Striving for trade not peace? Revisiting trade-peace and trade-security nexuses in the EU’s trade policy strategy amidst the Russia-Ukraine war

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article dismantles the popular myth that the strategic framing of the EU’s trade with Russia following the 2014 ‘Ukraine crisis’ was nurtured by the liberal peace logic, and the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine should be thus seen as an ultimate failure of a ‘liberal peace’ hypothesis. To challenge this argument, we provide a nuanced conceptualization of the trade-peace and trade-security nexuses in EU trade policy and apply it to the case of EU-Russia trade relations (2014–2022). We find that the trade-peace and trade-security nexuses in the EU’s framing of its approach to Russia has been shaped by the bargaining and restrictive logics. Though the case of Russia’s war against Ukraine does not immediately refute the liberal peace theory, we call for the critical reconsideration of the connections between peace and security concerns in the strategic and legal framing of the EU’s trade policy.