🚨My recent co-authored article on the EU's "puzzling" and "contradictory" integration promotion strategy in the MENA region is now published in @gpejournal.bsky.social Below is a brief thread summarising its main arguments.

The paper introduces a dialectical method based on the ontology of the philosophy of internal relations and the epistemology of the process of abstraction. This method is used to analyse the EU's strategy, with the Agadir and GAFTA Agreements as case studies.

The method contends that understanding the EU's strategy in the MENA requires situating it within the dynamics of neoliberal capitalism and interrelated geopolitics. It also invites us to consider spatial and temporal scales of the EU strategy to unlock its "puzzling" approach.

The paper argues that the complex interplay of developments and dynamics at the EU scale, global competition scale, and MENA scale across three distinct time frames (1995–2003, 2004–11, 2012–21) has shaped the EU regional integration strategy in the MENA region.

On the EU scale, it shows that the EU presents itself as a leading proponent of global market openness but strategically marginalises the GAFTA Agreement in favour of the Agadir Agreement to meet its economic needs by utilising the economic potential of specific MENA industries.

The paper also demonstrates that the global competitive dynamics, however, have constrained this preference, as the EU has been contested by the US in the Agadir Agreement area and China and, to a lesser extent, Russia in other GAFTA member states.

Lastly, it shows that the agency of MENA states has been noticeable since the EU encounters difficulties in influencing GAFTA’s regulatory framework and dealing with the diverse interests of state elites in the region.