Decentring European Foreign Policy Analysis: Towards a Paradigmatic Shift

Abstract

The article argues that considering Eurocentrism as a meta-paradigm helps scholars to be conscious about assumptions, simplifications and distortions that undermine scholars' abilities to analyse European foreign policy. The article integrates several conceptualisations of decentring that originate from both postcolonial and more mainstream scholarship. It explains how analytical limitations and simplifications can be overcome through various interrelated stages of a decentring approach, whilst avoiding recentring or merely ‘decentring by addition’. The article concludes by arguing for a widening of ‘allyship in diversity’ – not only amongst but also beyond critical approaches – by reaching out to more mainstream scholarship in order to increase the prospect of a paradigm shift in the analysis of European foreign policy.