Methodological Reflections on a Decentring Agenda in EU Foreign Policy Research: Experiences from a Horizon2020 Project

When elaborating a decentring agenda for EU foreign policy research, one also needs to engage in methodological reflections and how the strategies of provincializing, engagement and reconstruction need to be translated not only in the theoretical and conceptual approach, but - most crucially - in the methodology of one’s research as well. Methodology sets the stage - to paraphrase Gayatri Spivak’s (1993) - to unlearn one’s own learning and unlearn one’s own privilege. After discussing the role of methodology in decentring, this contribution describes how this was pursued in the Horizon 2020 Project MEDRESET the methodological framework of which was specifically developed with the aim to research Mediterranean relations from a decentring perspective in a consortium of 12 research institutions from across the Mediterranean space. It analyses what this approach has enabled us to learn, while also outlining the difficulties of unlearning and the shortcomings we could not overcome through a decentring methodology. While this has been about critiquing how Mediterranean relations have been studied and about studying them differently, over the course of the research, the demands of decentring went well beyond. The article concludes with reflections on the difficulties and crucial role of decentring research in a political environment which is increasingly revisionist (authoritarian, nationalist, and ethno-centric).