Rethinking security: towards Third World Approaches to European Union Law

Amidst the second Trump presidency and the Putinist invasion of Ukraine, European Union (EU) discourse has taken a ‘security turn’. The need to defend ‘European constitutional values’ amidst autocratization amplifies earlier concerns of limited democratic oversight over security policies. Critical EU security studies, despite highlighting these deficits, largely neglect the domination vis-à-vis polities beyond the EU. This article discusses how Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) advance critical studies of EU security by developing the concept of ‘normative deficiency’ and applying it to the EU. We argue that TWAIL enriches existing critical EU security studies by recognising normative deficiency not only in the limited formal regulation but also in the ignorance towards the uneven spillover of the regulation towards the Global South. The de-centering of European security with the help of TWAIL enables to draw the contours of ‘Third World Approaches to EU Law’ (TWAEL). We illustrate how TWAEL can strengthen the EU’s capacity to live up to constitutional values in relation to the deployment of private military and security companies (PMSCs). TWAEL highlights how the normative deficiency of EU law fuels the omission of non-EU citizens from democratic oversight over PMSC deployment.