The EU’s hegemonic interventions in the South Caucasus: Constructing ‘civil’ society, depoliticising human rights?
| Author | Laura Luciani |
| Date | 01 March 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0010836720954478 |
| Published date | 01 March 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0010836720954478
Cooperation and Conflict
2021, Vol. 56(1) 101 –120
© The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0010836720954478
journals.sagepub.com/home/cac
The EU’s hegemonic
interventions in the South
Caucasus: Constructing ‘civil’
society, depoliticising human
rights?
Laura Luciani
Abstract
This article draws upon poststructuralist and postcolonial theories to examine the European
Union’s (EU’s) policies of human rights promotion in the South Caucasus – notably, the EU’s
engagement with local human rights activists and organisations in Armenia, Azerbaijan and
Georgia. Contrary to most literature, which has been concerned with policy (in)effectiveness,
this article is interested in problematising the discursive foundations of this EU-civil society
‘partnership’ in the realm of human rights promotion, as well as in retrieving the agency of actors
who are ‘at the receiving end’ of EU policies. It is argued that the discursive construction of ‘civil’
society as a ‘good-Other’ of the EU-Self serves as a means to depoliticise the EU’s interventions,
aiming at the approximation of ‘transitioning’ countries to the EU’s human rights standards.
Although the hegemonic relation requires subaltern actors to perform the ‘civil’ society identity,
processes of hybridisation and subversion arise as external interventions interact with local
realities and meanings. Building on in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations, the
article shows how the hegemonic identity of ‘civil’ society is negotiated by South Caucasus
‘not-quite-civil’ actors striving for local legitimacy, financial survival or ownership of their human
rights work.
Keywords
Civil society, European Union, hegemony, human rights promotion, South Caucasus
Introduction
Civil society is a crucial piece in the European Union’s (EU’s) external action framework
in the domain of human rights promotion (HRP). Since the collapse of the Soviet Union,
and even more so since the launch of the Eastern Partnership (EaP) in 2009, the EU has
Corresponding author:
Laura Luciani, Centre for EU Studies, Department of Political Sciences, Ghent University, Universiteitstraat
8, B-9000 Ghent, Belgium.
Email: laura.luciani@ugent.be
954478CAC0010.1177/0010836720954478Cooperation and ConflictLuciani
research-article2020
Article
102 Cooperation and Conflict 56(1)
been engaging with civil society actors in the South Caucasus (Armenia, Azerbaijan and
Georgia), considering them important partners in the bottom-up promotion of human
rights, democracy and the rule of law. For local human rights activists and civil society
organisations (CSOs), this has meant not only increased funding (e.g. through a Civil
Society Facility dedicated to the EU’s ‘neighbourhood’), but also the opening up of
opportunities to participate in policy developments, notably through the EaP Civil
Society Forum (CSF):1 more engagement with civil society appeared as one cross-cut-
ting deliverable among the ‘20 deliverables for 2020’ set by the EU and EaP countries.
Whereas most European studies literature has been concerned with policy (in)effective-
ness and norms diffusion, related to the extent in which the EU managed to socialise or
‘empower’ civil societies in third countries, including the South Caucasus (Aliyev, 2016;
Rommens, 2014; Smith, 2011), the discursive foundations underpinning this EU-civil
society ‘partnership’ have been by and large taken for granted. To counter these domi-
nant perspectives, this article unpacks the discursive foundations of these policies
through poststructuralist and postcolonial theories by asking: how is ‘civil society’ con-
structed and subverted within the EU’s HRP in the South Caucasus?
External support to civil society has been problematised by a number of scholars, which
departed from the focus on norms diffusion to expose the dysfunctionalities generated by
the ‘marketisation’ of civil society (Choudry and Kapoor, 2013; Cooley and Ron, 2002;
Hahn-Fuhr and Worschech, 2014; Hulme and Edwards, 2013; Marchetti, 2017). Although
these contributions expose how foreign funding, including the EU’s, affects the motiva-
tions, claims and accountability of local non-governmental organisations (NGOs), they are
overwhelmingly based on rationalist premises. In the camp of poststructuralist approaches,
Foucauldian governmentality theory has dominated the field of European studies since
Kurki’s (2011a) seminal work: this illuminated the neoliberal and depoliticising rationali-
ties informing EU support to civil society, notably through the European Instrument for
Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR). However, as Muehlenhoff (2019) rightly notes,
governmentality studies mostly analyse EU documents, overlooking how civil society sup-
port works in practice within a specific context and how its rationalities are negotiated by
local actors. In light of these elements, this article advances the problematisation of EU
engagement with civil society in a two-fold way: first, by employing Laclau and Mouffe’s
(1985) theory of hegemony and Bhabha’s concept of hybridity (1994), it contributes to a
discursive-theoretical understanding of these policies, also beyond the governmentality
framework. Notably, it conceptualises them as hegemonic interventions shaping the iden-
tity of civil society and its role in HRP. Second, by illustrating how this identity gets hybrid-
ised and subverted in the South Caucasus context, this contribution suggests a mutually
constitutive relation between EU paradigms and local agencies.
In line with invitations to ‘decentre’ the study and practice of EU foreign policy, this
article examines the contingent, EUrocentric2 assumptions underpinning EU normative
paradigms and the power/knowledge relations they sustain (Fisher Onar and Nicolaidis,
2013; Keukeleire and Lecocq, 2018). As Diez (2013: 205) suggested, the concept of
hegemony provides a fruitful entry point for such exercise: it allows to ‘denaturalise the
norms that are brought into association with the EU’ by spotlighting the discursive strug-
gles about and the politics sustaining them. Authors have illustrated how the EU posi-
tions itself as a benevolent hegemonic power in its Eastern ‘neighbourhood’ and how the
To continue reading
Request your trial