Paper Titles & Abstracts

The interface between Common Security and Defence Policy and assistance to border management reform in the neighbourhood features highly on the EU's security agenda. It reflects the current paradigm of integrated border management based on the principle of 'pushing the borders out' by what would appear external security means in the pursuit of internal security. As such, the interface structures the political discourse on handling threats and manifests itself at different levels of policy practice, in decision-making and at the operational level of project design and implementation. It is also subject to a critical debate and conceptual analysis within the so-called internal-external security nexus, or 'the Möbius ribbon of security' where the distinction proves deceptive in the first place. The paper looks at these three intertwined dimensions to better understand the interface. It conducts a genealogy at the level of the highly interrelated political and academic discourses and it examines in-depth concrete practices of EU's statebuilding at the blurring CSDP/IBM intersection that such discourses authorise. We focus in particular on how the established paradigm of internal/external security plays out in reform assistance on the ground and how it feeds (not) back into the political discourse, including on the EU as a political project.