ABSTRACT
This chapter presents extensive empirical work explaining shifts and consequences of the EU’s regional frames regarding West Africa in the last decade. It traces the EU’s internal bureaucratic struggles and institutional reforms that led to the EU’s deconstruction of West Africa into smaller security regions such as the Sahel, and shows how these shifts now undermine and weaken the regional framework based around the Economic Community for West African States (ECOWAS). By providing new overlapping and thus competing regional imaginaries, the EU contradicts and imperils ECOWAS as the legitimate security actor in West Africa. Exemplifying the benefits of interdisciplinary dialogue, this contribution also outlines the shortcomings of (a-)spatial concepts in IR and turns to critical geography to unpack the struggles over the definition of regional space which must be symmetrically analysed with the struggles over the definition of what security is.
