Paper Titles & Abstracts

The paper will explore the changing nature of the EU's policies towards its eastern neighbourhood, in the light of restructuring of its external services, and the increasing resistance of the outside. The paper will postulate that in trying to adapt, the EU is undergoing some critical paradigmatic shifts in its construction of the outside, which may have lasting implications for the partner states' social/ideational re-engineering, and for the EU's positioning as a global transformative force. Three particular shifts are observable: (i) methodological, in how the EU has altered its modus operandi in the neighbourhood, from hierarchical/disciplinary governance to adaptive governmentality necessitating the complex matrix of 'enablement'; (ii) ontological, in how and why the EU has been resisted by the neighbourhood; and (iii) epistemological, in how the EU may come to modify its transformative strategy, to remain an influential regional and global player