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Since 2003 the EU has launched 16 peacekeeping missions in Africa in most cases in cooperation with the UN. Therefore, this article takes an inter-organizational perspective on the EU's peacekeeping activities in Africa. Theoretically the article makes a contribution to the growing literature on inter-organizational approaches by applying niche selection and resource exchange theory to the field of security studies. The paper finds that EU missions in the past followed a targeted and niche approach in which it has played a facilitating but not dominating role in UN peacekeeping operations. However, in order to make effective use of this targeted approach the EU and UN are currently engaging in a substantial reconstruction of their relationship by building an interlocking peacekeeping architecture in which elements of resource pooling are central. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

This article problematizes the EU's approach to conflict transformation in its neighbouring countries, with specific reference to Bosnia and Herzegovina. It claims that the way in which the EU engages with domestic elites differs considerably from its engagement with the grassroots – an interaction that is heavily reliant on cooperation with civil society. This in turn produces a process of divergent transformation, creating further cleavages between elites and citizens. Emerging centrifugal processes obstruct the development of a common political platform for the citizens and represent an obstacle to the creation of a social contract in the peacebuilding context. This undermines the possibility of achieving sustainable peace and results in the transformation of past conflict into new conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article reflects on the dynamics associated with state building in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) with a particular focus on the role of external agency. The debate over constitutional reform has featured prominently in BiH since the early 2000s. The objective of this reform was to transform Dayton into a functional institutional framework that prepared the country for both international withdrawal and EU integration. Based on a detailed analysis of two international initiatives launched in 2005 and 2009 this article analyses the reasons why constitutional engineering in post-Dayton BiH failed. More specifically, the article argues that this reform failed as a result of various shortcomings including international divisions; a democratic deficit inherent in the process; and the neglect of local conditions (including conflicting notions of the future form of the state by both local and external actors). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]