The Role of non-EU External Actors in the Eastern and Southern Neighborhoods

SHARPEDEM-EU publication 4 (July 2024)

This report is the first in a series of articles investigating the role of 12 non-EU external actors in the Eastern and Southern Neighbourhoods. These actors include the African Union, the Arab League, China, the Council of Europe, the Norh Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Nations, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Conducted within the framework of SHAPEDEM-EU Project, this mapping exercise aims at providing a better understanding of these actors’ discursive and behavioural practices in the realms of democracy support, democracy prevention, autocracy support and autocracy promotion in both neighbourhoods. As defined in the SHAPEDEM-EU Concepts Manual practices refer to socially meaningful performed patterns of action that represent and impact knowledge, discourse and activities in and on the real world. Practices can be distinguished “between discursive practices (e.g., essential narratives) and behavioural practices (e.g., activities in a specific field of practices)” (Achrainer and Pace, 2024, p. 24).  Below, we present a concise overview of the main findings gleaned from the twelve case studies.