars with making sense of the meaning-making
practices that give security traction in politics has triggered a series of interrogations.
The most stringent one involves what Huysmans has referred to as the normative
dilemma of security studies. Arguing that security is what agents make of it,
which is the claim that unites the different strands of critical security analysis, leads
scholars to understand the creation of a security problem as a social phenomenon,
that is, as a structural effect that is beyond the intentions and control of the
individuals practices of denition (Huysmans 2002: 42, original emphasis).
This includes the denitional practices of security researchers. The normative
dilemma thus consists of how to write or speak about security when the security
knowledge risks the production of what one tries to avoid, what one criticizes
(ibid.: 43). The boundary between sense making and meaning making is porous, and
as far as security politics are concerned, the former may well result in the latter.
Huysmans does not in fact provide a way out of the dilemma, but emphasises the
possibility of mitigating its effects through a specic research strategy. If the making
of a security problem is a structural effect, then security analysis needs to move away
from the sole examination of shifts in the meanings attached to security to studying
how these meaning-making practices are entrenched in a symbolic, cultural order,
which he denes in Foucauldian terms as the power-knowledge nexus (ibid.: 58).
This theoretical displacement enables researchers to specify the conditions under
which a given issue can be framed successfully in terms of security and,
simultaneously, to disqualify the security knowledge that they themselves produce
by showing that it does not meet these conditions. By and large, contemporary work
on security politics has built on this scholarly ruse. Successive renements of the
securitisation framework have specied the conditions of possibility of security
utterances, the requirements of audience and the importance of context
(e.g., Balzacq 2005; McDonald 2008; Salter 2008; Ciut 2009). In a more
Foucauldian vein, other scholars have set out to map the forms of knowledge and
styles of reasoning at work in contemporary security politics (e.g., Aradau and van
Munster 2007, 2011). Theoretical adjustments have been made to reformulate the
decisionist view of politics injected into critical security analysis by the securitisation
framework, working with the idea of normalisation (e.g., Neal 2009, 2012).
This articulation of the politics of security knowledge enables critical scholars to
put security in its place in a broader political order. In the meantime, it sidesteps
the concrete analysis of their social position within this order. The subject of the

Julien Jeandesboz
Putting security in its place

normative dilemma, in a way, is a scholar who adjusts their theoretical

focus, individually and consciously, so as to mitigate, and possibly pre-empt
instrumentalisation, and who seems removed from the social and political order
within which the security practices that they study are deployed. However,
in the contemporary condition of increased promiscuity encountered by security
researchers in the European/EU context, it may well be the case that a reection on
the conditions of possibility of critical security research becomes necessary.
Disciplinary sociology, the interface of science and security and self-reection
The previous remarks should not be taken to mean that critical scholars of security
have foregone the study of knowledge-producing, academic subjects. In fact, the
on-going efforts fall into three categories: disciplinary sociology, the study of the
interface between scientic and security practices, and self-reection.
Efforts at developing the sociology of critical efforts in the eld of security studies
have been of two kinds. They have taken the form of an intellectual history often
combined with suggestions for nudging critical research agendas in unexplored
directions (e.g., Huysmans 1998c; Hansen 2000; Buzan and Hansen 2009).
They have also detailed the social trajectory and structuration of the eld of critical
approaches, with contrasting and contending results. By reconstructing the genesis
of critical approaches to security, the c.a.s.e. collective (2006) aimed to resist the
effects of amnesia (Bourdieu 2004b: 37) stemming from the growing density of
critical studies of security and the temptation to retell the story of their developments
in terms of the relations between the clearly identied schools of thought
(e.g., Waever 2004). The collectives manifesto retraces the trajectories of
encounters between scholars and the formalisation and institutionalisation of the
informal networks shaped by these encounters, through publications, journals and the
availability of funding. It aims to defuse analyses in terms of schools by the very
way in which it is drafted, drawing on Bourdieus (2004a) idea of the collective
intellectual (: 108). Because of this objective, however, the discussion staged in the
manifesto remains internal to the academic eld. C.a.s.e. scholars appear to inhabit
and operate in a world of their own, and the conditions of possibility of them
self-labelling and being considered as c.a.s.e. scholars in the rst place are hardly
addressed. That the academic eld in general and the social space of critical
approaches to security is embedded within a broader order, a broader economy of
power and knowledge, is alluded to but not analysed.
A second thread of research has looked precisely at the articulation of scientic
and security practices. Contributors step out of an analysis that is strictly internal
to the academic eld, and examine how academic/scientic work relates to the
broader political order within which security knowledge unfolds. Villumsen
(2011) argues that the interface between securitisation and scientic practice
constitutes a valid object of enquiry, and identies three mechanisms (objectication,

Journal of International Relations and Development

2016

co-determination, mobilisation) through which this interface unfolds. Here again,

though, the objectifying subject escapes the enquiry until the conclusion, where
she notes that the role of science in politics inevitably points a nger to ourselves as
researchers (Villumsen 2011: 394). Her call for practical reexivity, which
she borrows from Bourdieu and which I engage with below, is then remote from
any concrete research endeavour and issued for its own sake. In another example,
Bueger and Bethke (2014) draw on actor-network theory (A-NT) to analyse the
history and the trajectory of the concept of failed state. They highlight how the
story of the failed state as a category of scholarship and a category of practice is, in
large part, a story of control (ibid.: 21) involving controversies constitutive of and
across a wide variety of academic and non-academic actors. What is rendered, here,
is the relative porosity of the boundary between the elds of social sciences, politics
and bureaucracy, manifested by the actor-networked quality of the concept of
failed states. Again, however, the story is told from a position of exteriority and the
tools of the researchers are not turned to the analysis of their own enrolment in
the failed state A-NT.
A third thread of research has grown around undertaking such an effort, nurtured
by a developing interest in the broader eld of IR with autoethnography
and autobiography (Lwenheim 2010; Brigg and Bleiker 2010; Inayatullah 2011).
Kurowska and Tallis (2013) thus recount their encounter as researcher and initially
practitioner, respectively, of European security that led to the collaborative writing
and publication of an article on the EU border assistance mission to Moldova and
Ukraine (Kurowska and Tallis 2009). Unlike the contributions evoked so far,
their own knowledge-producing practices take centre stage. They make a compelling
argument about the chiasmatic condition of security knowledge production: as a
necessarily co-constitutive endeavour which itself becomes researchable material
(Kurowska and Tallis 2013: 77). In so doing, they argue against the conservative
academic perspective, present also in critical approaches to European security,
wherein the researchers way of knowing is seen as utterly superior to other ways
of knowing (ibid.: 86). Their piece conveys quite accurately the condition of
promiscuity in the production of knowledge on European security politics, and the
fact that exploring such condition is an integral part of the research process,
rather than an ex-ante or ex post pre-occupation. What is lost in their
account, however, is the sense that knowledge production is the object of a broader
political and social struggle that scholars are part of. In part, this is probably because
of the fact that the two authors seemed to share, before their encounter, rather
similar dispositions, despite their distinct institutional positions (a shared taste in
intellectualising experiences and writing, for instance). Scholarly writing and the
particular practical sense of the academic eld may encourage accounts where the
knowledge-producing subject is either invisible or aloof. In the meantime, in their
collective condition as scholars, researchers involved in the study of European
security politics are not socially dominant. They look up, as anthropologists

Julien Jeandesboz
Putting security in its place

say (Nader 1972; Gusterson 1997), more often than down, on their object of research
and face situations where they are at a social (symbolic, cultural) disadvantage,
whereby the upper reaches of the social system are largely in the shadow
(Kuus 2013: 117).
Practical reexivity
The existing discussions on the question of reexivity outline a set of requirements:
rst, the need to take into account the internal dynamics of the academic eld in their
scholarly but also social dimension; second, the importance of studying the porous
boundary between the academic eld of knowledge production and the political
and bureaucratic elds; third, the relevance of reexivity for the generation of
researchable material. These I understand to constitute an incentive for the researcher
to turn their thinking tools (Leander 2008) onto themselves, not as a navel-gazing
exercise but as part of an effort to map the relation between knowledge production
and broader political and social orders, as a component and not a complement, addenda
or meta-theoretical positioning, of a specic research project. This is the
practical reexivity outlined by Pierre Bourdieu (esp. 2004a) in his writings on the
sociology of science.
As noted by different IR contributors (e.g., Leander 2002; Eagleton-Pierce 2011),
Bourdieus commitment to reexivity in the practice of research derives from two
observations. First (and this echoes concerns voiced through the normative
dilemma), the scientic eld in general involves two sources of authority
or capitals: a capital of strictly scientic authority, and a capital of power over the
scientic world which can be accumulated through channels that are not purely
scientic (in particular through the institutions it contains) (Bourdieu 2004a: 57).
In other words, the idea of pure science and of research strategies that are only
purely scientic is a ction, and knowledge production is always embedded within
a broader economy of social relations and power, which impacts on dispositions and
strategies within the scientic eld. Second, the autonomy of the social sciences
vis--vis the broader political and social order is weaker than with other sciences,
because they have an object too important [], too controversial for it to be left to
their discretion [], too important and controversial in terms of social life, the social
order and the symbolic order (ibid.: 87). To the extent that the social sciences present
a lesser entry cost (than mathematics or physics, to use Bourdieus own examples)
and are more directly connected to the concerns of agents positioned in the
bureaucratic and political elds, the social sciences are then more directly exposed
to heteronomy (idem.).
To come to terms with this situation, Bourdieu advocates objectivating the subject
of objectivation (ibid.: 88). For all its apparent positivist connotations, the aim
of such a strategy is not to purify science and generate knowledge untainted by the
effects of the political and social orders within which research is ensconced, nor is it a

Journal of International Relations and Development

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navel-gazing, individualistic exercise. Reexivity is practical in that it has to have

practical effect by bringing to the fore, in the process of research itself and as
a contribution to this process, the position of the objectivating subject in the overall
social space, in their specic eld of specialisation, as well as forms of membership
(e.g., institutional afliations) within the scholastic universe (ibid.: 94). There are,
thus, imperatives for the kind of self-analysis that Bourdieu sketches, in particular
in that such an exercise is useful only insofar as it enables the researcher to account,
beyond their personal situation, for a collective condition, the organisational and
mental structures that shape [their] work (Eagleton-Pierce 2011: 816), with
the assumption that how this condition relates to the broader political and social
order within which it plays out is a constituent part of the examination of a given
research object. The requirement for reexivity to have practical effect, then, makes
it integral to a well-rounded research rather than a methodological stake.
Making practical reexivity work
The programme for reexive research outlined by Bourdieu is certainly demanding,
and cannot be transposed automatically onto research on the EU security politics.
The difculty lies in articulating the particular pre-occupation of critical research
on security, which lies with putting security in its place in broader political and social
orderings, and putting security in its place in the knowledge-producing practices of
security researchers. In very general terms, this involves two moves. The rst one,
using the same tools for generating research ndings on a specic topic and
analysing knowledge production, is often understood in A-NT terms as the principle
of symmetry (Bueger and Bethke 2014: 8). The second one, which I argue actively
for here, is the inclusion of reexive considerations in the process of presenting and
discussing research ndings, rather than treating them as a separate endeavour.
These two moves are deployed in the remainder of the article, but it is useful to
specify beforehand the scope of the tools I use in that endeavour.
The enquiry on the ENP and security politics outlined in the following pages relies
on two heuristic devices prosopography and intrigue which operate alongside
the analysis in terms of promiscuity advanced in the introduction. These are not pure
concepts or methods but thinking tools, that is a temporary construct which takes
shape for and by empirical work (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 161).
Prosopography is a familiar tool of historians and sociologists, which can be dened
here as multiple career-line analysis (Stone 1971: 46), that is, as a way of [t]racing
the careers of particular individuals, their personal and professional trajectories, and
giving an account of their social networks (Vauchez 2008: 138). Intrigue, on the
other hand, draws on Veynes (1984) epistemological work on history. The notion
accounts for the work of selection conducted by historians and social scientists that
enables them to single out event-worthy facts from non-event-worthy ones.
They are the current iteration of previous analytical constructions that initially built

Julien Jeandesboz
Putting security in its place

on notions of narratives, elds and bureaucratic politics (Jeandesboz 2007).

While this may come across as shaky empiricism, the adjustment and indeed
exibility of the thinking tools used in this research reect the concrete conduct
of the research process, where dealing with unforeseen ndings and novel
research questions is deemed more important than the rigid adherence to protocols
(Leander 2013: 57).

The European neighbourhood policy and security politics

This section explores the value of practical reexivity by revisiting research on the
ENP and security politics. It articulates the two components of a critical research
agenda on security politics outlined above: an analysis of the location of security
politics within the broader political ordering at work through the ENP, building on
the examination of knowledge-producing practices about this ordering and the
location of security, including my own. I start accordingly with a discussion of my
entry into researching the ENP and security politics, which also coincides with entry
in academia as a profession. To make the case that reexivity can lead to
practical effect in the research process, I highlight how the examination of this
promiscuous trajectory opens up the analysis of the academic intrigue of the ENP,
that is the entanglement of scholarly, bureaucratic and political practices in
the establishment of the policy as a legitimate object of both political concern and
academic study. Both scholarly and bureaucratic accounts build security in as one of
the dening features and core concerns of the ENP, in a way that is misleading for a
satisfying understanding of the policy. To further this point, I unpack successively
the intrigue of security politics undergirding the genesis of the ENP, showing them
to be structured by an opposition between different understandings of security,
and the intrigue of assistance, highlighting how security is less the dening
characteristic of the ENP than a part in a broader pattern and process of ordering the
EU relations with the neighbouring countries.
Researching the ENP in the early 2000s
The European neighbourhood policy, launched in 20032004 by the European
Commission, brings under a single framework the bilateral and multilateral relations
between the EU and a group of sixteen countries in its geographical vicinity, from
Eastern Europe to North Africa. The ENP was framed as a way to promote
the commercial, political and regulatory rapprochement of the neighbouring
countries with the EU (by means of a dedicated nancial instrument, the ENPI,
launched at the beginning of 2007), in a context where further enlargements on the
scale experienced in 20042007 were seen as unlikely. Over the years, the framing of
the policy has evolved, moving towards the notion of a partnership for reform

Journal of International Relations and Development

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10

following the launching of the Eastern Partnership (EaP) in mid-2009, whereby

the more deeply a partner engages with the Union, the more fully the Union can
respond, politically, economically and through nancial and technical cooperation
(European Commission 2007: 2). In 2011, the uprisings in North Africa and the
Middle East led the European Commission together with the services of the EU High
Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (HRVP) to frame the ENP as
a partnership for democracy and shared prosperity with the Southern neighbours in
particular (European Commission and HRVP 2011a, b). For all its emphasis on
partnership, however, the ENP is now generally considered as an asymmetrical
framework where the views from the neighbouring countries either consist
exclusively of the positions of governmental actors, or are altogether disregarded
(e.g., Teti 2012). It constitutes, at least seen through an analysis of those in charge of its
conduct in the EU arenas, a purportedly far-reaching attempt at ordering the Unions
relations with the countries in question. What would become a central interrogation
in my own research was the degree of centrality of security politics in this pattern.
The choice to start an academic research project on the ENP in the fall of 2003,
while the policy was still in its early stages and had yet to attract the kind of scholarly
investments it now enjoys, was hardly individual, and not strictly scholarly. It was in
part the outcome of early promiscuity with the eld of Eurocracy and the attempts
to enter the Brussels bubble (Georgakakis 2011). It was also determined by the
conditions of possibility of the academic professional eld. An ofcial working for
the European Commissions Group of Policy Advisors (GOPA) had already
suggested the topic as the next big thing in the EU external relations when
I interviewed him in early 2003 for the Masters thesis I was researching while
attending the College of Europe in Bruges. The aim of the interview was
not particularly scholarly. As my Bruges thesis supervisor at the time had suggested,
meeting members of the GOPA could enhance my chances of obtaining an internship
(the coveted Commission stage) with this body. The tactic proved unfruitful. I failed
to secure the internship and moved back to my home country to start a research
Masters degree spurred by a subsequent comment from the same ofcial,
who suggested I had more of an academic prole than a professional one, but also
an aspiration/admiration for academic work grounded in the kind of primary
socialisation experienced as the offspring of two school teachers. The application
I sent to the graduate school where I would eventually write my Ph.D. echoed the
conversation I had had with the GOPA ofcial and foregrounded the EU external
relations and the ENP as a matter of scholarly and topical relevance.
The cohabitation of scholarly and non-scholarly considerations especially the
pursuit of the freedom from urgency, from necessity and particularly economic
necessity that Bourdieu (1990: 38182) advances as the social condition of
the scholastic viewpoint remained a characteristic throughout my doctoral
research. Fieldwork funding, which would sustain research travels to Brussels,
Moldova, Morocco and Ukraine, came from the writing of a report on security and

Julien Jeandesboz
Putting security in its place

11

the ENP for the French Ministry of Defence (Jeandesboz and Guittet 2007)
conducted in 2006 by virtue of my association, sponsored by my Ph.D. supervisor,
with a research centre that had a habit of participating in such studies. The report
dealt with the security aspects of the ENP, and led to further such contributions that
turned into a livelihood as my doctoral grant came to an end some related to
border control and the external dimension of the EU area of freedom, security and
justice and the ENP for the European Parliament (Jeandesboz 2008; Alegre et al.
2009), and various aspects of the EU security politics for an FP7-Security
Theme-funded project (e.g., Bigo et al. 2008; Amicelle et al. 2009). Among the
topics it addressed this work reiterated in various ways, and partly for tactical
reasons, the notion that security politics were predominant in the organisation of
the EU relations with the neighbouring countries. Incrementally, however, the
outputs of this promiscuous line of work came to conict with the ndings that my
main research was coming up with. It is this tension that spurred my interest
in looking at the academic intrigue, that is, the conditions of production of
knowledge on the ENP.
The academic intrigue: crafting the ENP as a research object
Reconstructing the singular personal trajectory and process through which the
ENP made sense initially as a relevant scholarly topic provides a standalone
illustration of the impurity, in the scholastic perspective, and degree of promiscuity
involved in the crafting of a research object. As a standalone illustration,
this reconstruction has nevertheless little of the practical effect identied previously
as a key contribution of reexivity. It does provide the grounds for a broader analysis,
asking whether this aspect of promiscuity is entirely singular or it reects a wider,
collective condition characteristic of the way in which scholarship on the ENP has
related to policy developments.
The initial elements of this broader analysis came as the side product of my
doctoral state-of-the-art research. I found that the ENP was one of the few policies for
which the Commission made available, directly from its homepage, a list of academic
and policy publications dedicated to its analysis (still regularly updated, European
Commission 2013). The promiscuous character of my own research trajectory made
excavating this entanglement appealing as I was approaching the writing stage of my
doctoral work. The fact that the president of the Commission at the time the ENP was
launched, Romano Prodi, had made the rst formal introduction of the policy in
a speech to the Sixth ECSA-World Conference (Prodi 2002a) provided further
anecdotal evidence of a broader intertwinement between the political, bureaucratic
and academic elds in the context of the ENP. Likewise, some of the earliest
academic and policy publications discussing the notions that would later be
associated with the ENP neighbourhood, wider Europe, and so forth were
published as the policy was still in its infancy. Edited volumes by Dannreuther

Journal of International Relations and Development

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12

(2003) and Zielonka (2002), for instance, engaged with these notions before and
immediately after the European Commission tabled its communication on Wider
Europe-Neighbourhood and its ENP strategy paper (European Commission 2003,
2004a, b). The availability of these references suggested that the ENP was being
produced simultaneously, and not sequentially, as an object of concern for
practitioners and scholars. While the literature on the ENP makes use of some of
the outcomes of this process (typically, by drawing on them for intellectual
inspiration and referencing purposes), the circulation of the notions that eventually
formed the conceptual bedrock of the policy among the EU academic and policy
advice circles has been left largely untouched as an analytical concern.
Prosopographic analysis of this initial academic intrigue allows for the
identication of three specic sites where it played out. While the rst references to
the neighbourhood appeared in the EU documents in 20022003 and the ENP label
was ofcially endorsed in 2004, discussions on the EUs relations with its
geographical vicinity were conducted in a series of advisory groups supported by
academic institutions at the end of the 1990s. These groups were constituted
following the July 1997 publication of the European Commissions Agenda 2000
on the challenge of enlargement and the December 1997 European Council meeting
in Luxembourg. Two such groups met regularly under the auspices of the Robert
Schuman Centre (RSC) of the EUI between 1997 and 2001. The Working Group on
the Eastern Enlargement of the European Union was established in the period
between the publication of Agenda 2000 and the Luxembourg European Council.
It was colloquially referred to as the Krenzler group, after its chairman Horst Gnter
Krenzler, director of the European Commissions directorate general for economic
external relations (DG I) between 1986 and 1996.1 The Reection Group on the
Long-Term Implications of EU Enlargement: The Nature of the New Border met
between 1997 and 1999 as the result of a collaboration between the RCS and the
European Commissions Forward Studies Unit, a foresight body established in 1989
under the direct authority of the Commissions president Jacques Delors.2 It was
usually referred to as the Amato group after its chairman, former Italian
prime minister and EUI law professor Giuliano Amato. In the meantime, the
Gutersloh-based Bertelsmann Foundation became the rst European research
organisation to run a direct neighbourhood project in collaboration with the Centre
for Applied Research (Centrum fr angewandte Politikforschung, CAP) at the
University of Munich between 1999 and 2001, steered by Bertelsmann researchers
Iris Kempe and Wim Van Meurs. All three groups brought together academics,
representatives from various European think tanks, as well as the EU and national
civil servants. It should be noted, however, that the groups did not include
representatives from the countries that would later be considered as neighbours.
The three groups published extensively on their ndings. The Krenzler and Amato
groups made use in particular of the RSC policy papers series. The outputs of the
former included a background paper on the European Union in stages (Nello

Julien Jeandesboz
Putting security in its place

13

and Smith 1997), the rst report providing a geostrategic analysis of the implications
of the EU enlargement (Krenzler and Andreatta 1998), and a series of six thematic
papers including on the Justice and Home Affairs dimension of enlargement
(Krenzler and Wolczuk 2001). The proceedings of the latter were published in four
policy papers, including one on mobility in the context of enlargement (Amato and
Batt 1999a). The work of the Bertelsmann direct neighbourhood programme led to
the publication of a two-volume report (Kempe 2001; Van Meurs 2001),
part of which subsequently featured in the report presented by the Villa Faber
Group (2001) on the Future of the EU to the December 2001 Laeken European
Council. The work of these groups also led in time to further policy as well as
academic publications. Parts of the debates and contributors to the two RSC groups
can be found in the abovementioned 2002 volume edited by Jan Zielonka (who is
listed as a participant to the meetings of both groups and was at the time professor at
the EUI). Discussions on the neighbourhood were developed further by the Amato
Groups rapporteur, Judy Batt, in an issue of the leading publication of the
EU Institute for Security Studies,3 the Cahiers de Chaillot (Batt et al. 2003), which
also spawned less policy-oriented publications (e.g., Lynch 2005). The work
conducted by the Bertelsmann and CAP researchers also resulted in several academic
publications (e.g., Hayoz et al. 2005).
The work of these groups as well as other early policy and academic publications
constitute the intellectual substrate of later academic contributions on the ENP.4
In this respect, the groups embody the understanding of promiscuity foregrounded
here, operating as a site of interchange and conversion between expert/bureaucratic
and academic capital, legitimising the ENP both as a policy endeavour and scholarly
concern. This is also where the question of security comes into play. The institutional
developments brought by the entry into force of the Amsterdam Treaty made the role
of the EU security politics in the shaping of the Unions relations with the
neighbours a particular concern for the work of all three groups. In its report on
the geostrategic implications of enlargement, the Krenzler group holds the view that,
in terms of its effect on the neighbouring countries with no clear prospect of
membership, particularly the Mediterranean, enlargement is not an option to solve
the security vacuum in the region (Krenzler and Andreatta 1998: 9). It thus warns
of the need for a renewed policy to meet some of the most serious threats
to European civilisation from mass migration to environmental disasters, from
terrorism to nuclear proliferation [that] originate from the Southern shores of the
basin (ibid.). In its treatment of Eastern Europe, however, the groups conclusions
forego their dramatic undertones. Focus on the creation of the EU as a community
of internal security, the groups report on JHA matters argues, dictates the
preoccupation with securing a tight external border at the expense of thorough
considerations of the effects this has on the existing pattern of relations in Central and
Eastern Europe, further warning that Schengen risks being perceived as a
system driven by the anxieties of the existing Member States (Krenzler and

Journal of International Relations and Development

2016

14

Wolczuk 2001: 25). Along very similar lines, the nal report of the Amato group
criticises the Fortress impulse [that] would undermine the coherence, moral
authority and international credibility of the EU [] as the pivotal actor in
Europes emerging new political and security order (Amato and Batt 1999b: 7).
The document dedicates its nal chapter to a discussion of how to manage the new
eastern border, and warns against the effects deriving from the incorporation of the
Schengen framework in the EUs legal foundations. Schengen has been
driven by the overriding concern of the member states with securing tighter controls
at the external borders, and needs to be counterbalanced by a coherent,
explicit immigration policy [] that is attuned to the needs of a comprehensive
neighbourhood policy for the EU, coordinating the many different but interrelated
aspects of eastward enlargement and taking into account the special challenges of
the EUs neighbours to the South (ibid.: 58).
The policy and academic production of these three groups entrenched the key
themes around which subsequent scholarship on the ENP would coalesce: on the one
hand, concerns with the articulation between the ENP, enlargement and the Unions
modes of external governance (e.g., Lavenex 2004, 2008; Kelley 2006; Weber
et al. 2007; Lavenex and Schimmelfennig 2009; Tulmets 2010), and on the other
preoccupations with the articulation between the ENP and justice and home affairs
(JHA), at the time of the newest and most dynamic area of the EU policy (Wichmann
2007; Zaiotti 2007; Wolff 2008; Balzacq 2009a; Lavenex and Wichmann 2009).
It further determined what would be one of the main challenges of my own research,
namely making sense of the articulation between the EU security politics and the
broader political ordering that the ENP participated of.
The security intrigue
The framing of the relations between the EU and the neighbouring countries in
security terms has been inscribed consistently in the ENP and the scholarship related
to this policy by the work of the abovementioned groups, sustained through
high-prole policy documents (the 2003 European Security Strategy, the 2004
Hague programme, and the 2009 Stockholm programme on justice and home
affairs), and furthered by the pursuit of projects related to police cooperation, lawenforcement or border control through the ENP nancial and technical assistance
schemes, or by the focus on the neighbouring countries in the operational activities of
the EU security bodies such as the EUROPOL or the EU external borders agency
FRONTEX. Balzacq provides an analysis of the correlation between the systematic
introduction of provisions related to the external dimension of JHA (ED-JHA)
in ENP actions plans, the conduct of the abovementioned JHA activities in relation
with the neighbouring countries, and the reconguration of the bureaucratic arenas
dealing with JHA issues in Brussels, starting from the 1992 Edinburgh European
Council, and more stringently with the entry into force of the Treaty of Amsterdam

Julien Jeandesboz
Putting security in its place

15

(Peers 2000; Balzacq 2009b: 2131). The bureaucratic struggles between the
different groups involved in this process, such as the European Commissions
DG Justice and Home Affairs (DG JHA, later DG JLS and currently DG Home),
the Councils DG H (on JHA issues) and working groups (the High Level Working
Group on immigration and asylum HLWG, the Standing Committee on
Immigration, Frontiers, and Asylum SCIFA, the Working Groups on Frontiers
and on Visas), have sustained the framing of the Unions relations with
its neighbours in terms of internal security.
My initial analysis of security politics in the ENP coincided largely with the
abovementioned studies and emphasised the predominance of JHA concerns
(Jeandesboz 2007, 2009). This was also a key component of the work I did for the
French Ministry of Defence and the European Parliament. Two developments,
however, provided an incentive to complicate this account. The rst insight came as
a result of the work conducted for the French Ministry of Defence. When prompted
on the absence of a defence/military angle in the ENP as opposed to JHA, the ofcial
in charge of the study at the ministry responded during one of our coordination
meeting that this is the point, theres more than just immigration, it is also a defence
question.5 This initial hint informed further prosographic work, nurtured by the
idea that security actors involved in JHA matters and security actors involved in
foreign policy and defence matters did not see eye to eye on the ENP, leading to the
notion that two different framings have in fact coexisted and competed over the
denition of the security stakes associated with the ENP. The rst one is indeed
sustained by the involvement of agents positioned within the JHA bureaucracies of
the Union. The second one is sustained by the engagement of the bureaucracies
involved in the EUs common foreign and security policy (CFSP).
Most accounts of security politics in the ENP stress how the adoption of the
European Security Strategy (ESS) in 2003 (Council of the European Union 2003a)
contributed to framing the neighbourhood in terms of security (Aliboni 2005; Goujon
2005; Zaiotti 2007; Lavenex and Wichmann 2009). In the meantime, they underplay
the fact that this document hailed from an altogether different bureaucratic territory in
the Brussels arenas. The main proponents in the framing of the neighbourhood as an
internal security issue were representatives of Member State asylum, immigration,
border control and Interior services, within the HLWG and SCIFA, as well
as ofcials from the Community bureaucracies in charge of these issues (DG JHA/
JLS in the Commission, DG H in the Council Secretariat). One of the rst documents
advocating the extension of a neighbourhood initiative to a select group of countries
on the basis of JHA concerns, for instance, was a letter from the former UK Home
Secretary Jack Straw (who had since become the UK Foreign Secretary) to Spains
minister of Foreign Affairs Josep Piqu, in January 2002. The ESS, by contrast,
was drafted within the Solana milieu as the academic shorthand goes (Kurowska
2009), comprising the collaborators of the EUs High Representative for the CFSP
Javier Solana, including the head of the Council Secretariats DG for external and

Journal of International Relations and Development

2016

16

political-military affairs (DG E) Robert Cooper and the CFSP services attached
to him. The drafting of the ESS also included discussions with a number of
academics and think-tank experts involved in foreign policy and defence issues (for
a selection of those participants, see, for example, Biscop and Andersson 2008). The
work of these professionals of political diplomacy and defence (Buchet de Neuilly
2005) sustained an argument which was consistently different from the framing
conveyed by JHA proponents. While for the latter the neighbourhood is, rst and
foremost, dened in terms of ows of persons to control, the former support the idea,
outlined in the ESS, that geography still matters (Council of the European Union
2003a: 9) and that the neighbourhood, in geostrategical terms (Browning and
Joenniemi 2008), is a periphery to be controlled.
The intrigue of assistance
While the notion that the framing of the ENP involved contentious security politics
constituted a relevant nding, it could not account for the second observation that
I made during my eldwork. Ofcials from internal security and foreign policy
bureaucracies are not the only agents in charge of the conduct of the ENP. In fact,
they are not even the main protagonists in this framework. Since the inception of the
policy, ofcials from the EUs external relations bureaucracies, mostly within the
Commission, as well as in the external affairs services of the Council Secretariats
DG E, do the bulk of the daily work. The main drafters of the ENP, who devised the
rst communication on the issue in March 2003 as well as the policys strategy
document in 2004, originated from the Commissions DG Relex and DG
Enlargement. The initial ENP communication was drafted by a small group of
ofcials under the direct supervision of Chris Patten, holder of the External Relations
portfolio in the Prodi College of commissioners. As Kelley and others recount, this
small group was incorporated after the publication of this communication into the
Wider Europe Task Force (hereafter WETF), which comprised ofcials from DG
Enlargement and was headed by Michael Leigh, director of DG Enlargement who
had just been transferred from DG Relex (Goujon 2005; Kelley 2006) The task force
would eventually be incorporated into DG Relex (as Directorate D) before being
moved to DG Enlargement with the appointment of the second Barroso college, and
later to the newly established European External Action Service (EEAS).
These ofcials invoked security concerns routinely in their role as drafters of the
ENP, yet their role did not t the classical depiction of security professionals in the
literature, nor my initial assumption that their role remained rather subservient
compared to JHA and CFSP. The 2004 strategy document on the neighbourhood,
for instance, mentions that the ENP will contribute both to realise the objectives
of the European Security Strategy and to help the Unions objectives in the area of
Justice and Home Affairs, in particular in the ght against organised crime and
corruption, money laundering and all forms of trafcking, as well as with regard to

Julien Jeandesboz
Putting security in its place

17

issues related to migration (European Commission 2004b: 6). Upon reading the
documents, my initial assumption was that external relations objectives and concerns
had been subsumed under a security rationale. Interview work led to a different
understanding, centred upon an intrigue not of security but of assistance.
The multiplication and succession of large Community assistance programmes since
the beginning of the 1990s (PHARE for Central Eastern Europe, TACIS for
post-Soviet countries, MEDA for Mediterranean countries) has supported an
unprecedented extension of the role played by the external relations services of the
Community bureaucracies, particularly within the Commission, together with a
substantial increase of their personnel and budget, generating clear stakes for these
services to preserve and possibly extend their perimeter of competence and action.
In 2004, DG Relex estimated that the instrument for nancial and technical
assistance tied to the ENP (hereafter ENPI) would represent 25 per cent of the funds
earmarked for the Commissions external relations services over the period from
2007 to 2013 (European Commission 2004a). At the time, it was also notorious
within the Commission that the involvement of ofcials from DG Enlargement
followed from the pending completion of the 2004 round of the EU enlargement, which
would see this specic directorate lose about half of its personnel. For one interviewee
involved in the WETF and later in the ENP, it wasnt just a coincidence that certain
persons who had an experience of enlargement were involved in this initiative [dossier]
[]. What happened is that when the bulk of the work on enlargement was completed
at the beginning of 2003, it was clear that some people had nothing else left to do.6 This
does not preclude that the drafters of the ENP made reference to security issues, but
these references reected a tactical use of a security framing. Prompted on these
references to security and on the centrality of security in the conduct of the ENP, another
participant to the WETF thus outlined that, in the presentation of our interests, this is
indeed in the case. When you look at the substance of our relations with the neighbours,
this is not the case []. It is tied to this slightly defensive atmosphere in the EU []; it
is legitimate though, because it has a very high prole.7
This last statement suggests that the intrigues of assistance and security are
autonomous but related. Preoccupation with assistance is an alternative framing of
the neighbourhood that competes with security politics. This is illustrated by
a discrete sequence which unfolded between November and May 2003, when
ofcials from the WETF were called to present the Commissions work in progress
on the ENP to the Councils HLWG on three occasions (Council of the European
Union 2003a, 2004a, b). During the rst of these meetings, the Presidency
recommended that, given the rapid changes in migratory ows, [neighbourhood]
action plans should provide the room to manoeuvre needed for effective control of
illegal migration and [] as the HLWG has a certain amount of experience in this
area, it could provide the Commission with some support (Council of the European
Union 2003b: 3). The HLWG also secured the last screening of the 2004 strategy
document on the ENP drafted by the European Commission, before it was presented

Journal of International Relations and Development

2016

18

to the May 2004 General Affairs Council meeting and the June 2004 European
Council (Council of the European Union 2004a). The ENP was placed under
observation by representatives from Member State ministries of Interior and Justice
positioned in the HLWG on issues related to immigration control. These tensions
also played out within the Commission, where the involvement of DG JHA, as
pointed out by one interviewee, led to a certain degree of tension on [visa and
immigration] questions. Yes, JLS [JHA at the time] is in contact with ministries of
Interior that are, lets say, conservative on these issues, whereas ministries of Foreign
Affairs tend to be more open. In this sense, you nd at the level of the Commission
what you would nd between these two ministries at Member State level.8
This observation hints at other ways in which the analysis of the neighbourhood in
terms of intrigues can be expanded involving the question of mobility where
assistance and security meet. I will only sketch this issue here, for questions of
space. Mobility, and particularly the possibility to establish the principle of free
movement of persons with neighbouring countries, was a key term of engagement for
the higher-level echelons of the European Commission. For the president of the
Commission at the time, the ENP should have offered the neighbours the perspective
of sharing everything but the institutions, including freedom of movement
for persons with neighbouring populations (Prodi 2002b), as a means to move
beyond viewing [] [neighbouring countries] as a question of security
(Prodi 2002a). As Guild (2005) notes, however, the prospect was ultimately
discarded (in the 2004 strategy paper), to the extent that it does not appear in the
formal policy documents dealing with the ENP, partly because of its framing in terms
of security, but also because this proposal was not followed up by the drafters of the
policy within the Commission. Prompted about this issue, an interviewee, who had
been in DG Relex and among the leadership of the WETF at the time, outlined to me
that, after the initial proposals had been made, it was important to return to reality [].
Everything but the institutions, the transposition of the acquis, its a strong objective
but it is not what these countries need []. We had to put some esh on the skeleton,
give it some substance, and this is what we did with the 2004 strategy paper.9 Much
like the generalisation of references to security in documents related to the ENP,
it seems that the disappearance of the free movement of persons as an objective of the
policy cannot be attributed solely to the predominance of security framings, but also to
the divergence in perspective between professionals of politics (here Prodi) and of
bureaucracy (my interlocutor, and their colleagues from DG Relex).

Conclusion
This article has discussed the possibilities available to critical students of security for
putting security in its place. It has argued that efforts to locate security within a given
political ordering need to be combined with an effort from critical security scholars to

Julien Jeandesboz
Putting security in its place

19

examine their own knowledge-producing practices. Such efforts should not be

considered as indulgence, narcissism or as an ex-ante or ex post, meta-theoretical
commitment, but should take place in the research process itself and particularly in
the presentation of ndings, as a fruitful contribution to research rather than as a
safeguard or defence of ones critical credentials. I have proceeded to map this
proposition onto research I have conducted on the ENP and the EU security politics.
Relating my entry into research on this issue has given me the opportunity to look at
the way in which the ENP has been constituted simultaneously as a scholarly and
policy object, and the way in which security, far from being a logical focus for
scholars and practitioners alike, has in fact been simultaneously built into the policy
by scholarly and institutional practices of meaning making. In turn, this has allowed
me to revisit, albeit schematically, the various research steps undertaken in
examining the ENP, showing how moments where the limits of my assumptions
about the place of security politics manifested themselves, rst, in terms of the
contentious politics involved in security framings of the policy and, second, in terms
of the location of the security intrigue with regard other patterns of ordering.
Related in this way, I would argue that the research process appears less as the
imposition of the sovereign scholastic gaze onto social and political processes, and
more as the effect of both social and scholarly conditions of possibility. This allows me
to recast security politics in the ENP as part of a broader attempt at ordering the EUs
relations with a specic part of the world; however, it is necessary to acknowledge that
the research recounted here does re-enact some of the practical geopolitics
(Kuus 2011) built in the policy by its practitioners as much as its scholars, by
sidestepping the neighbours and their engagement in the intrigues of the ENP. The
observation not only points to a crucial limit in this particular research, but also
identies an outcome of building reexivity in the practice of research altogether.
This brings me back to the objective of this piece, which is not to provide an
exemplar or a blueprint to be transposed by others, but to continue a debate which is
currently on-going among critical scholars of security. It is indispensable, then,
to reiterate the point emphasised and practiced by Bourdieu (2004a: 91) that
reexivity is not something done by one person alone and that it can exert its full
effect only if it is incumbent upon all the agents engaged in the eld. Deploring the
increased promiscuity of research on the EU security politics can only take critical
scholars so far: the generalizing of the imperative of reexivity and the spreading
of the indispensable instruments for complying with it (ibid.) looks more promising
as a constructive strategy of engagement.

Notes
1 Krenzlers term was so inuential that DG I was in the early 1990s referred to as House Krenzler
among Commission ofcials (Abls et al. 1993: 10).

Journal of International Relations and Development

2016

20
2 In 2000, the unit became the GOPA under Romano Prodis presidency. Since 2004 and the arrival in
ofce of Jos Manuel Barroso, it has gone under the name of Bureau of European Policy Advisors
(BEPA). Here again, the research I conducted was inuenced by the initial contacts I had benetted
from as a Bruges student with GOPA ofcials.
3 The ISS is a policy research body, afliated until 2002 to the Western European Union organisation,
which subsequently became an EU agency.
4 For the former, see, for example, Batt (2003) for the Centre for European Reform; Wallace (2003)
for the Notre Europe foundation. For the latter see, for example, Aliboni (2005) or the special issue of
The International Spectator guest-edited by Balfour and Rotta (2005).
5 Fieldnotes, Paris, September 2006.
6 Interview, DG Relex, European Commission, October 2007 (my translation).
7 Interview, DG Relex, November 2006.
8 Interview, DG Relex, November 2006 The interviewee was previously employed within DG JHA/JLS.
9 Interview, DG Relex, April 2005 (my translation).

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About the author

Julien Jeandesboz is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science,
University of Amsterdam. His research engages with critical approaches to security,
international political sociology, and examines issues of European border and
internal security, surveillance and fundamental freedoms and rights, as well as
European Union foreign policy and external relations.