Abstract

Existing scholarship on relations between the European Union and the Middle East and North Africa has contributed little to ongoing theoretical debates in the disciplines of comparative politics and international relations. Yet, several prominent research programs in these two fields would benefit from incorporating interactions between these two regions. In particular, conceptual controversies regarding the rise of populism, the trend towards greater supranationalism in European defence policy, the dynamics of regional securitisation, the intricacies of overlapping regionalism and the workings of contemporary empire will be advanced when specialists begin to focus on formulating causal explanations, and move beyond descriptive and evaluative accounts.