EU Peacekeeping in Africa: From Functional Niches to Interlocking Security.

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]