This paper investigates lobbying and framing in EU foreign policy towards conflicts in its neighbourhood. While a variety of actors, including non-state actors, participate in the process of formulation of EU foreign policy, little is known about the emergence, codification and diffusion of frames informing EU policy towards cases of ethno-political conflicts in the EU’s neighbourhood. This paper argues that understanding these dynamics and the conditions under which framing and diffusion of frames occur requires an analysis of social networks as well as the identification of frame entrepreneurs. While networks provide the social structure through which framing processes develop, entrepreneurs are the agency that triggers these processes and favours frame diffusion. Without a frame entrepreneur new frames are unlikely to emerge and diffuse. The paper will investigate these dynamics with regard to EU policies towards the Israeli-Palestinian and the Western-Sahara conflicts. While in both cases there are territorial disputes going on, with one side of the parties involved in a much stronger position (Israel and Morocco) than the other (Palestinians and Sahrawis), the EU’s policy towards Israel and Palestine has progressively been defined according to a legal frame which challenges the territorial claims of Israel over the Occupied Palestinian Territories. In contrast, the Western Sahara’s problem has been obfuscated by the prevalence of an economic frame, which defines the EU’s stance toward Morocco.
