The European Union’s development policy: a balancing act between ‘a more comprehensive approach’ and creeping securitisation

Abstract

‘Security’ has become prominent in official EU development discourse in recent years, and references to security concerns are routinely included in policy statements and documents. Our objective in this paper is to determine whether security concerns have had a growing influence over EU development policy and aid allocation. If so, we are interested in whether this trend can properly be understood as ‘securitisation’ in the critical sense that resources are being diverted away from socio-economic development, or whether we should see it as a positive trend towards greater coherence in EU development policy.