This paper examines how the European Union (EU) has discursively represented Mindanao in official texts from the 1980s to the 2020s. Using the Discourse-Historical Approach, it analyzes 84 documents from the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Court of Justice. Two dominant framings emerge, namely conflict and aid. Conflict discourse shifts from separatist insurgency to terrorism in the post-9/11 period and later to governance and human rights concerns during the Duterte presidency. Aid discourse evolves from humanitarian relief to development cooperation, institution building, gender inclusion and climate resilience. These shifts reflect both developments within Mindanao and broader transformations in EU external action, including changes in how the Union performs humanitarian, developmental, security-oriented and normative roles. The study shows how EU discourse constructs the Union’s evolving actorness in a peripheral setting where material influence is limited but representational practices remain central.
ENVERGA et al. (Tue,) studied this question.