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What are global and diffuse risks? How should we think about their potential to turn into threats that overwhelm societal resilience in areas of limited statehood, precipitating violent conflict and governance breakdown? This working paper explores these questions in two sequential steps. First, it shows that existing explanations at the onset of violent conflict and governance breakdown remain focused on local conditions and immediate “bad neighbourhood” effects, neglecting global and diffuse risks. In a highly interconnected and interdependent world such neglect represents a fundamental omission with substantial theoretical and policymaking costs. Global and diffuse risks must be conceptualized, evaluated, and systematically integrated into predictive models, preparedness-efforts, and resilience-building strategies. Secondly, it articulates and explores a five-cluster typology of global and diffuse risks. It is only by taking global and diffuse risks seriously as explanatory variables at the onset of violent conflict and governance breakdown that the EU can make genuine progress in developing a long-term resilience-building strategy.

Faced with what has been labeled ‘rule of law backsliding’ in some EU countries, EU institutions have sought to address the rise of ‘illiberal regimes’ via existing mechanisms as well as new instruments. This introductory contribution offers an overview of the problem and a brief summary of the papers to follow and which were first presented at a workshop co-organized by the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law and Middlesex University London.

The Turkish experience of democratization reforms goes back to 19th century Ottoman rule and hence provides a rich case in its historicity. However, the impact of external actors in the Turkish example has recently begun to be discussed primarily with respect to the countrys relations with the EU and its attempts to fulfil the Copenhagen criteria in order to start accession negotiations for EU membership. Here our focus will be on the most recent wave of reforms during the 1991 to 2006 period. The prospect of EU accession, initiated at the Helsinki Summit of 1999, provides the most recent and crucial turning point in Turkeys democratic reform path. After the granting of candidacy at Helsinki, in order to fulfil the Copenhagen political and economic criteria necessary to begin accession negotiations, Turkey undertook various political reforms over a wide field encompassing most particularly human rights and freedoms, the judicial system, legislative and administrative capacity, corruption and strengthening of civilian control over the military. This chapter undertakes a critical assessment of these reforms, within the EUCLIDA theoretical framework.