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Focuses on the concept of civilian power and implications of the current militarisation.

The article analyzes Germany's policies toward Russia from an ontological security perspective. We argue that foreign policy should be seen as a tool that allows states to maintain a sense of a reasonably stable self, which enables them to cope in the changing world. We develop a three-layered model conceptualizing ontological security through narratives about the self, a significant other, and the international system and show its particular relevance for explicating policy change. When threatened by a crisis, states respond by narrative adjustment that highlights continuity on some levels, while enabling change on other levels. Developing the argument that Germany's ontological security is based in the "civilian power" narrative, we use our model to reconstruct Germany's response to Russia's wars in Georgia and Ukraine. In both cases, the discourse highlighted the ongoing validity of civilian power on the level of the international order, while challenges were accommodated by adjustments on the level of the self and the significant other. Ontological security was restored vis-à-vis the changing world by reinforcing the civilian power as a norm, while shifting blame to either both Germany and Russia (2008), or Russia exclusively (2014), for not adhering to it at a given time.

This article exposes the dilemma between the EU's civilian geopolitical model and its role as a dominant geoeconomic power. While the success of the European model for political-economic organisation and for overcoming war is appealing, the EU's external relations frequently fail to avoid the traps of Europe's imperial past (and present), thus undermining the EU's credibility and legitimacy in international development policy. This article therefore argues for a critical engagement with views on the EU from the outside. It draws on qualitative fieldwork on EU development policy in East Africa and illustrates how such external perceptions sometimes differ considerably from dominant European ones articulated in official EU geopolitical discourse. Adapted from the source document.

The Syrian war has entered its eigth year. This will however not be the focus of this article. Although an easy way to dismiss the existing ample critique of the role of the European Union (EU) institutions and its Member States in that conflict would be to argue that it focuses of the conflict, this article will present an analysis of why adopting the concept of 'civilian power Europe' (CPE) will show that the way the EU has reacted to this conflict to date in Syria offers a more accurate description. In order to do so, the article consists of three parts: the first presents the main CPE characteristics before it turns to how in practice the EU's decisions and actions on the Syrian conflict can be considered from that particular perspective. The final part pays attention to the role of the European Parliament in order to further contribute to explaining how and why this parliamentary institution has greatly contributed to the EU acting as a civilian power in Syria – in line with CPE's emphasis on the importance of both democratic prerequisites and inputs.