Coedited with Annemarie Peen Rodt and Richard G. Whitman, this special issue was published by Global Society in 2015. It presents the fruits of an ongoing collaborative research agenda, which, over several years and with support from the British Academy, the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, the European Consortium for Political Research as well as the Universities of Bath, Birmingham, Kent, Nottingham and Roskilde, has brought together our contributors at a number of workshops, seminars and conferences, leading to a variety of other scholarly outputs and extensive engagement with policy makers in the institutions and member states of the EU. 

The six contributions brought together here represent both a state-of-the-art review of our current knowledge and understanding and push its boundaries towards the mid-range theory of the EU as an international security provider, which we argue is critically missing in current debates on the EU’s international role.

As part of this special issue, I co-authored the introduction on The EU as an International Security Provider: The Need for a Mid-range Theory and a separate article with Argyro Kartsonaki on The EU’s Responses to Conflicts in its Wider Neighbourhood: Human or European Security?