Preventing extremism – riskifying enlargement: Prevention imaginaries of counter-terrorism in EU enlargement towards South East Europe

Preventive counter-terrorism has become an increasingly important focus of the current European Union (EU) enlargement to South East Europe or the so-called Western Balkan states. Against this background, in this thesis, I argue that prevention (re)orders enlargement relations between the EU and South-East Europe (SEE) in specific ways. Preventive counter-terrorism shapes political relations in EU enlargement in a way that goes beyond targeting extremism or political violence. The three empirical chapters highlight different aspects of this main point. Prevention (1) summarises, addresses and governs multiple issues of stabilisation and transformation agendas in SEE. As such it has come to complement previous catch-all categories of international governance in SEE such as peacebuilding or reconciliation. Prevention (2) (re)produces political dynamics of complicit politicisation. It reproduces imaginaries of technical and depoliticised enlargement and security politics and at the same time underlines contestations of such (de)politicisation claims. Prevention (3) (re)configures spatio-temporal relations of SEE and the EU. It anticipates and imagines future risks related to counter-terrorism and political integration of SEE into the EU and thereby produces riskified spatial SEE-EU relations. The increased focus on prevention in EU enlargement to a certain extent riskifies enlargement by connecting central enlargement concerns to extremism and terrorism. Through this focus, achieving enlargement reforms are not only a goal of European integration or of state- and society-building but become vital in terms of Europe’s security. At the same time, the riskification of enlargement provides another line of reasoning for delaying progress in the accession of SEE to the EU.