Over the last two decades, the space and discourse of the EU’s global interventionism have come to revolve around notions of success and failure. Despite claims of objective appraisals of recipients’ conformity to particular criteria, reality on the ground has tended to be more complex and harder to apprehend. Discourses of failure have especially framed how EU donors understand events taking place in recipient countries and, consequently, which policies are deemed acceptable or unthinkable. This paper proceeds from the post-positivist assumption that reality is constructed through interpretation and focuses on how donors’ own biases and preconceptions permeate and condition their responses to crises. As an illustration of their active role in the production and reproduction of particular representations of recipient countries, it looks specifically at EU discourses on Guinea-Bissau and concomitant strategies of intervention.
