In this paper, I will look at a specific area of foreign policy which is security and defense, and more particularly to its transformation into a ‘regionalized security and defense policy’. Nowadays, many regional organizations find themselves in a process of security and defense regionalization, such as ECOWAS, the AU, Unasur, etc. While there are not as far is this process as the EU, their security and defense practices are changing through consultation, cooperation, joint exercises and operations. The link between regional organization and security and defense has been poorly analyzed by the New Regionalism Approach (NRA) trying to determine objective conditions for regionalization and studying the capacities of the organizations. Moreover, the concept of a regionalized security policy has not been brought up for any other regions than for the EU. This concept is an interesting lens to analyze this process has it brings up several questions such as: why and how member states are changing their practices in an area supposedly impermeable or reluctant to delegation of sovereignty? Is these changes implied by or has for consequence a change of identity and interests of member states?
I am proposing to build a framework to analyze changes of practice in security and defense policies towards regionalization, using a poststructuralist view of identity and foreign policy as co-constituted. I will argue that new kind of policies than entails these new regional practices need to be legitimize through reference to identity. At the same time, identities are constituted and (re)produced through formulation of security and defense policies. In this framework, both identity and policy are thus constituted through discourse (Hansen 2006). Therefore, through the study of discourse stemming from the regional institutions and national level, I will try to understand the change in identities and security and defense policies leading to new regional practices. I aim at adding to this poststructural framework a more constructivist way of understanding the diffusion and reinforcement of these discourses. I argue that once these ‘regional’ discourses legitimizing these new practices are introduced, new places of interaction are created (joint operations or joint forums for army or diplomatic officials for instance) where new actors are socialized to these ‘regional’ discourses.
