The paper seeks to provide a conceptual frame for the systematical study of security relations between the European Union and Asia. In order to address questions such as how we can explain the trajectory of security relations between the EU and Asian partners, and whether over time a greater convergence in cooperation can be observed, an analytical framework is developed. This conceptualisation aims to facilitate a comprehensive analysis of risk perceptions, policy responses and joint actions between the EU and Asia across a wide range of traditional and non-traditional security dimensions, including regional security military security, economic security, maritime security, human security, civil protection, cybersecurity, migration and human trafficking, climate and energy security. The value of such a perspective is to identify variations in the level of cooperation across these different policy domains with distinct temporal trajectories as well as variation across the different Asian countries, and over time. In doing so, it advances our understanding of EU-Asia security relations beyond existing treatments in the literature where the focus has mainly been on great power politics with near exclusive attention to interests and policies of the USA and China and a narrow focus on 'traditional' or military security challenges. As a consequence, analyses tend to employ a limited set of concepts and approaches, such a balance of power and power transition. By way of conclusion, the paper explores the empirical application of this framework and discusses the added value of such an approach.
