EU Foreign and Security Policy through the Lens of Practice Theory: bridging the gap between policy rhetoric and field-reality in the study of the EU

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My doctoral research seeks to forge an analytical framework able to comprehensively appraise the praxis of the European Union's foreign and security action, seeking to move away from conventional grand theories. Building upon Bourdieu's praxeology, this framework underlines the importance of a focus on practice as the intertwining element between agency and structure. Such a focus would allow the author to coherently answer the research question of whether or not there is a fundamental asymmetry between the EU policy rhetoric and the actual practices on the field(s) in the Southern neighborhood. The work addresses the research question by revolving around two interrelated issues. First, whether behind the rhetoric of norms and values projection the EU is constructing an inferior Other that must comply with its ruling in an asymmetrical manner. In this regard, the research attempts to understand the way this rhetoric is discursively legitimized by both EU and non- EU practitioners; the ways the logics embedded in this rhetoric might directly or indirectly favour phenomena of social disparities and concentrations of capital. Second, whether local participation, joint ownership and partnerships are a contradiction in practice, as these rather serve to hide a hierarchy wherein the neighbors are not equal participants, but subaltern to the EU because of the dispositional logics embedded in the foreign policy practices of the Union