The predominantly EU-centric and Western-centric analysis of EU foreign policy limits our understanding of the EU’s foreign policy within a rapidly changing international context (Keuleers, Fonck and Keukeleire, forthcoming). Fisher Onar and Nicolaïdis’ (2013) therefore argue in favor of a decentring agenda for the study and practice of the EU’s foreign policy. The purpose of this paper is to translate this decentring agenda into a systematic analytical framework that allows scholars to study EU foreign policy from an ‘outside-in’ perspective. The framework is designed to open up for decentring, in terms of which knowledge can be acquired (by adopting a ‘material/spatial’, ‘normative’, ‘polity’ and ‘historical/temporal’ outside-in perspective) and how this knowledge can be acquired (by adopting a ‘linguistic’, ‘disciplinary’ and ‘methodological’ outside-in perspective).
