Research Project
Good intentions, mixed results – A conflict sensitive unpacking of the EU comprehensive approach to conflict and crisis mechanisms
Events
By combining bottom–up perspectives with an institutional approach, EUNPACK will increase our understanding of how EU crisis responses function and are received on the ground in crisis areas.
This entails exploring local agencies and perceptions in target countries without losing sight of the EU’s institutions and their expectations and ambitions. It also entails examining the whole cycle of crisis, from pre-crisis, through crisis, and into post-crisis phase.
EUNPACK analyses two gaps in EU crisis response. First, the intentions–implementation gap, which relates to 1) the capacity to make decisions and respond with one voice and to deploy the necessary resources, 2) how these responses are implemented on the ground by various EU institutions and member states, and 3) how other actors – local and international – enhance or undermine the EU’s activities. Second, the project addresses the gap between the implementation of EU policies and approaches, and how these policies and approaches are received and perceived in target countries, what we refer to as the implementation–local reception/perceptions gap.
Our main hypothesis is that the severity of the two gaps is a decisive factor for the EU’s impacts on crisis management and thereby its ability to contribute more effectively to problem-solving on the ground. We analyse these gaps through cases that reflect the variation of EU crisis responses in three concentric areas surrounding the EU: the enlargement area (Kosovo, Serbia), the neighbourhood area (Ukraine, Libya), and the extended neighbourhood (Mali, Iraq, Afghanistan).
The results of our research will enable us to present policy recommendations fine-tuned to make the EU’s crisis response mechanisms more conflict and context sensitive, and thereby more efficient and sustainable.
See more information on the project's home page.
Publications
- EUNPACK: Highlights and recommendations
- REPORT: Executive Summary of the Final Report & Selected Policy Recommendations
- ACADEMIC ARTICLE: The limits of technocracy and local encounters: The European Union and peacebuilding
- ACADEMIC ARTICLE: Plugging the capability-expectations gap: towards effective, comprehensive and conflict-sensitive EU crisis response?
- ACADEMIC ARTICLE: Lessons to be learned from the EU Crisis Response in the Extended Neighbourhood: EU Security Sector Reform in Afghanistan, Iraq and Mali
- ACADEMIC ARTICLE: Approaching the European Union’s crisis response and international peacekeeping from below
- WORKING PAPER: EU policies towards Iraq
- WORKING PAPER: EU policies towards Afghanistan
- WORKING PAPER: EU policies towards Mali
- WORKING PAPER: Comparing the EU’s Output Effectiveness in the Cases of Afghanistan, Iraq and Mali
- WORKING PAPER: EU crisis response in Mali
- WORKING PAPER: The implementation of EU crisis response in Afghanistan
- WORKING PAPER: The implementation of EU crisis response in Iraq
- WORKING PAPER: The implementation of EU crisis response in Ukraine
- WORKING PAPER: The implementation of EU crisis response in Libya
- WORKING PAPER: The implementation of EU crisis response in Serbia and Kosovo
- POLICY BRIEF: Public Perceptions of the EU’s Role in Crisis Management in South Mitrovica
- POLICY BRIEF: Public Perceptions of the EU’s Role in Crisis Management in North Mitrovica
- POLICY BRIEF: A summary of perception studies in Ukraine
- POLICY BRIEF: Perceptions about the EU crisis response in Mali
- POLICY BRIEF: Perceptions about the EU’s Crisis Response in Libya
- POLICY BRIEF: Summarizing perception studies in Afghanistan
- POLICY BRIEF: Perceptions about the EU crisis response in Iraq
- WORKING PAPER: How the EU is facing crises in its neighbourhood: Evidence from Libya and Ukraine
- WORKING PAPER: The EU's Crisis Management in the Kosovo-Serbia crises
- REPORT: Best practices in EU crisis response and policy implementation
- REPORT: Understanding the EU's crisis response toolbox and decision-making processes
Blog posts
- Five paradoxes of the EU's crisis response
- 10 Racing Tips on NATO-EU Cooperation inside Iraq
- Is the EU ready to handle the major challenges it is facing?
- EUNPACK meets with the EU's Training Mission in Mali
- EUNPACK at the Belgrade Security Forum 2018
- EUNPACK at MERI Forum 2018: 'EU in the Middle East: Responsive Statehood to Prevent Violent Extremism'
- In memory of our friend and colleague Ambroise Dakouo
- Notes from Libya fieldwork
- Syria: Diplomacy in Disarray
- Workshop in Bamako, Mali
- Win the War, Lose the Peace?
- Challenges to crisis response and peacekeeping
- Good intentions - mixed results
- Back to square one: Egypt five years since Tahrir
European Café Debates and Policy Forums
- European Café debates: Afghanistan
- European Café debates: Libya
- European Café debates: Iraq
- European Café debates: Mali
- European Café debates: Serbia
- European Café debates: Kosovo
- European Café debates: Ukraine
- Second EU Crisis Response Policy Forum
- First EU Crisis Response Policy Forum
Newsletters
Project Manager
Participants
Articles
How can the EU improve its response to crises?
Researchers within and beyond Europe have been studying the EU's approach to conflict and crises. Here's what they found out.
EUNPACK Final Conference: synthesising three years of research on the EU’s crisis response
Conflict sensitivity in focus as the three-year NUPI-led research project on the EU’s crisis response (EUNPACK) organised a final conference in Brussels in March.
Five paradoxes EU must address to effectively respond to crises beyond its borders
Engaging in ongoing conflicts brings with it a set of extraordinary challenges.
PODCAST: Is the EU ready to handle the major challenges it is facing?
Ivan Krastev reflects on the crises that has shaped the EU for the past decades.
The EU in the Middle East - how to prevent terrorism and violent extremism?
That was the topic for the project EUNPACK's contribution to the MERI Forum 2018.
Unpacking EU crisis response
How does the EU respond to crises? This is the key question posed by a group of NUPI researchers who have succeeded in the competition for funding within the world’s largest research programme.
New publications
EUNPACK Executive Summary of the Final Report & Selected Policy Recommendations. A conflict-sensitive unpacking of the eu comprehensive approach to...
Since adopting a ‘comprehensive approach’ to crisis management in 2013, the EU has spent considerable time and energy on streamlining its approach and improving internal coordination. New and protracted crises, from the conflict in Ukraine to the rise of Daesh in Syria and Iraq, and the refugee situation in North Africa and the Sahel, have made the improvement of external crisis-response capacities a top priority. But the implementation of the EU’s policies on the ground has received less scholarly and policy attention than the EU’s actorness and institutional capacity-building, and studies of implementation have often been guided primarily by a theoretical or normative agenda. The main objective of the EUNPACK project has been to unpack EU crisis response mechanisms and provide new insights how they are being received and perceived on the ground by both local beneficiaries and other external stakeholders. By introducing a bottom–up perspective combined with an institutional approach, the project has tried to break with the dominant line of scholarship on EU crisis response that has tended to view only one side of the equation, namely the EU itself. Thus, the project has been attentive to the local level in target countries as well as to the EU level and the connections between them. The research has been conducted through an inductive and systematic empirical research combining competencies from two research traditions that so far has had little interaction, namely peace and conflict studies and EU studies. A key finding in our research is that while the EU has been increasingly concerned with horizontal lessons learnt, it needs to improve vertical lessons learnt to better understand the local dynamics and thus provide more appropriate responses.
Plugging the capability-expectations gap: towards effective, comprehensive and conflict-sensitive EU crisis response?
Since the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty in 2009, the European Union (EU) has spent considerable time and energy on defining and refining its comprehensive approach to external conflicts. The knock-on effects of new and protracted crises, from the war in Ukraine to the multi-faceted armed conflicts in the Sahel and the wider Middle East, have made the improvement of external crisis-response capacities a top priority. But has the EU has managed to plug the capability–expectations gap, and develop an effective, comprehensive and conflict sensitive crisis-response capability? Drawing on institutional theory and an approach developed by March and Olsen, this article analyses whether the EU has the administrative capacities needed in order to be an effective actor in this area and implement a policy in line with the established goals and objectives identified in its comprehensive approach.
Working paper on implementation of EU crisis response in Mali
This paper offers a critical review of the EUTM and EUCAP in Mali, arguing that this is another example of international interventions that may be well-intended, but that end up producing very mixed results on the ground. One reason for this is the gaps between intentions and implementation and between implementation and local reception/perceptions. Whereas the first gap points to mismatches between EU policy intentions and what effect the implementation of these policies actually have (see for example Hill 1993), the latter gap reveals the inability of an international actor to both understand how key concepts such as ‘security sector reform’ and ‘border management’ are understood on the ground as well as translating its own policies and Brussels’ developed mandate into policies that makes sense for people on the ground (Cissé, Bøås, Kvamme and Dakouo 2017).
Implementation of the EU’s crisis response in Ukraine
The objective of this paper is to reflect on the received and perceived EU crisis response in Ukraine, paying specific attention to the security and humanitarian sectors, among the key areas for the EU since the beginning of the crisis/conflict. This research focus is in line with EUNPACK Task 2, aimed at analysing how the EU and its member states are implementing its crisis response on the ground throughout the conflict cycle. Three core assumptions underpin our research focus in this paper.
EU-Supported Reforms in the EU Neighbourhood as Organized Anarchies: The Case of Post-Maidan Ukraine
How does the EU and its member states organize their support for reforms in the countries of the EU Neighbourhood? Building on organization theory research on reforms as sets of loosely coupled ‘garbage can’ processes, we conceptualize the ENP induced reform processes as an organized framework connecting the reform capacities of not only the EU institutions but also EU member-state governments. We apply this approach to Ukraine in the post-Maidan period. We focus on the interplay between EU-level reform capacities and the capacities of two member states highly active in Ukraine, namely Germany and Sweden. As this case illustrates, the current approach provides a complementary perspective to mainstream approaches to the study of the EU’s external governance as it offers partial explanations of how organizational processes may impact on the efficiency of reforms promoted by the EU and its member states in the neighbouring countries.
Working Paper: Comparing the EU’s Output Effectiveness in the Cases of Afghanistan, Iraq and Mali
This part of the overall report (Deliverable 7.1) on the EU’s crisis response in Afghanistan, Iraq and Mali compares the findings of three comprehensive cases-studies. The analytical focus is on the output dimension of EU policy-making that is the output of decision-making of the policy-making machinery in Brussels. Thus, the analysis is confined to the choices and decisions made regarding the EU’s problem definitions, policy goals, strategies and instruments – both on a strategic and operational level; thus policy implementation or impact will be analysed as next steps in following project reports (D 7.2, 7.3, and 7.4).
Best practices in EU crisis response and policy implementation
This report has two aims. First, to take stock of how the Europen External Action Sercvice (EEAS) and the Commission have institutionalized lessons-learned mechanism. Second, to discuss the extent to which these mechanisms and practices incorporate the EU’s ambitions for a ‘conflict-sensitive’ and ‘comprehensive’ crisis-response approach. In this sense, this report will serve as a point of departure for case-study research to be undertaken within the framework of Work Packages 5–7 of the EUNPACK project, on whether there is a gap between policy and practice with regard to institutional learning.