EU's Discourse on Promoting Security in Fragile States

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2011 in the subject Politics - Topic: European Union, grade: 1,8, Maastricht University, course: European Studies, language: English, abstract: This paper will examine the discourse on security and development within the EU, focusing specifically on its 'fragile states' approach which is increasingly dominating the development policy agenda. As fragile states have been addressed for the first time in the 2003 ESS, the analysis will be focused on the years 2003 to date. The EU's approach towards fragile states is addressed in many studies, which mainly discuss it in the context of crisis management and how to enable a sustainable development environment. This paper aims to contribute to the existing scholarly literature by focusing on the concept per se rather than the policy instruments applied. Accordingly, it will be analyzed how the concept is framed around certain interests by means of a qualitative discourse analysis on relevant EU policy documents.