This book aims to show practice approaches at work in the fields of European diplomacy and security broadly conceived. It sets out to provide readers with a hands-on sense of where research on social practices and European diplomacy, security and foreign policy currently stands. The book reviews how practice approaches have evolved in International Relations (IR) and brings together an unique set of contributions which highlights how insights from practice approaches can be applied to advance research on a number of key issues in these fields. While the debate about practices in IR goes beyond the case of diplomacy, the latter has become a showcase for the former and this book continues the debate on practices and diplomacy by zooming in on the European Union. Examples of issues covered include the evolution of EU-NATO relations seen from the perspective of communities of practice, burden sharing as an anchoring practice for European states’ involvement in crisis management operations, the practical knowledge shaping the EU’s responses to the Arab Uprisings, agency as accomplished in and through EU counter-piracy practices and the political resistance to Israeli occupation and the non-official recognition of Palestine performed by EU diplomats. Thus, by focusing on specific practices and analytical mechanisms that contribute to understand the transformations of European diplomacy, security and foreign policy, this book provides essential readings to anyone interested in innovative ways to grasp the contemporary challenges that face the EU and its member states. The chapters originally published as a special issue of European Security.

This book is the first to comprehensively examine the institutional dynamics that characterize the diplomatic system set up by the European Communities and the European Union – currently the foremost experiment in non-state diplomacy. It analyses European Union Diplomatic Service’s work on foreign policy and external economic relations, both in Brussels and in the Commission’s Delegations across the world.

This book contributes to the ongoing debate in IR on the role of security communities and formulates a new mechanism-based analytical framework. It argues that the question we need to ask is how security communities work at a time when armed conflicts among states have become significantly less frequent compared to other non-military threats and trans-boundary risks (e.g. terrorism and the adverse effects of climate change). Drawing upon recent advances in practice theory, the book suggests that the emergence and spread of cooperative security practices, ranging from multilateral diplomacy to crisis management, are as important for understanding how security communities work as more traditional confidence-building measures. Using the EU, Spain and Morocco as an in-depth case study, this volume reveals that through the institutionalization of multilateral venues, the EU has provided cooperative frameworks that otherwise would not have been available, and that the de-territorialized notion of security threats has created a new rationale for practical cooperation between Spanish and Moroccan diplomats, armed forces and civilian authorities. Within the broader context, this book provides a mechanism-based framework for studying regional organizations as security community-building institutions, and by utilizing that framework it shows how practice theory can be applied in empirical research to generate novel and thought-provoking results of relevance for the broader field of IR. This book will be of much interest to students of multilateral diplomacy, European Politics, foreign policy, security studies and IR in general.

In The Ideas and Practices of the European Union's Structural Antidiplomacy, Steffen Bay Rasmussen offers a comprehensive analysis of EU diplomacy that goes beyond the functioning of the European External Action Service and discusses the sui generis nature of the EU as a diplomatic actor, the forms of bilateral and multilateral representation as well as the actor identity, founding ideas and meta-practices of EU diplomacy. The book employs a novel theoretical approach that distinguishes the social structures of diplomacy from the practices and meta-practices of diplomacy. Comparing EU diplomacy to the two theoretically constructed ideal types of Westphalian diplomacy and utopian antidiplomacy, Steffen Bay Rasmussen concludes that the EU's international agency constitutes a new form of diplomacy called structural antidiplomacy.

Over the past five years, the EU has established a new system of diplomacy centred on the European External Action Service (EEAS) and the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. This new system reflects a process of evolution in a changing context, and has been faced by major challenges since its inception. This book examines the diplomatic system of the EU, locating it within the broader study of diplomacy and the European integration project. The volume is structured around the interrelated themes of institutional change and the evolving practices of EU diplomacy. It tracks the development of the EU’s system of diplomacy, with particular reference to the implementation of the Lisbon Treaty, the establishment of the EEAS and the emerging practices of EU strategic and structural diplomacy. Bringing together contributions from leading experts in the field, this book provides an original approach to the development and operation of the EU’s diplomatic system. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of European Union international relations, European Union politics and diplomacy.

This textbook, the first comprehensive comparative study ever undertaken, surveys and compares the world’s ten largest diplomatic services: those of Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Russia, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Chapters cover the distinctive histories and cultures of the services, their changing role in foreign policy making, and their preparations for the new challenges of the twenty-first century.

European External Action provides a critical assessment of the practice of EU diplomacy in a key site of Africa-European relations and the global development industry - the Kenyan capital of Nairobi. It analyses how the EU positions itself through its newly established diplomatic corps, the European External Action Service (EEAS), and how it is perceived as a collective geopolitical actor by its external cooperation partners. Going beyond existing studies on EU policy making in Brussels and African-European relations more generally, this book explores in a novel way the conduct of external relations and perceptions of the EU - abroad. Based on institutional ethnography within the EU Delegation in Nairobi and research affiliation with the University of Nairobi, as well as interviews with leading individuals of Kenyan-European interaction, it analyses the practices, processes and perceptions through which EU diplomacy is enacted and realised in a strategic node of global North-South relations. In light of the EU’s claim as a key partner for developing countries and its ambition to be a major player in global politics, European External Action thereby speaks not only to wider debates on the EU’s role as a global and development actor, but also provides new insights in the internal dynamics and the making of external agency in and through EU diplomacy.