This paper discusses uses and misuses of EU border management models and strategies in the framework of crisis response interventions in the Southern and Eastern neighbourhoods. It focuses especially on Libya and Ukraine, cases which dramatically stand out as the conflicts at the gates of Europe. The deployment of border management instruments appears to follow different trajectories in the two countries, diverging in terms of both design and implementation. By relying on collaborative research materials resulting from extensive fieldwork, the paper argues that the differentiation of EU's interventions across the ENP countries can be explained as the result of growing political and institutional fragmentation in the EU, the replacement of the "transformative power"-mantra with new stabilization templates and weak strategic consistency among member states, each conveying different security identities and interests vis-à-vis EU's external actions and sectors. Primary data, collected between 2016 and 2018, does not point to an increase in conflict-sensitivity, context-specificity and local ownership, they rather reveal the crisis of the EU´s liberal project.
Introduction: contextualizing the Tunisian transition In recent scholarship on democratization in the Arab world, there have been repeated criticisms of the dominance of top-down institutionalist analyses in the period prior to the Arab uprisings. 1 This is not to say that bottom-up approaches were not present, as there were indeed very relevant studies produced at the time, even in such unpropitious research settings as Tunisia. Researchers looking at the protests in the mining region of Gafsa in 2008 already highlighted some of the dynamics between local unrest and state authoritarianism that would later impact the Tunisian revolution. 2 Similarly, studies had investigated the dynamics of the (crony) neo-liberal reforms of the Tunisian regime at the local level and outlined the many unintended consequences of macro-reforms in the face of local resistance and adaptations. 3 Yet in all these cases,
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