RESEARCH

• Strengthen the understanding of multilateralism, and its relation with other concepts such as multi-polarity, multiregionalism and interregionalism;
• Understand the changes within the field of security and its effect on the governance structures namely in the approach to security cooperation and multilateralism;
• Better understand the evolving nature of the EU as a global actor within the field of security and EU’s current role in global security governance;
• Understand and develop the changing role of the EU towards other regional integration processes in the peace and security field;
• Better understand the relationship between external and internal dimensions of the above mentioned policy domains, namely the legal aspects of EU’s involvement in security at regional and global levels;
• Suggest future roles to the EU on the world stage within the field of security.

This research project will be undertaken through a conceptual analysis but also through the undertaking of case-studies on an agreed number of security issues and through exercises of foresight, where academia and stakeholders will be able to explore scenarios of future roles of the EU in security. EU-GRASP will study several cases of cooperation both at the interregional, intra-regional and regional-global levels, in order to understand the multilateral nature of security governance, where local, national, regional, and global actors link in different manners, according to the different issues at stake. In doing so, EU-GRASP will focus on six security issues that are high on the EU-agenda:

1. Regional conflict;
2. Terrorism;
3. Weapons of mass destruction;
4. Energy security and climate change;
5. Human rights;
6. Migration.

EU-GRASP aims to show how the EU engages in different types of cooperation, with different actors in the different security issues. While in some cases there is still a strong bilateral dimension to the cooperation, in other cases the nature of the cooperation is definitely regional-global and interregional. These case-studies wish to show first of all, EU’s involvement with different actors in security governance, and secondly, EU’s use of multilateralism as an instrument for security governance. The research will be policy oriented and include a foresight dimension.