The EU likes to be seen as a normative actor, engaged in diffusing the norms and values enshrined in the Lisbon Treaty. This book focuses on gender equality as one of these values. It shows that the EU, in implementing the mandate to promote gender equality abroad, is acting under distinctly separate sets of logic in the various policy fields and vis-à-vis different stakeholders. The same normative commitment to gender equality, when filtered through the particular logic of the various policy fields, leads to different types of external action with rather different outcomes.

Thomas Kruessmann, Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies, University of Tartu. Anita Ziegerhofer, Professor at the Institute of the Foundations of Law, University of Graz.