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Between 2002 and 2008, the European Union simultaneously applied interventionism and the promotion of local ownership as policy approaches in its peacebuilding efforts in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This article introduces an analytical framework to evaluate the coherence of the EU's policies and applies this framework to two case studies involving the police sector: the EU's support to the fight against organized crime and to negotiations on a police reform. The article concludes that the two policy approaches applied by the EU were incoherent and that this incoherence contributed to the failure to achieve police restructuring in Bosnia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The increasing privatization of military and stability operations has received considerable scholarly attention. Existing scholarship, however, has largely focused on the privatization of state foreign policy, overlooking the empirical analysis of international organizations' use of commercial actors in the conduct of crisis management operations. The present study fills this gap by investigating the role of commercial contractors in supporting European Common Security and Defence civilian and military missions. By doing so, the article intends to advance the empirical knowledge of the privatization of foreign policy activities and the scope, determinants and future prospects of EU reliance on commercial actors for CSDP crisis management operations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Security Sector Reform (SSR) has developed into a key component of international peacebuilding agendas. However, there is a lack of sufficient knowledge of the advantages and drawbacks of different reform processes. This study offers a comparative analysis of two post-war states with diverse approaches to the reconstruction of the national armed forces after a civil war: Sierra Leone after the 1999 Lomé Peace Accord, where the competing warring parties were integrated into a single force; and Liberia following the 2003 Accra Peace Agreement, where the old army was disbanded and a new force was recruited and built from scratch. The findings show that each approach was associated with distinct benefits and risks during the implementation process. However, the outcomes are also similar in many important respects, and raise questions about the long-term sustainability of these reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abyei was one of the most contested areas of Sudan's Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) of January 2005. Drawing on direct experience, the article examines the agreement and the experience of trying to support its implementation. It analyses the relationship between this and the overall problems of the CPA, and of peacekeeping in the newly independent South Sudan. Drawing on relevant literature, it examines the wider issues for the negotiation of peace agreements; for UN mandates, including the protection of civilians; for the limitations of peacekeeping; and for the importance of continuing political engagement. It argues that in some situations smaller missions without a heavy military component might in fact achieve more. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Following more than a decade of NATO's intervention in Afghanistan, it is often argued that the UN, alongside its international partners and the Afghan government, has failed to facilitate good governance and a stable democratic political order. In charting the evolving UN role in ‘democratizing’ Afghanistan, this article analyses why this is so. The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), facing considerable historical and institutional constraints, has had neither the will nor the capacity to implement its ambitious democratization mandate. Instead of aiming for a system of governance along ‘Western’ lines, it should focus primarily on promoting an appropriate, institutionalized, workable political order, regional consensus, and national reconciliation as the necessary foundations for bringing peace and stability to the country. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]