Introduction: European Security Governance

The academic journal European Security (Taylor & Francis) published an EU-GRASP special issue on European ‘security’ governance.  The issue is edited by George Christou and Stuart Croft from the University of Warwick and includes 10 contributions on a wide range of security issues.

The central aim of this special issue is to discuss the question of how we can understand and explain the EU as a security actor – in essence, to elaborate on the current literature on security governance in order to provide a more theoretically driven analysis of the EU in security. Our contention is that whilst the current literature on security governance in Europe is conceptually rich, there still remains somewhat of a gap between those that do ‘security governance’ and those that focus on ‘security’ per se. We argue that a synergy or at least a conversation between these two literatures is required in order to enrich further the study of the EU as global-regional actor in peace and security.

Currently, there is partial access on the website of European Security to some of the contributions in this issue.