The Stability Trap : Selective Visibility, Spatial Differentiation, and Security Prioritisation in EU Governance of Transnational Crime in Senegal

Sammanfattning

EU security-development governance in West Africa increasingly shapes how stability and insecurity are understood, with direct consequences for how transnational organised crime (TOC) is rendered visible and prioritised. While dominant scholarship and policy tend to focus on crisis-affected Sahelian states, attention remains limited on how relatively stable states are positioned within these governance frameworks. This thesis focuses on Senegal as a stable periphery to examine how EU security governance operates beyond immediate crisis contexts. The analysis draws on a qualitative, interpretive case study combining EU policy documents (2011-2025) with semi-structured elite interviews conducted with security practitioners in Dakar. The theoretical framework brings together three interrelated concepts: practice-oriented securitisation, spatial differentiation, and selective visibility. Together, this framework shows how the EU constructs the Sahel as a flexible governance space rather than a fixed geographic region, structured through a highly interventionist crisis core and a comparatively marginalised stable periphery. Within this configuration, Senegal is positioned as both geographically proximate to insecurity and yet consistently framed as a stable and reliable partner. This positioning shapes EU engagement, which prioritises preventative and capacity-building measures over crisis intervention. Migration and terrorism dominate the security agenda, while TOC becomes visible primarily when linked to these concerns. Governance therefore operates through selective visibility, where attention is shaped by resource constraints and European strategic priorities rather than uniform assessments of risk. These dynamics produce what this study conceptualises as the stability trap, in which Senegal’s categorisation as ‘stable’ reduces the perceived urgency of its security challenges. Stability is not treated as the absence of insecurity, but as a governing category that structures attention and intervention in uneven ways across the region. This ultimately results in asymmetrical security outcomes, where certain forms of insecurity remain structurally under-prioritised despite their persistence.