Best Practices in EU Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding

Introduction

Over the past two decades the EU has devoted considerable attention to the role of learning lessons and best practice in the realm of foreign and security policy to help improve its performance.

This approach, or ‘learning turn,’ also applies to the specific topic of conflict prevention and peacebuilding (CPP), the central research focus of the EU-CIVCAP project. Building on earlier outputs from Work Package 7 (WP7: Learning, Lessons, and Best Practices) and other EU-CIVCAP research findings, this report summarises a range of potential CPP best practices for consideration by the EU, focusing on the Common Foreign Security Policy (CFSP), the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) and other policy tools.

This report incorporates contributions from researchers across Work Packages 2-6 of the EU-CIVCAP project. It begins with a review of the general approach to learning and lessons that informs how the project approaches the problem of learning-driven reform in the CPP realm.

The third section provides a definition of best practices and explains the choice of such practices for the purposes of this report. The fourth section addresses the best practices produced by Work Packages 2-4, which focus on the pre- and early stages of conflict: WP2 (Prepare), WP3 (Conflict Prevention), and WP4 (Crisis Response). The fifth section turns to the conflict and post-conflict stages addressed by Work Packages 5-6: WP5 (Management and Mitigation) and WP6 (Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding). In the sixth section (Conclusion), the report reviews the overall findings regarding best practices and speculates on the future of the EU’s institutional reform efforts in the realm of CPP and beyond.

Keywords

• EU conflict prevention; peacebuilding strategies; civilian capabilities; crisis response mechanisms; institutional learning; security policy coordination; post-conflict reconstruction; multilateral governance