Determinants of Regional Leadership: is the EU a Leading Regional Actor in Peace and Security?

This article introduces a conceptualization of regional leadership, including an analytical framework where regional leadership is considered to be based on three necessary ‘determinants’. Regional leadership is defined as a concept used to describe the power of an actor to influence certain aspects of the international relations and/or the internal functioning of an actor in its neighbourhood. The aforementioned necessary determinants are: (i) the actor’s willingness to act as a leader; (ii) the actor’s capacity to act as a leader and (iii) the acceptance of the leadership actions by followers and external actors. Each of these determinants will be applied to the European Union (EU) in the area of peace and security to assess whether the EU is a regional leader in this domain.