Publication details
EU´s External Human Rights Promotion Effectivity Challenge and the Decentring Agenda as the Potential Remedy. Illustrative case of Decentring EU´s Human Rights and Democracy Country Strategies
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| Year of publication | 2019 |
| Type | Conference abstract |
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| Description | Recent research suggests, that the effectivity represents one of the main challenges to ambitious and comprehensive goals of EU´s External Human Rights policy. This is due to internal (EU and MS levels) policy incoherence, but also due to external pressures and contestation from the third countries. This paper focuses exclusively on the second, external reasons of ineffective conduct. This paper contributes to the vivid discussion about eurocentrism in European studies and the efforts of combatting its negative consequences in European policymaking with the help of outside-in perspectives and decentring approaches, opening EU´s policymaking arena to influences of a variety of stakeholders. Particularly, it attempts at bringing theoretical and conceptual discussions concerning the decentring agenda one step closer to its applicability. The framework which was gradually formed and concretized by the authors Nora Fisher Onar and Kalypso Nicolaidis underwent just recently operationalisation by Stephan Keukeleire and Sharon Lecocq. This operationalisation is customized for the specific case of EU’s external human rights policy. Whereas I am trying to protect the core concept of human rights and focus the decentring activities (provincializing and engagement) on the level of conceptions – the ways human rights commitments are promoted and strategically implemented by the EU. For that purpose, EU´s Human Rights and Democracy Country Strategy (HRDCS) is identified as the appropriate foreign policy instrument to be used as a litmus test for the applicability of the decentring agenda in practical policymaking. Based on empirical investigation of the ways how the third country governments are involved in the process of drafting of the respective HRDCS, there are presented also first practical recommendations to the EU policymakers inspired by the practically employed ´decentred agenda´. |