European Union security governance: putting the ‘security’ back in

The central aim of this article is to discuss the question of how we can understand and explain the European Union (EU) as a security actor – in essence, to elaborate on the current literature on security governance in order to provide a more theoretically driven analysis of the EU in security. Our contention is that whilst the current literature on security governance in Europe is conceptually rich, there still remains somewhat of a gap between those that do ‘security governance’ and those that focus on ‘security’ per se. We argue that a synergy or at least a conversation between these two literatures is required in order to enrich further the study of the EU as global–regional security actor.