From Decentring Agenda to Decentring Application. An Illustrative Case of Decentring the EU’s Human Rights and Democracy Country Strategies

Abstract

In recent years the international landscape has undergone major shifts and deep transformations. These facts are mirrored in the academic literature introducing concepts of Global International Relations, pluralization of agency and norms contestation. Particularly, European studies is now confronted with a challenging task to contribute to the identification, analysis and further outline of the appropriate strategies for the EU in this new complex and more demanding reality. One of the latest conceptual attempts proposes solutions which ‘make sense of our multipolar order and…reconstitute European agency in a non-European world’ arrived in the package of the so-called ‘Decentring agenda’ (Nikolaïdis & Fisher Onar 2013). Recently authors have delivered on the operationalization of the decentring agenda into various spheres of scientific inquiry dealing with European affairs (Keukeleire & Lecocq, 2018). This article aims to further extend the reach of decentring, specifically towards practical application of decentring in strategic policy planning and policymaking. The EU’s External Human Rights Policy (EHRP) is a particularly sensitive subject calling for the application of the decentring approach. Particularly in this paper, decentring is demonstrated and illustratively applied on the very basic, direct and strategic level of Human Rights and Democracy Country Strategies (HRDCS). It intends to fill the small but crucial gap between academic conceptual work, which is still not fully in touch with practical application, and the demand from the side of policymakers who lack time for study and ‘translation’ of conceptual innovations stemming from political theory and political science into their daily practice.