Current scholarship on European Union-Middle East relations has contributed little to ongoing theoretical debates in the academic discipline of international relations. Yet several influential research programmes regarding world politics would benefit from incorporating events and trends involving these two regions. In particular, conceptual controversies regarding regional and global security, the diffusion of regional identities, interregionalism and overlapping regionalism and the politics of empire will be advanced when specialists concentrate on analytical puzzles, and move beyond descriptive, evaluative and prescriptive accounts.