Borrowing the Copenhagen school's lexicon of desecuritization the present paper appraises the EU's role as a desecuritizing agent for Turkey with a particular focus on security speech-acts about Kurdish separatism' and political Islam'. Taking up the illustrative cases of silencing the military and abandoning limits to freedom of speech reflected in EU-Turkey accession documents this paper observes the ways in which the EU membership conditionality has been an important catalyst for Turkey's ...

The aim of this paper is to explain the flux in the European Union (EU) policies towards the Black Sea region with a particular comparative focus on the impact of the EU's operations in the South Caucasus and the EU Border Assistance Mission (EUBAM) in Moldova. This paper adopts the prospect and process of EU enlargement towards Central and Eastern Europe as a breakthrough in the EU's deeper rapprochement with the Black Sea region. By assuming that the EU has a variety of instruments at its disposal ...

The Cyprus conundrum presents a major challenge to western security structures and relationships in particular with regard to Turkey's European Union (EU) accession process and the stalled Berlin plus arrangements between NATO and the EU. This article argues that the Cyprus question is neither the sole reason for blocking the progress nor is its resolution the panacea for unblocking the interwoven stalemate in the NATO-EU and the EU-Turkey relationships. In this context this article will first ...