This paper is interested in the interrogation of the EU human
security/crisis management (HS/CM) nexus. The nexus is not a starting
point for the author, but a result of a number of elements, processes,
structures and mechanisms which need to be put under the microscope in
order to reveal important insights about a given articulation of
HS/CM. As a result, the main motivation of this paper is to ascertain
what has been behind and underneath a certain spatio-temporal
articulation of HS/CM, to find out what kind of structural terrain has
enabled, shaped, or blocked a certain version of HS/CM to unfold, for
what political reasons, and with what political implications and
consequences.Every human security assemblage is composed of messy
discourses and practices which are often loosely related and from time
to time can be completely unrelated. More often than not, academics
have been afraid of studying the messiness of political reality, of
discourses and practices and their mutual dependencies or their lack
thereof. The Cartesian foundation of social science has meant that the
existing material and ideational messiness needs to be turned into a
representational idiom and passively projected as a certain kind of
synoptic imagery. This paper embraces a preliminary attempt to cut
below stereotypical representations of EU's HS/CM by drawing on the
previous research of the author, namely detailed theoretical and
empirical examination of two other prominent HS/CM cases: Canada and
Japan. Reflection on similarities and structural differences, as well
as heuristic utility of the developed approach for the purposes of
EU-oriented analysis, will be highlighted.
