Mary Kaldor EU Global Strategy and Human Security - Rethinking Approaches To Conflict-Routledge (2018)

EU Global Strategy and Human
Security
This volume examines the EU’s Global Strategy in relation to human security approaches
to conflict.
Contemporary conflicts are best understood as a social condition in which armed
groups mobilise sectarian and fundamentalist sentiments and construct a predatory
economy through which they enrich themselves at the expense of ordinary citizens. This
volume provides a timely contribution to debates over the role of the EU on the global
stage and its contribution to peace and security, at a time when these discussions are rein-
vigorated by the adoption of the EU Global Strategy. It discusses the significance of the
Strategic Review and the Global Strategy for the re-articulation of EU conflict preven-
tion, crisis management, peacebuilding, and development policies in the next few years.
It also addresses the key issues facing EU security in the 21st century, including the con-
flicts in Ukraine, Libya and Syria, border security, cyber-security and the role of the
private security sector. The book concludes by proposing that the EU adopts a second-
generation human security approach to conflicts, as an alternative to geopolitics or the
‘War on Terror’, taking forward the principles of human security and adapting them to
21st-century realities.
This book will be of interest to students of human security, European foreign and
security policy, peace and conflict studies, global governance and IR in general.
Mary Kaldor is Professor of Global Governance and Director of the Conflict and Civil
Society Research Unit at the London School of Economics, UK. Her books include
Human Security: Reflections on Globalization and Intervention (2007), Global Civil
Society: An Answer to War (2003) and New and Old Wars: Organised Violence in a
Global Era (1999).
Iavor Rangelov is Assistant Professorial Research Fellow at the Conflict and Civil
Society Research Unit, London School of Economics, UK. He is the author of National-
ism and the Rule of Law: Lessons from the Balkans and Beyond (2014) and co-editor of
The Handbook of Global Security Policy (2014).
Sabine Selchow is Research Fellow in the ARC-Laureate Program ‘Inventing the Inter-
national’ at the University of Sydney and Research Associate at the Conflict and Civil
Society Research Unit, London School of Economics, UK. She is the author of Negoti-
ations of the ‘New World’: The Omnipresence of Global as a Political Phenomenon
(2017) and co-editor of Subterranean Politics in Europe (2015).
Routledge Studies in Human Security
Series Editors:
Mary Martin
London School of Economics
and
Taylor Owen
University of Oxford
The aim of this series is to provide a coherent body of academic and practitioner
insight which is capable of stimulating further consideration of the concept of
human security, its impact on security scholarship and on the development of
new security practices.
National, European and Human Security

From Co-Existence to Convergence
Edited by Mary Martin, Mary Kaldor and Narcís Serra
State Responses to Human Security

At Home and Abroad
Edited by Courtney Hillebrecht, Tyler White and Patrice McMahon
Human Security, Changing States and Global Responses

Institutions and Practices
Edited by Sangmin Bae and Makoto Maruyama
Gendering Human Security in Afghanistan

In a Time of Western Intervention
Ben Walter
EU Global Strategy and Human Security

Rethinking Approaches to Conflict
Edited by Mary Kaldor, Iavor Rangelov and Sabine Selchow
Climate Change, Policy and Security

State and Human Impacts
Edited by Donald Wallace and Daniel Silander
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/

Routledge-Studies-in-Human-Security/book-series/HSS
EU Global Strategy and
Human Security
Rethinking Approaches to Conflict
Edited by Mary Kaldor, Iavor Rangelov

and Sabine Selchow
First published 2018
by Routledge
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© 2018 selection and editorial matter, Mary Kaldor, Iavor Rangelov and
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Typeset in Times New Roman
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Contents
List of illustrations vii

Notes on contributors viii
Introduction 1
M ary K aldor , I a v or R angelo v and S abine S elchow
PART I
Background 11
1 Assessing Mogherini’s ‘The European Union in a Changing

Global Environment’ from within a ‘reflexive modern’
world 13
S abine S elchow
PART II
Conflicts 29
2 Review of the EU policy for Ukraine 31

T ymofiy M ylo v ano v , Y uri M . Z huko v and
Y uriy G orodnichenko
3 EU in the Western Balkans: hybrid development, hybrid

security and hybrid justice 46
Vesna B o j icic - D zelilo v ic , D enisa K osto v ico v a and
E lisa R andazzo
4 EU Syria engagement from a human security perspective 64

R im T urkmani
vi Contents
5 EU policies in the DR Congo: misaligned ambitions 85
Valerie A rnould and K oen Vlassenroot
6 A human security strategy for the European Union in the

Horn of Africa and Red Sea 103
A lex de W aal and R achel I breck
PART III
Policy arenas 121
7 Europe’s failed ‘fight’ against irregular migration 123

R uben A ndersson
8 EU approaches to justice in conflict and transition 142

I a v or R angelo v , M arika T heros and N ata š a K andi ć
9 Human security and sanctions, from security to governance:

strengthening EU capacities and involving the locals 158
F rancesco G iumelli
10 Cybersecurity: a case for a European approach 175

G ene v i È v e S chm É der and E mmanuel D armois
11 Private partnerships, public peace: the role of the private

sector in second-generation human security 195
M ary M artin
Conclusion: the EU Global Strategy and contemporary

conflicts – how much second-generation human security is
possible? 213
M ary K aldor and S abine S elchow
Appendix: from hybrid peace to human security – rethinking EU

strategy towards conflict 227
Index 229
Illustrations
Figures
2.1 Violence in the East of Ukraine. Minsk I and II are ceasefire
agreements 32
2.2 Rebel violence and rebel control of the territory 36
2.3 Proportion of Russian speakers residing in each municipality,
and the proportion of the local labour force employed in three
industries 37
7.1 Irregular migration routes from West Africa towards Europe 125
Table
12.1 Content of the ESS 2003 and EUGS 2016 216
Contributors
Ruben Andersson is an anthropologist and Associate Professor of Migration

and Development at Oxford University’s Department of International Devel-
opment, University of Oxford. His book Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine Migra-
tion and the Business of Bordering Europe is published by the University of
California Press.
Valerie Arnould is Senior Research Fellow with the Africa Programme at the
Egmont – Royal Institute for International Relations and a Research Associ-
ate with the Leuven Institute of Criminology, Catholic University of Leuven.
Her areas of expertise are transitional justice, political and security dynamics
in Central Africa, and peacebuilding.
Vesna Bojicic-Dzelilovic is Associate Professorial Research Fellow at the Con-
flict and Civil Society Research Unit, Department of International Develop-
ment, and an associate fellow of the South East Europe Research Unit at the
European Institute, at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Her main areas of research are political economy of conflict and post-conflict
reconstruction, postcommunist economic transition, political economy of
policy making, decentralisation and regional development. She has published
academic and policy papers on these topics with a focus on South East
Europe.
Emmanuel Darmois is a French specialist of Information and Communication
Technologies. He started his career by teaching Computer Science and
working on Artificial Intelligence. He has since occupied a variety of posi-
tions in the industry, in research, technical strategy and development, or
standardisation. He is currently involved in projects with the European Com-
mission on Cloud Computing and Internet of Things.
Alex de Waal is Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation and
Research Professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts
University. He has worked extensively on issues of humanitarianism, con-
flict and peace, especially in the Horn of Africa, and is author of The Real
Politics of the Horn of Africa: Money, War and the Business of Power
(Polity 2015).
Contributors ix
Francesco Giumelli is Senior Lecturer in the Department of International Rela-
tions and International Organization at the University of Groningen. He was
previously Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute and
Fellow at the Kroc Institute of Notre Dame University. He is author of The
Success of Sanctions: Lessons Learned from the EU Experience (2013) and
Coercing, Constraining and Signalling: Explaining UN and EU Sanctions
after the Cold War (2011).
Yuriy Gorodnichenko is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University
of California Berkeley. His research focuses on a broad set of topics, includ-
ing public finance, economic development, international economics, and
econometrics. He received a Ph.D. from the Department of Economics at the
University of Michigan.
Rachel Ibreck is Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the Depart-
ment of Politics and International Relations at Goldsmiths, University of
London. Her research focuses on human rights activism and conflict in Africa,
and she has previously worked on land disputes in South Sudan for the Justice
and Security Research Programme at the London School of Economics and
Political Science.
Mary Kaldor is Professor of Global Governance, Director of the Conflict and
Civil Society Research Unit and CEO of the DFID-funded Conflict Research
Programme at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is
the author of numerous books, including Human Security: Reflections on Glo-
balization and Intervention (2007), Global Civil Society: An Answer to War
(2003) and New and Old Wars (1999). She was co-chair of the Helsinki
Citizens Assembly, a member of the International Independent Commission
on Kosovo, and convenor of the Human Security Study Group, which
reported to Javier Solana and Federica Mogherini.
Nataša Kandić has been a dedicated human rights activist since her student
days. Most of her projects and actions were implemented through the Human-
itarian Law Center (Serbia), which she founded in 1992, and Humanitarin
Law Center Kosovo, which became an independent organisation in 2010. She
currently coordinates the regional fact-finding and reconciliation process
known as the RECOM Initiative, dealing with human losses during the wars
in the former Yugoslavia. Her work made powerful local impact and
prompted wide international recognition.
Denisa Kostovicova is Associate Professor in Global Politics at the Department
of Government, London School of Economics and Political Science. Her
research interests include civil society, human security and post-conflict
reconstruction and state-building. She is the author of Kosovo: The Politics of
Identity and Space.
Mary Martin is director of the UN Business and Human Security Initiative at
the London School of Economics and Political Science, part of the LSE
x Contributors
IDEAS United Nations at LSE project. From 2006–2009 she was coordinator
of the Human Security Study Group, which produced the 2007 Madrid
Report. Her research focuses on the role of the private sector in conflict and
peacebuilding and private security in the international system. She co-edited
the Routledge Handbook of Human Security and edits the Routledge series of
Studies in Human Security. She is former European Business Editor of the
Guardian and Daily Telegraph newspapers.
Tymofiy Mylovanov received a Master degree in Economics from the EERC
Program at the Kyiv Mohyla Academy. He earned his Ph.D in Economics at
the University of Wisconsin Madison in 2004. He has taught at the University
of Bonn, Penn State University, University of Pennsylvania, and University
of Pittsburgh. His research focus is on game theory, contract theory, and insti-
tutional design. He is a cofounder of VoxUkraine.org, a group of global
economists working on the policy problems in Ukraine and a member of the
academic advisory board of the Kyiv School of Economics.
Elisa Randazzo is Fellow in Conflict Studies in the Government Department at
the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research interests
include peace-building, state-building and post-conflict reconstruction. Recent
publications include an article on the ‘Paradoxes of the Everyday’ in peace-
building, published in Third World Quarterly.
Iavor Rangelov is Assistant Professorial Research Fellow at the Conflict and
Civil Society Research Unit, London School of Economics and Political
Science, and Co-Chair of the London Transitional Justice Network. He was
previously a fellow of the research and training programme European Foreign
and Security Policy Studies and visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre,
Brussels; EU Institute for Security Studies, Paris; Institut Barcelona d’Estudis
Internacionals, Barcelona; and T.M.C. Asser Instituut, The Hague.
Geneviève Schméder is a French University Professor who taught in Science
Po and various universities in France and elsewhere. She previously worked
in the OECD and in the French Ministry of Industry and was an early member
of the Human Security Study Group which reported to Javier Solana, EU
High Representative.
Sabine Selchow is Research Fellow in the Laureate Research Programme
‘Inventing the International’ at the University of Sydney (led by Glenda
Sluga), where she focuses on the study of Security Strategies and Defence
Reviews. Before moving to the University of Sydney, she was Research
Fellow in the two ERC-funded research programmes ‘Security in Trans-
ition’ at the London School of Economics and Political Science (led by
Mary Kaldor) and ‘Methodological Cosmopolitanism’ at Ludwig-
Maximilians-University Munich (led by late Ulrich Beck). She holds a Ph.D.
in Government from the London School of Economics and Political
Science.
Contributors xi
Marika Theros is doctoral candidate at the Department of International Devel-
opment, London School of Economics, and fellow at the Institute for State
Effectiveness. She has extensive experience in research, consulting and activ-
ism on issues of human rights and justice in Afghanistan, the Middle East and
the Balkans.
Rim Turkmani is Senior Research Fellow at the London School of Economics
and Political Science (LSE) working on war economy in Syria and means to
transforming it to peace economy, and on the role of Syrian civil society in
brokering peace and creating stability from the bottom up. She is co-founder
of the Syrian Civil Coalition that supports the role of the Syrian civil society
in peace building and democratic transition.
Koen Vlassenroot is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Conflict
Research Group at Ghent University. He is also Director of the Africa Pro-
gramme at the Egmont – Royal Institute for International Relations. His
research focuses on dynamics of conflict and issues of justice and security in
Central Africa. He has written numerous book chapters and articles on mili-
tias, land access, rebel governance and state-building. His current research
projects are on access to justice and security and on access to justice for dis-
placed people in DR Congo.
Yuri M. Zhukov is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a Faculty Associate with the Center for Political
Studies at the Institute for Social Research. His research focuses on the
causes, dynamics and outcomes of conflict, at the international and local
levels. He received a Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Harvard
University and also holds degrees from the Graduate School of Foreign
Service at Georgetown University (M.A.) and Brown University (A.B.).
Introduction1
Mary Kaldor, Iavor Rangelov and Sabine Selchow
Conflicts are at the sharp end of contemporary crises. Refugees, extremist ideo-
logies, criminality and predation are all produced in conflict. Contemporary con-
flicts are sometimes known as ‘hybrid wars’ or ‘new wars’ in which classic
distinctions between public and private, government/regular and rebel/irregular,
and internal and external break down. They are best understood not as legitimate
contests of wills (the twentieth-century idea of war) but as a degenerate social
condition in which armed groups mobilise sectarian and fundamentalist senti-
ments and construct a predatory economy through which they enrich themselves
at the expense of ordinary citizens. Identifying ways to address violent conflict
could open up strategies for dealing with broader issues.
At the EU Summit of June 2016, the High Representative of the European
Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Federica Mogherini, presented
the results of her global review of external strategy entitled Global Strategy for
the European Union’s Foreign and Security Policy (EUGS). As part of the
review process, the Human Security Study Group, convened by Mary Kaldor
and Javier Solana, presented a report entitled ‘From Hybrid Peace to Human
Security: Rethinking the EU Strategy towards Conflict’, together with 12 back-
ground research papers that examine specific conflicts, policy arenas, and the
review process itself. This book is based on the report and the background
papers.
The book argues that the European Union should adopt what it defines as a
second-generation human security approach as an alternative both to the War on
Terror and the Liberal Peace – the approach that the EU has largely followed up
to now. Both approaches have failed to address the continuing spread of new
wars. We use the term hybrid peace to describe what happens when a Liberal
Peace approach is applied in contemporary conflicts.
In this introduction, we start with a background to the Study Group and to the
concepts of second-generation human security and hybrid peace. We then
provide an outline of the book.
The Study Group on Europe’s Security Capabilities (later renamed the Human
Security Study Group) was assembled in 2003 and was composed of a combina-
tion of academics and practitioners. It reported to Javier Solana, then the High
Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy, but was organised and
2 M. Kaldor et al.
funded independently of the European Union. As the Foreword to its first report
put it, it was a ‘critical moment for the European Union’ (Barcelona Report
2004). The lack of any coherent and concerted response to violence on the conti-
nent, or any common defence policy, had been exposed by the war in Bosnia,
the US had just published its controversial 2002 National Security Strategy and
the EU its first security strategy in December 2003 (ESS 2003), and the new
Constitution for the Union was adopted in June 2004. The Study Group adopted
the term ‘human security’ to describe its distinctive approach and its first report
to Javier Solana presented in Barcelona in September 2004, was entitled ‘A
Human Security Doctrine for Europe’. The version of human security put
forward by the study group had its roots in the experience of the Helsinki process
in Europe, the idea of combining security and human rights, but could not be
construed as the ‘narrow version’ of human security, often equated with
Responsibility to Protect, or the so-called ‘broad’ approach of the United Nations
Development Programme, that had coined the term in its 1994 Human Develop-
ment Report and which stressed the importance of development as a form of
security. Rather it added a new component to the definition of human security.
As well as the usual elements of human security – focus on the individual as
opposed to the state and on the link between ‘freedom from fear’ and ‘freedom
from want’ – it put particular emphasis on the link between human security and
law and the blurring of the difference between internal and external security.
Human security, according to the Human Security Study Group, is about the
kind of security that individuals expect in rights-based law-governed societies
where law is based on an implicit social contract among individuals, and
between individuals and the state. Fundamental to law-governed societies is the
assumption of equality before the law. In a law-governed national society it is
assumed that the state will protect individuals from existential threats and that
emergency services – among others, ambulances, firefighters, police – are part of
state provision. In many such societies, human rights are enshrined in national
constitutions and/or national legislation, in accordance with international law. In
the approach of the Study Group, human security is about extending individual
rights beyond domestic borders and about developing a capacity at a regional or
global level to provide those kinds of emergency services to be deployed in situ-
ations where states either lack capacity or are themselves the violators of rights.
What this means is that national security cannot be assured unilaterally, that
security in any part of the world depends on a global or human security system.
Thus, instead of defending borders against external attack the security capabil-
ities of states are designed to contribute to something akin to global emergency
services.
Unlike earlier enunciations of human security, the Barcelona Report, and its
follow-up the Madrid Report (Madrid Report 2007), focussed on implementation
and on recommending the kind of capabilities required to operationalise this
understanding of human security. It was proposed to establish human security
forces composed of both military and civilian officers under civilian control and
with substantial participation of women. This coming together of military and
Introduction 3
civilians for human security is only possible if they both conform to certain prin-
ciples, which guide the way they are used and operate. These principles distin-
guish a human security intervention from a classic military intervention; they
include the primacy of human rights, legitimate political authority, a bottom-up
approach, regional focus and clear transparent civilian command.
In this book, we use the term second-generation human security. Second-
generation human security, as Martin and Owen argue, is not about broadening
versus narrowing but about deepening the concept (Martin and Owen 2010). It is
about how to respond to the crises of our time, especially contemporary con-
flicts. The Barcelona version of human security needs to be updated and comple-
mented by some of the ideas relating to hybrid or post-liberal peace, which bring
together bottom-up and top-down approaches. It should be stressed that the idea
of hybrid peace is an empirical description rather than a normative project. All
interventions necessarily involve complex interactions at all levels. The ‘inter-
national’ tends to refer to the messy conglomeration of international agencies
involved in particular interventions while the local, according to Richmond and
Mitchell, refers to a ‘territorialized space … in this sense, the local is not to be
essentialized or parochialised; it refers to a space, that is, in a sense, transversal,
transnational and even global, or at least a feature of most human societies’
(Richmond and Mitchell 2012, p. 11). In other words, interventions are about the
blurring of the inside/outside distinction and reconceptualising some of the
dominant binaries that underpin conventional liberal thinking. Richmond and
Mitchell suggest that hybridisation is about
the way in which local actors respond to, resist and ultimately reshape peace
initiatives through this formulation is too passive. International actors (those
representing other states, international institutions and agencies) possess
monetary resources and some capacity for force, but local actors possess
contextual knowledge, through which they do not merely respond or resist
but also manipulate and indeed precipitate international action.
Mac Ginty talks about the
interaction of already hybridised actors and structures. Although these actors

and structures may be labelled as ‘local’, ‘indigenous’, ‘liberal’ ‘exogene-
ous’ or ‘international’ it is useful to see them as composites, or amalgama-
tions resulting from long-term processes of social negotiation and
adaptation.
(2010, p. 398)
In this book, we use the term hybrid peace to refer to a specific variant of
hybrid peace – what happens when Liberal Peace is applied to new wars. By
Liberal Peace we refer to the typical type of intervention undertaken by inter-
national agencies, usually under a United Nations mandate. Such interventions
are usually based on a top-down peace agreement among the warring parties and
4 M. Kaldor et al.
the task of the intervention is to guarantee the agreement. It is a strange kind of
hybridisation that involves the interaction of violent, extremist, and predatory
local actors that are integrated into global circuits with a motley collection of
well-meaning international actors often operating on the basis of a distinct
internal logic shaped by funding and career structures and domestic considera-
tions. Violence between the local actors is ended but in most cases this is a rather
small part of the violence – most violence in contemporary conflicts is directed
against civilians not against other warring parties. To some extent the peace
agreement weakens the permissive environment for violence; nevertheless, the
agreement entrenches the power positions of the warring parties and is associ-
ated with continued predation, human rights violations, gender violence, and
divisive politics. Bosnia is perhaps the archetypal example of hybrid peace.
More resources per head have been devoted to sustaining the Dayton peace
agreement than probably anywhere else as well as thousands of peace-keeping
troops; yet Bosnia remains a dysfunctional divided society subsisting in a per-
petual state of no war no peace and where the threat of renewed violence oper-
ates as a disciplinary tool. Using different terms, the chapters of this book about
conflict-affected areas all show how external interventions have been subverted
as a consequence of what is variously described as the political marketplace, pat-
rimonialism or clientelism, state capture of systemic corruption, or the entrench-
ment of predatory actors – in other words what we mean by hybrid peace. It not
only involves a hybridisation of actors but also of war and peace.
Second-generation human security is a practical strategy. Human security
needs to be reconstructed as an alternative to the War on Terror not as its adjunct
(or apologia). In contrast to the top down character of the Responsibility to
Protect (which is about the right of outside powers to intervene), human security
needs to be understood as the right to be protected. That means that human
security has to conceive the human as gendered, contextual and social. A human
security strategy has to emanate from the context that is both local and imbued
with the global rather than be imposed from above. Second, human security does
have to be about the extension of rights-based international law but that process
is also contextual. Law can be used as an instrument of resistance by local
groups trying to reduce violence and to enhance the safety of their own com-
munities and, it is only through such pressure that international tendencies to
override law can be constrained. In so far as human security involves inter-
national intervention must be about assisting those concerned about the future of
their societies and how to overcome private and sectarian interests not imposing
geo-political or counter terror strategies. And third, we need a micro and granu-
lar empirical picture of the variety of international interventions in practice, what
Duffield (2001) calls the ‘strategic complexes of global governance’ to identify
possible pathways for alternative approaches.
As a concrete strategy, human security aims at reversing the social condition
that gives rise both to new wars and hybrid peace through a combination of
hands-on initiatives in the political, economic and security spheres, that are
global, regional, national and local, and, at the same time focussed on those
Introduction 5
actors in society who have the capacity to engage in legitimate and inclusive
processes – often grass roots activists, critical intellectuals, women’s groups,
professionals as well as more traditional leaders. What this might involve is
spelled out in the Berlin Report of the Human Security Study Group, reproduced
in the Appendix.
The volume is divided into three parts. Part I provides the background to the
volume, in which Sabine Selchow (Chapter 1) examines Federica Mogherini’s
strategic assessment ‘The European Union in a changing global environment’ (EU
2015). This document served two purposes in the process of developing the EU
Global Strategy (EUGS). First, it constituted the basis on which the European
Council gave Mogherini the mandate to develop the new EU Global Strategy.
Second, it served as the point of reference for those who were to contribute to the
development of the EUGS in the consultative process that Mogherini initiated. But
Mogherini’s strategic assessment did not lose its relevance after the publication of
the EUGS; it remains the central official assessment of the security environment.
Guided by an understanding of the contemporary world as being ‘reflexive
modern’, and grounded in a systematic analysis of the web of meanings ‘European
security’ that is produced in the document, Selchow argues that there is something
remarkable about Mogherini’s strategic assessment: it holds radical openings
towards ‘European security’ beyond modern premises, i.e. it holds openings for a
future EU that is fit for ‘reflexive modern’ times.
Part II of the volume examines EU policies in five conflict-affected regions
where the Union has been involved with diverse objectives, instruments, and
levels of resources, assessing in particular the extent to which EU engagement
has tended to promote human security on the ground and elaborating concrete
proposals for developing a second-generation human security approach in each
context.
Chapter 2 provides a review of the ongoing violent conflict in Ukraine and
the contemporaneous economic and political crises. Tymofiy Mylovanov, Yuriy
Zhukov and Yuriy Gorodnichenko use big data on violence in the east of
Ukraine to argue that the local variation in the violence is best explained by eco-
nomic rather than ethnic or political factors. The contribution discusses the
resistance of the Ukrainian public to the conflict-resolution strategy outlined in
the Minsk I and Minsk II agreements. This resistance reflects the lack of legiti-
macy of these agreements, where the major stakeholder – the public – has been
denied a voice in framing the terms of the agreements. The authors suggest that
EU policy in Ukraine should be focussed on creating economic opportunities for
the general public (economic resolution) and use a bottom-up approach to
include all sections of society in deliberations of how to resolve the conflict
(political resolution). These actions should be complemented by strict condition-
ality of EU support that requires anti-corruption policies that address the state
economy and, more importantly, dismantle the rent-seeking networks of olig-
archs and restore justice.
The Western Balkans have been a laboratory for the EU in developing its pol-
icies and capabilities for crisis management, stabilisation and peacebuilding,
6 M. Kaldor et al.
where sustained engagement has been pursued for more than two decades with a
view to progressively integrating the post-conflict states in regions within the
Union. In their analysis of EU interventions in the Western Balkans, Vesna
Bojicic-Dzelilovic, Denisa Kostovicova and Elisa Randazzo (Chapter 3) adopt a
relational analysis that highlights the role of informal networks forged during the
war and reworked in its aftermath in a context shaped by the interactions of local
elites and international peacebuilding efforts, especially those led by the EU.
The authors describe divergent outcomes of EU policies across different domains
– which they label hybrid development, hybrid security, and hybrid justice – that
include subversion of EU policies, significant unintended consequences, as well
as some qualified successes. They explain these outcomes by pointing to key
characteristics of the EU’s approach to the region, including state-centricity,
fragmentation across policy domains, and instrumental use of conditionality. The
chapter closes with reflections on the challenges facing the EU in the region as
well as the need to align EU policies with a human security approach that is self-
consciously bottom-up and regional in character.
In Chapter 4, Rim Turkmani looks at the EU engagement with Syria at
different stages. Before the conflict that engagement was marred with the chal-
lenge of engaging with an authoritarian state where the ultimate goal is state
security not human security. After the conflict, the challenges multiplied as a
result of the use of excessive violence by the regime against civilians. The EU
very rapidly suspended almost all engagement and funding and imposed a long
list of sanctions that have contributed to the deterioration of human and eco-
nomic security, accelerated the war economy and pushed the Syrian regime
further towards its external backers. This contributed to the EU’s loss of leverage
in resolving the conflict, despite covering much of the humanitarian bill. In 2017
the EU reassumed a more influential position as it considered potential reengage-
ment and funding for reconstruction should a political process start. Turkmani
argues that the EU’s Syria policies could be more effective within the frame-
work of second-generation human security, as a state-focussed approach risks
entrenching authoritarianism and empowering crony capitalists. This requires an
emphasis on building political legitimacy and ensuring an inclusive political set-
tlement that brings structural change to the distribution of power, aiding the
development of legitimate economy and helping to construct inclusive, account-
able and effective institutions with the capacity to manage the process of
reconstruction.
Turning to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Valerie Arnould and
Koen Vlassenroot (Chapter 5) highlight both how EU engagement in the DRC
has been informed by the human security agenda and, at the same time, how
these efforts have tended to fall short of delivering human security in practice.
Echoing the analysis of other contributors to this part of the volume, the authors
emphasise the challenges for the EU to promote human security in an environ-
ment driven by the logic of predatory governance rooted in narrow elite bar-
gains, or hybrid peace; in particular, they draw attention to the ways in which
EU peacebuilding and state-building policies are often subverted or captured by
Introduction 7
local actors to sustain prevalent forms of predation and exploit insecurity for
political and economic gain. Arnould and Vlassenroot attribute these outcomes
to a mixture of internal and external factors, which include domestic resistance
to change but also the EU’s problematic assumptions about institution-building
as a vehicle for change and its increasingly diminishing role as a diplomatic
actor in the region. The chapter concludes by drawing out some of the lessons
from the DRC for developing an EU approach to conflict aligned with second-
generation human security.
Alex de Wall and Rachel Ibreck (Chapter 6) draw attention to the complexi-
ties of pursuing a human security agenda in the Horn of Africa, detailing a range
of conventional and unconventional security threats – from armed conflict
across, between and within states, to climate change and famine. Although the
logic of the ‘political marketplace’ and an authoritarian turn currently dominate
politics in the region and complicate the prospects for taking forward a human
security agenda, the authors identify several openings and emphasise the ways in
which the EU may be uniquely positioned to exploit them productively. In par-
ticular, they identify the need for a regional human security approach based on
empowerment of citizens and meaningful engagement with civil society actors
and networks, and advocate the championing of ‘thick multilateralism’ – a
framework of multiple and overlapping multilateralisms within and beyond the
region – at the heart of the EU’s strategic engagement with the Horn of Africa.
Part III of the volume examines five policy arenas where the EU has significant
potential to experiment with and pursue in a consistent manner second-generation
human security approaches to conflict: migration, justice, sanctions, cybersecurity,
and the role of the private sector in conflict-affected environments.
Ruben Andersson’s contribution (Chapter 7) demonstrates how the European
‘border security model’ ends up reproducing and exacerbating the ‘irregular
migration’ problem that it is intended to address and proposes a set of ideas for
shifting EU migration policy and practice towards a human security approach.
The author identifies several mechanisms through which a European ‘market in
border security’ has evolved over the years and its self-perpetuating logic has
become increasingly entrenched, such as the rise of emergency framing, mecha-
nisms for surveillance and policing, and security partnerships with third states.
In the face of steady demand, the supply-side responses favoured by the EU and
member states tend to push migrants into riskier entry routes, which in turn
creates the need for more and more stringent controls – hence the growth of what
Andersson calls an ‘illegality industry’. While acknowledging the challenges for
moving away from the border security model and towards a human security
model, the contribution concludes with a set of policy proposals for the EU that
could pave the way for such a shift, including a harm reduction approach based
on (re)establishing legal pathways such as humanitarian visas, refugee resettle-
ment, family reunification and labour migration programmes.
Justice is another policy area where the EU could make a significant contri-
bution to advancing human security in conflict-affected environments. Iavor
Rangelov, Marika Theros and Nataša Kandić (Chapter 8) argue that human
8 M. Kaldor et al.
rights violations, organised crime and corruption should be treated as a spectrum
of abuse and criminality that is both a product and driver of violent conflict.
Accountability and justice mechanisms aimed at disrupting the predatory net-
works engaged in abuse and predation and providing redress to affected indi-
viduals and communities, they suggest, may be the most significant element of a
human security approach to conflict and it must involve strengthening the justice
networks that often emerge organically in conflict zones. The contribution exam-
ines the complex reasons behind the EU’s inconsistent policies in the justice
arena, which have to do with Europe’s unaddressed legacies of war and authorit-
arian rule internally as much as with a tendency to prioritise peace and stability
at the expense of human rights externally. The authors conclude by emphasising
the distinctive potential of the EU to drive innovation in the justice arena and
propose concrete ways in which European policies to address atrocity crimes and
economic crimes could be reconfigured as part of a second-generation human
security strategy.
Francesco Giumelli (Chapter 9) directs attention to EU sanctions policy and
considers the conditions under which existing policies and practices could be
aligned more closely with human security considerations. He argues that the shift
from comprehensive to targeted sanctions has evolved in part as a response to con-
cerns about the impact of sanctions on the security of individuals and communities,
and points out that sanctions are increasingly adopted upon demand from local
political actors. Nevertheless, Giumelli’s detailed analysis of EU sanctions sug-
gests that they are not always consistent with two human security principles that
are particularly relevant in this policy domain: the primacy of human rights and a
bottom-up approach. The contribution emphasises the importance of meaningfully
engaging local actors in all stages of the sanctions process but also strengthening
EU institutional capacity in order to ensure that going forward, EU sanctions are
aligned with and contribute to human security-informed external action.
In Chapter 10, Genevieve Schmeder and Emmanuel Darmois focus on the issue
of cybersecurity. They discuss the new vulnerabilities that arise due to the increas-
ing dependency on cyberspace, pointing out how malevolent individuals and
organisations may, without any physical presence, infiltrate global and sensitive
networks, subjecting individuals as well as governmental, non-governmental and
business organisations to new insecurities. The growing concern for cyber security
in this context reflects, according to the authors, a broader shift in approaches to
security from the security of nations and territories to the security of individuals
and communities. They see cyber-attacks not only as a fundamental assault on
human rights but also as an activity that has the potential to manipulate the course
of the democratic process, hence jeopardising the very existence of democracy.
Against this background, Schmeder and Darmois examine the content and actors
of cybersecurity and their relationship to civil society and human security, before
focussing specifically on EU cybersecurity policies. They identify a distinctive
European approach to cybersecurity that rejects the kind of technological deter-
minism and mass surveillance that characterise the approaches of other key actors,
thus offering a real alternative.
Introduction 9
The final contribution to this part of the volume shifts the focus to the role
that corporate actors play in violent conflict. Mary Martin (Chapter 11) draws
attention to the absence of business in EU efforts to address global security. She
critically examines the lack of a coherent agenda for mainstreaming business
relations within European external actions and argues that EU capabilities in
peacebuilding and conflict prevention are developed and deployed in isolation
from initiatives on business and human rights, EU regulatory dialogues with
European companies or aid and development policies. Martin seeks explanations
for this shortcoming by looking at conceptualisations of the corporate role in
security within the scholarly literature, and examining the idea of business
responsibility from a policy and practice perspective within EU and UN policy
agendas. She concludes by proposing a reframing of the private sector’s role in
terms of human security, arguing that a human security perspective provides an
analytical lens to better understand the kind of in/security produced by the pres-
ence of global corporations in fragile environments. The adoption of second-
generation human security as a ‘practical strategy’ offers opportunities to
promote a different kind of engagement between business, local society, govern-
ment and the international community, which takes account of local contexts and
acknowledges the hybrid nature of security.
The conclusion of the volume examines the Global Strategy for the European
Union’s Foreign and Security Policy (EUGS), adopted by the Council of the
European Union in October 2016. Mary Kaldor and Sabine Selchow start with a
question: To what extent is a second-generation human security approach to
violent conflicts, as elaborated in the contributions to this volume, made possible
by the adoption of the EUGS? In addressing that question, the authors proceed
from the premise that the document does not represent what Mogherini, the EU
or member states think, but that it constitutes an important part of the symbolic
negotiation of the world.
The analysis of Kaldor and Selchow highlights both the promise and challenges
of the EUGS as a basis for a second-generation human security approach to con-
flict. A deeper look at the textual level shows how the adoption of the EUGS con-
stitutes an important discursive moment that brings the language of human security
into EU security discourse and the reinvention of the EU through its security
strategy. Moreover, focussing on meanings and the world that the document of the
EUGS brings out, the authors find that the world of the EUGS is an intriguing and
variegated one, which not only differs in many respects from the world of the 2003
European Security Strategy but also creates important openings for a second-
generation human security approach to violent conflicts. Especially the contextual-
ised nature of conflicts, the existence of ‘rooted civil society’ as a significant
political actor and the necessity for grounding engagements in a diversity of
knowledges make possible a second-generation human security approach that
acknowledges the complexity of contemporary violent conflicts as historically situ-
ated social conditions. And yet, at the same time, there are tensions in the world of
the EUGS that may impose obstacles for the implementation of second-generation
human security. These include a conventional preoccupation with stabilisation,
10 M. Kaldor et al.
manifested in an implicit linear view of conflict and the exclusion of justice mech-
anisms, as well as a geopolitical outlook on EU external engagements that is con-
stitutive of EU action. These tensions run counter to the normative basis of
second-generation human security and may compromise its pursuit in practice.
Note
1 We are grateful to the European Research Council (ERC) and Friedrich Ebert Stiftung
(FES) for their financial support for this project and the work of the Human Security
Study Group.
References
Barcelona Report (2004) A Human Security Doctrine for Europe: The Barcelona Report
of the Study Group on Europe’s Security Capabilities. London, UK, 2004 Study Group
on Europe’s Security Capabilities.
Duffield, M. (2001) Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development
and Security. London, Zed Books.
ESS (2003) A Secure Europe in a Better World: European Security Strategy, Brussels, 12
December.
EU (2015) The European Union in a Changing Global Environment. In: Missiroli, A. ed.
Towards an EU Global Strategy – Background, Process, References. EUISS, Paris.
Mac Ginty, R. (2010) ‘Hybrid Peace: The Interaction between Top-down and Bottom-up
Peace’. Security Dialogue, 41(4), pp. 391–412.
Madrid Report (2007) A European Way of Security: The Madrid Report of the Human
Security Study Group. London, UK, Human Security Study Group.
Martin, M. and Owen, T. (2010) ‘The Second Generation of Human Security: Lessons
from the UN and EU Experience’. International Affairs, 86(1), pp. 211–224.
Richmond, O.P. and Mitchell, A. (2012) ‘Introduction – towards a Post-Liberal Peace’. In
Hybrid Forms of Peace. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
Part I
Background
1 Assessing Mogherini’s ‘The
European Union in a Changing
Global Environment’ from within
a ‘reflexive modern’ world
Sabine Selchow
Introduction
In June 2015, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs
and Security Policy (HR) Federica Mogherini published the document ‘The
European Union in a changing global environment: A more connected, contested
and complex world’ (EU 2015). This document assesses the EU’s security
environment. In the process of the development of the EU Global Strategy
(EUGS), the document served two purposes. First, it constituted the basis on
which the European Council gave Mogherini the mandate to develop the new
EU Global Strategy (European Council 2015). Second, it served as the point of
reference for those who were to contribute to the development of the EUGS in
the consultative process that Mogherini initiated. But the document did not lose
its relevance after the publication of the EUGS; it remains the central official
assessment of the security environment. This is because, in contrast to other
security strategies, the document of the EUGS does not provide its own assess-
ment of the EU’s strategic environment. It is ‘The European Union in a changing
global environment’ that keeps serving this purpose.
Strategic assessments of security environments, such as ‘The European Union
in a changing global environment’, are more than texts. They are part of the
symbolic negotiation of the world, that is, they are part of the negotiation of
what is thinkable and doable (see further Selchow 2016a; also, Kaldor and
Selchow in this volume’s conclusion). Guided by an understanding of the con-
temporary world as being ‘reflexive modern’, and grounded in a systematic ana-
lysis of the web of meanings ‘European security’ that is produced through the
document, this chapter argues that there is something remarkable about Mogh-
erini’s strategic assessment: it holds radical openings towards ‘European
security’ beyond modern premises, i.e. it holds openings for a future EU that is
fit for ‘reflexive modern’ times.1
European security in a ‘reflexive modern’ world

In 2013, the European Council invited the High Representative for Foreign
Affairs and Security Policy to assess “the impact of changes in the global
14 S. Selchow
environment, and to report to the Council in the course of 2015 on the chal-
lenges and opportunities arising for the Union, following consultations with
the Member States” (European Council 2013, p. 5). In June 2015, HR Mogh-
erini presented her assessment, entitled ‘The European Union in a changing
global environment: A more connected, contested and complex world’ (EU
2015). On the basis of this assessment, the European Council concluded the
HR would “continue the process of strategic reflection with a view to pre-
paring an EU global strategy on foreign and security policy in close
cooperation with Member States” (European Council 2015, p. 5). The EU
Global Strategy (EUGS) was published in June 2016.
The development of the strategic assessment ‘The European Union in a
changing global environment’ was a collaborative exercise that took place over
the first six months of 2015. At its heart was “an informal working group, includ-
ing representatives from the European External Action Service, the European
Commission, the Council Secretariat and the European Council” (Tocci 2015,
p. 119). The strategic document was not only to serve as the ground, on which
the European Council asked Mogherini to prepare the EU Global Strategy, but
also as a key point of reference in the development of the EUGS. The EUGS,
too, was to be developed through a consultative process that was to stretch
“beyond the circles of the foreign policy community and get everybody
involved” (Mogherini 2015b). “I want a strategy that responds to the ideas, the
fears, and even the dreams of the European citizens, the young and the older
generations”, explained Mogherini (ibid.) when she launched the process. An
important motivation for this consultative process was the understanding that the
development of the EUGS is:
not only about foreign policy, it is not only about our role in the World, but
it can be and must be very much about us, about Europe, about who we are,
how we work together, what as Europeans we share in terms on common
foreign and security policy. It is about making a European public opinion on
foreign policy and security policy emerge.
(Ibid.)
As one of Mogherini’s advisors put it, “the primary purpose of an ‘external’

strategy is actually internal” (Tocci 2015, p. 116). With this, Mogherini and her
team aptly captured the nature of documents like the EUGS as well as ‘The Euro-
pean Union in a changing global environment’. These are not just texts that
describe a reality that exists outside themselves but are part of the construction of
this world. They make the world meaningful. They “systematically form the
objects of which they speak” (Foucault 1972, p. 49). As such, texts, such as the
EUGS as well as Mogherini’s initial strategic assessment of the EU’s security
environment, are part of the social negotiation of the world. More precisely, they
produce and reproduce “interpretive dispositions” (Doty 1993, p. 298) that make
some things imaginable, thinkable and doable and others not (see further Selchow
2016a; Selchow 2017; also, Kaldor and Selchow in this volume’s conclusion).
Mogherini in a ‘reflexive modern’ world 15
Two points make Mogherini’s strategic assessment ‘The European Union in a
changing global environment’ a particularly interesting document. First, due to its
distinct institutionalised character and the outstanding relevance that the web of
meaning ‘security’ plays in the construction of the world it is a particularly influ-
ential text; the document plays a relatively powerful role in the symbolic negoti-
ation of the world, and, as such, deserves scholarly attention. Second, the current
negotiation of European security and, with that, the construction of the EU col-
lective self through an assessment of the security environment, such as Mogh-
erini’s 2015 document, takes place in a distinct historical moment, which makes
such exercise particularly sensitive. This is a moment, in which the global con-
sequences of modernisation, in other words, the ‘reflexive nature’ of modernisa-
tion is more apparent than ever. Whether or not it is explicitly acknowledged,
European security today is European security in a ‘reflexive modern’ world.
The notion of ‘reflexive modernisation’ is prominently developed in the work
of sociologist Ulrich Beck (especially 1991, 1994, 2006, 2009; also, Beck and
Grande 2007). As discussed in more detail elsewhere (Selchow 2016c, 2017),
Beck’s various writings and ideas can be brought together, digested and inter-
preted in a way that brings out a picture of social reality according to which it is
subject to and shaped by the interplay of the reflexive ‘backfiring’ of modernisa-
tion, on the one side, and the prevalence of the tradition of the ‘national per-
spective’, on the other side. The term reflexive ‘backfiring’ of modernisation
refers to a process, in which societies and their institutions are confronted with
the side effects of the process of modernisation (such as climate change and
global terrorism (Beck 2003)). What is crucial for such an understanding of the
world is that these side-effects are not to be understood as the dark side of mod-
ernisation but as its very success. Beck (e.g. 2009) uses the term ‘global risk’ to
capture these side effects, these unintended consequences of decisions that are/
were grounded in modern institutions (such as the nation-state, the market etc.)
and basic modern principles (such as freedom, market dependence, rationality,
progress, statehood, the obligation to give reasons, etc). As elaborated elsewhere
in more detail (Selchow 2014, 2017), the concept ‘global risk’ captures that the
unintended consequences of decisions are to be imagined as potentially being
‘socially delimited in space and time’ (see Beck and Grande 2007, p. 418). Fur-
thermore, it captures that – as just mentioned – they are to be seen as the very
success of modernisation, progress and advancements in scientific knowledge
production. Finally, the concept ‘global risk’ captures that these potential side
effects are to be seen as potentially producing non-knowledge (Nichtwissen)
(Beck 2009; see also Wehling 2010). This means that decisions can no longer be
grounded in an assessment of their potential unintended consequences that is
shaped by a national container-thinking, and that is based on the (optimistic)
modern belief in progress through scientific knowledge production. On the con-
trary, these potential unintended consequences, i.e. “global risks”, need to be
understood as “a result of more knowledge” (Beck 2009, p. 5; emphasis added),
as opposed to something that could be “tamed ” and dealt with through more
(modern scientific) knowledge. In this sense, as Beck and Grande (2007, p. 417)
16 S. Selchow
put it, ‘global risks’ produce a distinct contemporary social reality because it
brings along a ‘borderless’ necessity to cooperate (Kooperationszwang), as well
as an interrelation of responsibility (Verantwortungszusammenhang). At the
same time, they bring along an ‘inherent uncertainty’ because established
modern institutions and modern principles do no longer hold the potential of
addressing them (without producing ‘global risks’).2 This is what it means to say
that modernisation radicalises itself and reflexively ‘backfires’. It does not only
overturn its own institutions but also its own modern principles. “Modernity in
this sense is a sub-political ‘revolutionary system’ without a revolutionary
program or goal”, explains Beck (1991, p. 41).
The ‘reflexive backfiring’ of modernisation fundamentally challenges tradi-
tional perspectives on contemporary social reality, its modern (national) institu-
tions and the (modern) grounds, on which decisions are made and legitimised. It
challenges what is the second aspect that shapes contemporary social reality,
namely the prevalence of the tradition of the ‘national perspective’ (especially
Beck 2006). The ‘national perspective’ is a way of looking at the world that is
blind to the above-sketched reality of the reflexive ‘backfiring’ of modernisation
that is manifest in ‘global risks’; the adjective ‘national’ is used here in a relat-
ively broad sense, referring more to ‘modern’ than narrowly to ‘national’. What
Beck calls ‘national perspective’ is a view at social reality that is grounded in the
narrative of modernity with its above-mentioned belief in progress, optimistic
scientific knowledge production (see further Selchow 2016c; also, Selchow
2017),3 and, not least, a (national) container-thinking that is the foundation of the
international system (especially Beck 2006, pp. 24 and 48). With that, the
‘national perspective’ produces an ideational layer that brings out and ‘natural-
ises’ institutions that are not only ‘inadequate’ in the face of a social reality,
which is shaped by nothing less than the ‘backfiring’ of modernisation itself and
the very principles which brought them out, but that actually produces ‘global
risks’, as well as, concepts that “are historically obsolete but that nonetheless
continue to govern our thinking and acting” (Beck 2003, p. 255), and institu-
tions, which Beck (in Grefe 2000) calls ‘zombie institutions’ in that they appear
to be ‘alive’ in an imagined modern world but are actually ‘dead’ in a reflexive
modern reality.
Understanding social reality as being subject to ‘reflexive modernisation’ has
profound implications for how to assess the state of the world and strategies to
deal with contemporary challenges, such as the security of the EU and its
member states. A ‘reflexive modern’ reality is a reality that requires institutions
that are not based in and reproduce modern premises as these bring out ‘global
risks’, but institutions and premises that are different in kind to a ‘national per-
spective’. So, does Mogherini’s strategic assessment hold pathways towards
such a future? Does it hold openings that allow imagining a world beyond
modern institutions and premises?
‘European Security’ in Mogherini’s ‘The European Union in
a changing global environment’
Mogherini’s strategic assessment ‘The European Union in a changing global
environment’ brings out a fascinating and complex world.4 The first noteworthy
aspect of this world is its historical positioning; it constitutes, both, continuity
and a radical break with the past. A sense of historical continuity is constructed
in the text through the use of the word more. The world that is symbolically re-
produced in and through ‘The European Union in a changing global environ-
ment’ is “more connected”, “more complex”, “more contested” (EU 2015,
emphasis added). The word more indicates ‘difference in degree’ from the past,
rather than ‘difference in kind’. It links the now with the past, indicating mean-
ingful change but not a radical break with the past. At the same time, however,
there is a radical and explicit break with the past, namely with the world that has
been constructed in the 2003-EU Security Strategy (ESS 2003). This break is
made at the beginning of Mogherini’s strategic assessment. Its first sentence is:
“Since the 2003 Security Strategy, the EU’s strategic environment has changed
radically” (EU 2015, p. 123). The world of ‘The European Union in a changing
global environment’ is no longer “a post-Cold War environment” but a world of
“21st century realities” (EU 2015, p. 145). This break with the world of the ESS
2003 is remarkable because, in a different world, the status of historical know-
ledge and ‘lessons learned’ is precarious. In a world that is ‘different in kind’,
historical knowledge loses legitimacy (see further Selchow 2013) – in the case
of Mogherini’s ‘The European Union in a changing global environment’ this is
the knowledge and ‘lessons learned’ around the ESS 2003. In this sense, ‘The
European Union in a changing global environment’ symbolically establishes a
new beginning and a clear demarcation to the world of the ESS 2003.
A second noteworthy aspect of the world of Mogherini’s strategic assessment
is that it is “complex”; it is a world of “21st century realities” (EU 2015, p. 145)
that are “complex” realities. In the 2003 Security Strategy (ESS 2003), the adjec-
tive complex plays only a marginal role; here, “problems” and “causes” are
“complex”. In the world of Mogherini’s strategic assessment, however, it is
nothing less but the “world” and the “environment” that are “complex”. In other
words, ‘complexity’ is the state of the world. This implies four things. First,
established institutions are not able to deal with the new realities.
While the UN remains the principal guarantor of the sovereign equality

among states, the composition of its Security Council and the distribution of
voting rights in the International Financial Institutions no longer reflect
current realities. The World Trade Organisation has grown in membership
(and thus legitimacy) but not in ability to achieve consensus or advance
multilateral trade liberalisation. The G20 has emerged as a major informal
forum, reflecting global power realignments. But while it played a key role
in short-term crisis management during the 2008 financial crisis, it has failed
so far to tackle structural global challenges in economic growth, financial
18 S. Selchow
markets and development. No effective global institutions are in place to
confront […] pressing challenges such as migration, cyber security, arms
control or natural resource management.
(EU 2015, p. 138)
Second, there are shortcomings, if not failures in existing concepts, such as

‘border’ or ‘polarity’. These concepts might have worked in the “post-Cold War
era” but fall short in the new reality. “The world system is no longer bipolar,
unipolar or even multipolar, the very notion of ‘polarity’ is in question” (ibid.,
p. 136). The complexity of the world also implies the irrelevance of the clear
distinction between ‘internal’ and ‘external’. This is the distinction that under-
pinned and made the ‘international’ world possible. The fundamentally different
state of the world demands concrete engagements, such as “enhancing the coher-
ence between internal and external security policies” (ibid., p. 140), “the need to
develop synergies between internal and external security policies” (ibid., p. 150),
the tackling of “intertwined internal and external security challenges” (ibid.,
p. 145), the integration of “the external and internal dimensions of migration
management” (ibid., p. 126), and addressing “the immediate challenges in [the
EU’s] South by sharpening its tools in the internal-external security nexus”
(ibid., p. 125).
Third, established (political) theories no longer necessarily help grasping the
world. They are not able to explain causal relations and paradoxes:
Across all continents, emerging powers are rising in global rankings, but
they are unlikely to form a single and cohesive bloc. Moreover, different
regions display different configurations of power, while globally power is
diffusing beyond the nation state towards a network of state, non-state,
inter-state and transnational actors. Traditional multilateralism is losing
steam as emerging countries want to reform the post-World War II architec-
ture – yet opposing existing global governance mechanisms has been easier
than creating new ones.
(Ibid., p. 124)
In fact, there is not even a normative centre in this “complex” world. It is not
only that the “complex” world and its guiding categories and concepts are no
longer familiar, but it is also not clear who sets the rules to begin with:
We know that variable geometries of state and non-state actors will shape
the world in new ways. What we do not know are the rules of global inter-
action and who will set them. The global power shift and power diffusion
are challenging traditional multilateralism.
(Ibid., p. 138, emphasis added)
Finally, in this “complex” world, networks of meaning, which used to be conven-

tionally separated, are enmeshed. This is apparent for instance in the following
quote: “A surge in human mobility – from tourists to terrorists, from students to
refugees – compels us to change how we think about migration, citizenship,
health and development” (ibid., pp. 128–129, emphasis added). The bringing
together of the words tourists with terrorist and students with refugees breaks
down discursive boundaries. Social actors who, conventionally, have been ‘at
home’ in different discourses are combined under the label “human mobility”
(ibid.), where “human mobility” in all its facets is a constitutional feature of the
new “complex” world, that is, of the complexity of “21st century realities”. This
normalises and, in some sense, de-securitises ‘terrorists’ and ‘refugees’. Both are
a natural part of the “more connected, contested and complex world”.
A third noteworthy aspect of the world produced in Moghernini’s assessment
is that it is inhabited by an extended group of security actors. This extension of
the group of security actors is due to a diffusion of power that is characteristic
for the “complex” world: “We live in an age of power shifts at a global level and
power diffusion at all levels – away from governments and towards markets,
media, civil (and less civil) societies and individuals” (ibid., p. 135). However, it
is not only that power shifts from actors to actors. It is a world in which power,
as we know it, no longer exists. Power is no longer readily identifiable as it “no
longer resides within actors but circulates among them” (ibid., p. 136). The dif-
fusion of power means that it is not one state or a block of states that dominates
the world of “21st century realities”. So, while the US does have “a pivotal posi-
tion to shape the world” (ibid., p. 135), while China is “[p]rime amongst the
‘new’ powers” (ibid.), and while the EU “is set to retain one of the highest per
capita incomes in the world […] and has all the means to be an influential global
player in future” (ibid.), none of them will dominate the scene. “The combined
effect of rising literacy, jobs and disposable incomes, along with the accelerating
rate of technological progress, is expanding the number of stakeholders in world
affairs” (ibid.).
The fourth noteworthy aspect of the world produced in Mogherini’s assess-
ment is the relative absence of ‘threats’, ‘dangers’ and ‘risks’. In general, the
language of threats, dangers and (recently) risks is a prominent feature of dis-
cussions of ‘security’ (e.g. Selchow 2014), in ‘The European Union in a chang-
ing global environment’, however, it plays only a marginal role. In the world of
Mogherini’s assessment, it is ‘challenges’ and ‘opportunities’ that take the place
of ‘threats’, ‘dangers’ and ‘risks’ (see further Selchow 2016a). Two points are
particularly noteworthy in this context: First, the “complex” world of “21st
century realities” is a world in which there is no ‘existential threat’ that threatens
but also, ultimately, establishes the EU. This is remarkable because the idea of
an existential threat has always been key to the idea of (state) security. This
observation goes hand in hand with the fact that the EU does not find itself in
any kind of ‘state of exception’. Rather, the world of the “21st century realities”
is a world that is shaped by a state of “contest” between a complex and moving
set of actors and power constellations. In this respect, the world of ‘The Euro-
pean Union in a changing global environment’ is similar to the world of the 2015
US National Security Strategy (NSS), which is the first NSS that does not feature
20 S. Selchow
an ‘existential threat’ (see Selchow 2016c). Second, the language of challenge/s
and opportunity/ies is a language of ‘choice’ and ‘priorities’. “An effective
response hinges on the European Union’s ability to make choices and prioritise
areas where it can and wants to make a difference” (EU 2015, p. 143). It brings
out political actors in general and the EU in particular, which are (required to be)
flexible and set their own priorities. Security measures and actions are not deter-
mined by an outside that threatens the very existence of the political unit EU but
by internal priorities, by where and how the EU “wants to make a difference”
(ibid., emphasis added). Again, in this respect, the world of ‘The European
Union in a changing global environment’ is similar to the one in the NSS 2015.
Here, challenges and the “seizing of opportunities” (White House, 2015, preface)
play an important role. They are part of a market language, through which the
world is constructed in the NSS 2015, the language of the entrepreneurs, which
is about “investments” and “smart” moves in a “young century” (ibid., p. 1) that
is full of opportunities and chances for those who are “responsible” and “innov-
ative” (see Selchow 2016c).
In the world of Mogherini’s strategic assessment, the EU’s goal is to peace-
fully overcome the “21st century realities” as a historical moment in a trajectory
towards “a new global order which reflects universal values and in which the
interests of all stakeholders are respected within the confines of agreed rules”
(EU 2015, p. 138).
There are “five sets of challenges” in the world of ‘The European Union in a
changing global environment’. The nature of these challenges can be captured in
two points. First, they are the “regional manifestations” of the nature of the
“complex” world of “21st century realities”. Second, they are challenges to exist-
ing EU programmes. In other words, they are not challenges to the (existence of
the) EU as such but to the “major external action instruments and policies” that
are already in place, such as the Common Foreign and Security Policies (CFSP),
the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP), the counter-terrorism and
counter violent extremism measures, etc.
Challenges in the world of Mogherini’s strategic assessment are challenges to
existing measures and require an adjustment of them to “21st century realities”,
i.e. they require a “redoubling of commitments”, a “rethinking of approaches”
(ibid.), a “redefining of relationships” etc (EU 2015, pp. 139–140, emphasis
added). This distinguishes the world of ‘The European Union in a changing
global environment’ from the one in the NSS 2015, in which we find a concern
about concrete ‘challenges’, such as the “persistent threat of terrorism” (White
House 2015, p. 9), “the spread and use of WMD” (ibid., p. 11) and climate
change (ibid., p. 12).
Two interlinked aspects are worth highlighting. First, in contrast to the threats
of the world of the ESS 2003 (terrorism, proliferation of WMD, regional conflicts,
state failure, organised crime), challenges that exist in the world of the “21st
century realities” are more complex and, by nature, more nebulous. This is because
they are the regional manifestations of the “complex” new world. And, yet,
because they are the regional manifestations of the “complex” new world, they are
grounded in a distinct context. In fact, they only exist in the context of distinct
regions and social settings. There are no abstract ‘global’ threats but challenges
that are the product of the interplay of the “complex” world with particular
regional constellations and their distinct actors. For instance, climate change exists
in the world of the “21st century realities” as a trigger of regional conflicts, not as
an external or ‘global’ threat to the EU as such (EU 2015, p. 126).
“Region” is the guiding organisational category in the world of “21st century
realities”. While the world of the ESS 2003 consists mainly of nation-states, the
post “post Cold War”-world consists of “regions”, in which, as we have seen
above, challenges for the EU arise, take their form and play out in distinct ways.
In themselves, these “regions” are “complex” and “dynamic”. “Power configura-
tions change across time and place, making regions themselves dynamic con-
cepts” (EU 2015, p. 136). Other guiding concepts of the political geography of
the “complex” new world are “fragile states” and “ungoverned spaces”.
As suggested above, the focus on “regions” grasps the complexity of chal-
lenges and, at the same time, makes them ‘identifiable’. Challenges have a clear
place; they can be located. The prominence of “regions” as an organisational cat-
egory puts the spotlight on issues such as “identity” and “ideology” as drivers of
conflict (EU 2015, p. 132) and naturalises different actors as playing a role in the
political world in general, and in relation to the EU in particular, including those
involved in the “crisis of unprecedented magnitude [that] has broken out inside
the Sunni world, revolving around different interpretations of political Islam”
(ibid., p. 132).
The world of “regions” together with the conviction that the EU’s “[i]nterests
[are] dictated by geography” (ibid., p. 128), grounds the EU in the world and,
especially, in its neighbourhood. At the same time, it constructs the EU as an
island. The geographical compartmentalisation of the world into “regions” draws
a clear line around the EU, which is “surrounded by an arc of instability” (EU
2015, p. 123). This distances the EU from the “complex, contested and con-
nected world”, which is ‘out there’. Despite the fact that the internal/external-
dichotomy is explicitly framed as failing in the world of “21st century realities”,
the EU is strangely distanced and contained from the developments that
surrounds it.
Another noteworthy organisational category in the world of Mogherini’s stra-
tegic assessment – besides “regions” – are “webs”. “We live in a world of over-
lapping webs” (EU 2015, p. 145). “The exponential spread of webs not only
opens opportunities for political participation, it also favours economic and
financial crime, terrorism and trafficking” (ibid., p. 123). Again, in this respect,
the world in ‘The European Union in a changing global environment’ is similar
to the one in the NSS 2015. Here, the world has a distinct geography of “shared
spaces” (White House 2015, p. 7). These are “cyber, space, air, and oceans”
(ibid.). These “shared spaces”, which have not existed in the NSS 2010 (White
House 2010), are a crucial and facilitating feature of the world in that they
enable “the free flow of people, goods, services, and ideas”. They are nothing
less than the “arteries of the global economy and civil society”. As the biological
22 S. Selchow
metaphor indicates they are of existential importance. In this sense, they are a
common good that is to be protected by all against “dangerous behaviors of
some [which] threatens us all” (White House 2015, p. 7). Their protection is a
central US national interest and, at the same time, a task, which serves our
‘common humanity’ (for the above see further Selchow 2016c). The ‘webs’ in
Mogherini’s assessment are similar to the ‘spaces’ in the NSS 2015.
An additional noteworthy aspect of the world of “21st century realities”, as
constructed in ‘The European Union in a changing global environment’, is the
role that Big Data, data mining, cloud computing and the Internet of Things play.
They shape not only the pace of how we live but also the nature of our very
existence. This relates to both, the civil as well as the military sector. In the
world of “21st century realities” Big Data, data mining, cloud computing and the
Internet of Things shape the “contours of how we live, work and consume” (EU
2015, p. 130). In addition, they revolutionise “the defence industry and may
open new avenues for crisis management” (ibid., p. 134).
Furthermore, the EU is of a distinct nature in the world of Mogherini’s
strategic assessment; it is by nature uniquely positioned and equipped to deal
with the “complex” world of “21st century realities”. “The very nature of the
EU as a construct of intertwined polities gives us a unique advantage to help
steer the way in a more complex, more connected but also more contested
world” (EU 2015, p. 128). This is because the nature of the EU mirrors the
new world. It is itself the product of the complex processes that shape “21st
century realities”. As such, the EU is ‘naturally’ and uniquely positioned to
be successful in this new world. This, in turn, implies the imperative to secure
and foster the very nature of the (integrated) EU. European integration
becomes an explicit foreign policy and security strategy. Yet, acting as a
united and coordinated global security player does not imply “only […]
speaking with one voice, there is a need for a multitude of voices speaking in
unison” (EU 2015, p. 147).
Notably, crises take the role of an engine for EU integration, that is, as a
factor that strengthens the EU’s position as a global actor. “The political
economy of defence, coupled with security crises beyond the EU’s borders,
could lead to deeper cooperation between Member States, and thereby boost the
Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP)” (EU 2015, p. 131).
The EU is a proactive agent in the world of the ‘The European Union in a
changing global environment’ that actively “intervene[s] into” the future. “We
may not fully know our future, but we can shape it” (ibid., p. 128).
Intriguingly, while the distinct, integrated nature of the EU constitutes the
foundation of its strength in the world of “21st century realities”, nation-states
play an outstanding role in the world of Mogherini’s strategic assessment. It is
the nation-state that is the guarantor of peace; and it is the failing of the nation-
state that accounts for the spread of identity politics, that causes conflict and that
leads to “a more dangerous world” (ibid., p. 130). Consequently, it is the nation-
state that is to be strengthened around the world in general and in the EU’s
neighbourhood in particular.
Beyond the imperative of fostering democracy, human rights (including the
rights of minorities) and good governance, the conflict over Ukraine under-
lines the need to bolster the statehood prerogatives of our neighbours. These
include recognised and protected borders, a sustainable fiscal capacity, as
well as functioning customs services and police and military forces.
(Ibid., p. 132)
Finally, agency plays an important role in the world of “21st century

realities”.
[G]lobal trends are neither linear nor preordained, but often the product of
shocks and human choices. This highlights the uncertainty that lies ahead,
but also the role of agency – including that of the EU – in moving forward.
We may not fully know our future, but we can shape it.
(EU 2015, p. 128, emphasis added)
As we have seen above, in the world of ‘The European Union in a changing

global environment’, EU external engagements are not subject to ‘natural’ and
historically grounded commitments but the product of concrete political deci-
sions about priorities in view of what is useful, efficient and effective – in view
of what the EU wants. But it is not only the EU, which is a security agent.
Other actors are agentic, too, in the field of security. On the one side, this
refers to actors whose “human choices” shape “global trends”. In the world of
‘The European Union in a changing global environment’ they take an explicit
position on the global political stage. On the other side, it refers to citizens, to
Europeans more generally, who are demanded to become active ‘security’
agents in the face of “the growing need for Europeans to take responsibility for
their own security” (ibid., p. 145). This is captured in the notion of ‘resilience’,
which is implied in the idea that, in addition to “human choices”, it is “shocks”
that shape “global trends”.5 Inevitably, the comprehensive idea of agency
ascribes a central role to the notion of responsibility. Where there are “human
choices” there is “responsibility”. In this respect, the world of ‘The European
Union in a changing global environment’ is similar to the world in the NSS
2015. Here, too, responsibility of various actors is a guiding concept (see
further Selchow 2016c).
Radical openings and a conservation of EU institutions that

privileges modern premises
Looking at the above-sketched world of Mogherini’s strategic assessment ‘The
European Union in a changing global environment’, does it hold openings for an
adoption to the ‘reflexive modern’ reality, in which we live? Does it hold openings
for an ‘interpretive disposition’ that allows a rethinking of modern institutions and
premises? Assessing and interpreting the above findings from a position of the
‘reflexive modern’ world brings to light a complex and ambivalent ‘interpretive
24 S. Selchow
disposition’ that is implied in Mogherini’s world. There are two countervailing
tendencies.
On the one side, a highly conservative interpretive disposition comes to light.
It is a disposition that is shaped by the tradition of the ‘national perspective’ as it
has been sketched above as a perspective that is blind to the reality of the reflex-
ive backfiring of modernisation, ‘global risks’, and the internal cosmopolitisation
of (national) societies.
One dimension of this conservative disposition is that a fundamental ques-
tioning of EU institutions and existing programmes is ruled out categorically.
This is implied in the fact that the EU is constructed as the very product of the
complex world, and, as such, by virtue of its very nature ideally positioned to
deal with that world. It is also implied in that the various challenges Mogherini’s
assessment identifies are presented as challenges for concrete existing EU pro-
grammes and institutions. With that, these programmes and institutions are lifted
out of the realm of critique. The only matter that remains for debate is how to
adjust them to come up to the identified challenges.
More fundamentally, the language of ‘challenges’, which is part of a manage-
rial discourse, strengthens, replicates and naturalises a profoundly modern dis-
course and disposition. This is manifest for instance in the idea of the subject
that is implied and, with that, propagated, through the text. It is a subject that is
demanded to take responsibility and is put into the position of a security actor.
This implies that a subject and a security behaviour are desirable in the
“complex” world of “21st century realities”, which are flexible, pro-active,
adjustable, effective and efficient. The notion of ‘challenges’ implies a manage-
able world, which only requires the right adjustments and access to the necessary
tools, but no radical changes. ‘Global risks’ and the return of uncertainty as a
result of the reflexive backfiring of modernisation, i.e. the radicalisation of
modern principles and institutions, do not exist in Mogherini’s world. The idea
of modern agency, as we know it, is not questioned in the face of the kind of
uncertainty that shapes the “complex” world of “21st century realities”. This is
an uncertainty that poses challenges but is manageable and can be tackled
through the right adjustment of existing tools. “We may not fully know our
future, but we can shape it” (EU 2015, p. 128).
However, while the conservative ‘interpretative disposition’ is a significant
aspect of Mogherini’s strategic assessment, the last point above and the quote
about the ‘not fully known future’ indicates that there is more to it because,
while implying the modern conviction that the future can be shaped, it also indi-
cates that it might not be as predictable as, for instance, the modern technique of
‘risk’ suggests.
In this sense, the world of Mogherini’s ‘The European Union in a changing
global environment’ contains the possibility of a radical discursive opening
beyond a perspective on the world that is caught up in modern premises. Taking
up the Beck-inspired language introduced above, it implies an actualisation of
the tradition of the ‘national perspective’ that acknowledges the ‘both-and’-
nature of reflexive modern reality in profound ways. This is manifest in the
break with conceptual conventions that are normally used to grasp social reality.
It is particularly apparent in the symbolic dissolution of discursive boundaries,
which are normally applied to compartmentalise the social world, such as the
deconstruction of the conventional discursive ‘compartmentalisation’ of ‘terror-
ists’ and ‘tourists’, who, in a modern ‘either-or’-world, clearly and strictly
belong to different realities, and, as such, prescribe ‘natural’ ways of how to deal
with them. In the world of ‘The European Union in a changing global environ-
ment’, on the contrary, they are part of the phenomenon of “human mobility”,
which is a constitutive feature of the “complex” world of “21st century realities”.
The introduction of this concept “human mobility” not only indicates an aware-
ness of the inherent cosmopolitisation of societies, understood in the way I
sketched it earlier with reference to Beck, but it also inevitably opens the possib-
ility of a complete rethinking of social categories and the coordinates that guide
our conception of the world. This is because the concept “human mobility”
needs to be filled with meanings as it is not yet an established and conventional
concept in the world of European security. In a similar vein, other spaces are
opened through the explicit deconstruction and dismantling of concepts that are
key symbolic tools in the conventional handling of the modern (inter)national
world, such as “polarity”, “power” and not least “borders”.
Viewed from the above-sketched ‘reflexive modern’ interpretive position, this
radical discursive opening is remarkable because it constitutes what the above
introduced Beck and Lau (2004) call a ‘politicisation’. In tandem with conserv-
ing the nature of existing EU institutions and programmes, in the world of
Mogherini’s ‘The European Union in a changing global environment’ European
security is ‘politicised’. On the one side, this is manifest in the explicit de-
naturalisation of historical enmeshments and historically or ideologically legiti-
mised imperatives that my above-sketched empirical analysis uncovered. On the
other side, it is manifest in the explicit deconstruction of normalised conceptions
of the world. Through the de-naturalisation of central conventions an imperative
arises to fill the opened conceptual spaces and take a position. Hence, even if
traditional modern concepts continue to guide future moves, this is now a deci-
sion that had to be taken in the face of an opened-up world – it is no longer a
‘natural’ move. In this sense, for instance, possible future demarcations of clear
boundaries need to be taken as active choices, rather than natural consequences
that follow from the world constructed in ‘The European Union in a changing
global environment’. Not much of what used to be (perceived as) ‘natural’ is
‘natural’ in the “complex” world of “21st century realities”. Hence, ‘European
security’ in the world of ‘The European Union in a changing global environ-
ment’ requires political communication and negotiation. Going a step further,
given the relevance that the geographical category “region” plays in the world of
‘The European Union in a changing global environment’, these negotiations
have to include different knowledges, such as for instance regional and local
knowledges.
Taking the above together, we see an intriguingly ambivalent and, one could
say, paradoxical interpretative disposition implied in the world of Mogherini’s
26 S. Selchow
‘The European Union in a changing global environment’. On the one side, there
is not much space to question concrete existing EU institutions and programmes;
they are preserved in and through a modern understanding of the world as posing
manageable challenges that require mere adjustments. There is no sense of the
‘reflexive backfiring’ of modernisation and ‘global risks’, understood as the
unintended consequences of actions grounded in modern institutions and prin-
ciples. On the other side, there is a radical deconstruction of the modern (inter)
national world as we know it – in other words, the idea of the world around the
EU is challenged fundamentally. It is this symbolic opening, which implies the
possibility of thinking the world anew, that, I argue, is remarkable about Mogh-
erini’s ‘The European Union in a changing global environment’ and the world it
brings out. Although strictly preserving EU institutions in their current state,
‘The European Union in a changing global environment’ opens an ‘authorised’
discursive space, which holds the possibility for actors with different kinds of
(local and regional) knowledges to enter it and take advantage of it in order to
radically re-think the world, move beyond conventional understandings of it and,
with that, to potentially pave new pathways into the future of EU security prac-
tices, policies and institutions.
Conclusion and outlook

In 2015, HR Federica Mogherini published ‘The European Union in a changing
global environment’, a strategic assessment of the EU’s security environment. The
document was to serve as the basis for the development of the new EU Global
Strategy, published in summer 2016. Building on the premise that strategic assess-
ments of security environments, such as ‘The European Union in a changing
global environment’, are a significant part of the symbolic negotiation of the world
in that they determine what is thinkable and doable, and guided by an under-
standing of the contemporary world as being ‘reflexive modern’, this chapter
assessed the world of Mogherini’s strategic paper for whether or not it opens hori-
zons beyond the reproduction of modern institutions and premises, and, with that,
a reality of ‘global risks’. The study uncovers that the world of the strategic assess-
ment brings out an intriguing and paradoxical ‘interpretive disposition’. On the
one side, concrete existing EU institutions and programmes are preserved and
symbolically lifted out of the realm of critique, supported by a modern idea of
being faced by manageable challenges that require mere adjustments of existing
modern settings. On the other side, Mogherini’s document holds the possibility of
a radical rethinking of established conceptions. In this sense, it ‘politicises’ Euro-
pean security as it opens up for debate what used to be normalised, namely nothing
less than key concepts of political thinking. This is what makes the document fas-
cinating and significant: Mogherini’s ‘The European Union in a changing global
environment’ opens an ‘authorised’ discursive space for various actors to step in,
debate and fill it anew and even beyond conventions.
The document ‘The European Union in a changing global environment’ is
only one aspect in the never-ending social re-production of ‘European security’.
Yet, given its explicit position within the process of the development of the EU
Global Strategy and endorsed by HR Mogherini the discursive space it opens is
remarkable. Whether and precisely how this space is filled and formed in prac-
tice is an empirical question that asks for ongoing analyses. This chapter pro-
vides the ground for such studies.
Notes
1 This chapter is an amended version of the article ‘The Construction of “European
security” in “The European Union in a Changing Global Environment: A Systematic
Analysis” ’ published in European Security (Selchow 2016a). I would like to thank the
journal for permitting me to use and amend the original article.
2 In this sense, the term ‘global risk’ is actually not about ‘risk’ but questions the modern
‘tool’ ‘risk’, see further Selchow (2014, 2016c, 2017).
3 Beck (2009, p. 5) calls the assumption that unintended consequences of decisions could
be ‘tamed’ through scientific knowledge production, which underlies the idea of ‘risk’,
an “arrogant assumption of controllability”.
4 The following is grounded in an open cyclic analysis of the text that focused on ‘Euro-
pean security’, i.e. the interwoven meanings of the subject that is to be secured (the
collective self ) and the object in the face of which it is to be secured (threats, dangers).
Concretely, it was guided by six broad questions: What kind of security actor is the
EU? Which characteristics does it have? Where and how is it positioned in the world?
What is threatening the EU? What other security actors are there in the world? How is
the world imagined? (See further Selchow 2016a).
5 For an analysis and discussion of resilience and resilient in the US NSS 2010, see
Selchow (2016b).
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Part II
Conflicts
2 Review of the EU policy for
Ukraine
Tymofiy Mylovanov, Yuri M. Zhukov and
Yuriy Gorodnichenko
Introduction
This chapter provides a review of the ongoing security conflict in Ukraine and the
contemporaneous economic and political crises. We use big data of the violence in
the East of Ukraine to argue that the local variation in the violence is best
explained by economic rather than ethnic or political factors. We also discuss the
resistance of the Ukrainian public to the conflict resolution strategy outlined in the
Minsk and Minsk II agreements. This resistance is caused by lack of legitimacy of
these agreements, where the major stakeholders – public – have been denied a
voice in framing these agreements. Indeed, the Minsk agreements are typical of
what is described elsewhere in this book as hybrid peace and this chapter illus-
trates the need to address the underlying social conditions that lead to violence
rather than focusing on top-down agreements among the warring parties.
We start by describing the background of the conflict and remark that
the early attempts at the crisis resolution during the Euromaidan protests in the
winter of 2014 have not been successful because of lack of legitimacy of the
process. We then move towards discussion of Minsk II and resistance to these
agreements among the Ukrainian public. Next, we make a data-based argument
that the variation in the local violence in the East of Ukraine is best explained by
the structure of the local economy. This finding suggests that the key to reso-
lution will lie in restoring economic and judicial justice. After that, we talk about
Crimea, the political pressure on Crimean Tatars and the issue of blockade. Next,
we comment on the social hardship imposed on the Ukrainian population by the
crisis, the pervasive corruption, and success of conditionality requirements of the
IMF and other donor programs. Finally, we conclude with some recommenda-
tions about policies for the EU with respect to Ukraine.
Background of the conflict

On November 21, 2013, a prominent Ukrainian journalist Mustafa Nayem posted
a Facebook call for Ukrainians to come to the main square center of Kyiv
(Nayem, 2013). The objective was to protest a recent decision by President of
Ukraine Viktor Yanukovich not to sign a EU association agreement.
32 T. Mylovanov et al.
Over the next few days protesters grew in numbers, but there was no viol-
ence. Everything changed on November 30 when police dispersed the protesters,
arresting and injuring them in scores. The police brutality fueled the public
support of the protests. The protests continued into the late February of 2014. At
times, the number of protesters reached, according to some estimates, up to
1,000,000 people. The protests gradually turned more violent and culminated in
multiple deaths of protesters and police. The regime collapsed. President Yanuk-
ovich fled Ukraine and the parliament voted in a temporary government.
Following the change of the government in Ukraine, Russia annexed Crimea
in the spring of 2014. Immediately after that, Russia and some of Ukrainian
political elites orchestrated a pro-Russian insurgency in the East of Ukraine. In
the spring of 2014, multiple armed groups took over town councils and pro-
claimed two republics, Donetsk People Republic and Lugansk People Republic.
These armed groups were partly consisting of Russian (officially former) troops
and partly of locals. The republics have not been recognized by Ukraine, Russia,
and the rest of the world.
By the early summer of 2014, there was a full-fledged war in Donetsk and
Lugansk oblast between the separatists and the Ukrainian armed forces. In the
late summer of 2014, the Ukrainian military was making steady advances on the
territory controlled by the insurgents. In response, Russia offered military
support and the Ukrainian troops suffered heavy casualties and were pushed
back in August of 2014. Intense fighting continued throughout the end of 2014
and the spring and summer of 2015. By the spring of 2015, there was a tentative
ceasefire in place. The ceasefire continues to hold with sporadic violations.
Figure 2.1 describes the time series of the violence in the East of Ukraine.
In the meantime, Ukraine has restored legitimacy of the government and
political process. It held presidential elections and chose a new president (Petro
Poroshenko) in May 2014. A new parliament was elected in October of 2014. A
new coalition government was formed in late November. Local elections were
held in October and November 2015.
Minsk I Minsk II
40
30
20
10
0
3/2014 5/2014 7/2014 9/2014 11/2014 1/2015 3/2015 5/2015 7/2015
Figure 2.1 Violence in the East of Ukraine. Minsk I and II are ceasefire agreements.
Review of the EU policy for Ukraine 33
The EU has played an active role in mitigating the conflict. It has served as a
mediator between the parties of the conflict throughout the entire period since
the beginning of the Euromaidan. There were attempts to mediate a solution
between the former president Viktor Yanukovich and the protestors during Euro-
maidan. After the violence in the East emerged, there have been two agreements
Minsk I and Minsk II aimed to stop fighting. The current ceasefire follows Minsk
II agreement. Second, the EU has offered technical, financial, and diplomatic
support to the new Ukrainian government.
Sustainability and legitimacy of the Minsk II agreement

The Minsk II agreement (Telegraph, 2015) is currently the key political instru-
ment intended to resolve the security crisis in Ukraine. It requires introducing
changes into Constitution of Ukraine that grants the separatists regions certain
powers. These changes are not well understood by the Ukrainian public and are
not uniformly supported by people and by the political factions in the parlia-
ment. This is most evidenced by the deadly violence outside of the Ukrainian
parliament on August 31, 2015 during the vote on the decentralization amend-
ment to the Constitution of Ukraine as required by the Minsk II agreement. The
vote itself was highly irregular (Mylovanov, 2015) suggesting that the political
leadership of Ukraine had to engage in non-standard means of persuasion of the
members of the parliament to support the required changes. In addition, Western
politicians were present in the Ukrainian parliament during the vote. Many
observers remarked on intense pressure on the members of the parliament from
the EU and the US leaders. Several factions voted against the changes and
several members of the parliament who broke these parties’ line were excluded
from the respective faction.
In addition to being highly divisive among the Ukrainian public, Minsk II
does not address the fundamental causes that led to the Euromaidan revolution:
there is no serious effort to carry out fundamental and systematic reforms, to
eradicate corruption and abuse of power by the ruling elites, oligarchs, and
entrenched bureaucracy. The old kleptocratic/oligarchic system of power distri-
bution in Ukraine mutated into a more polished and Westernized look. After
more than three years since the start of the Maidan movement, nobody from top
echelons of the previous regime responsible for corruption and violence has been
brought to justice. Furthermore, the people directly responsible for instigating,
coordinating, and financing attacks on the Ukrainian public in Kyiv, Odessa, and
the East have not been brought to justice. It is unclear whether the criminal and
law enforcement networks that were involved in the violence have been dis-
mantled. Consequently, the public has been becoming increasingly frustrated
with the new government, providing a basis for political infighting, finger-
pointing, and rising populism.
Similarly, Minsk II does nothing to resolve the issue that led Russia to inter-
vene in Ukraine in the first place. Ukraine’s sovereignty is challenged by Russia.
The Budapest memorandum signed by Russia, the US, and the UK served as a
guarantee of the Ukrainian sovereignty. This memorandum has proven to be
ineffective. Minsk II, too, does not have any effective tools that would ensure
that Russia respects the sovereignty of Ukraine in the future.
Thus, Minsk II does nothing to prevent escalation of the violence in the
medium to the long run, while Ukraine finds itself under enormous external and
internal pressure. Together, these factors may risk a continuation of the crisis
with even more unpredictable consequences.
The external pressure from Russia and the West, including the EU, focuses
on the political settlement outlined in the Minsk II agreements. The two main
demands for Ukraine are to hold local elections at the territories controlled by
separatists and decentralization by granting autonomy to separatist territories.
A substantive part of the Ukrainian public resents this external pressure.
Ukrainians feel insulted that their sovereignty has been blatantly taken away
from them by Russia and that, in a sense, the West follows a similar approach. In
addition, the West does not require that Russia must withdraw from Ukraine,
including Crimea, and pay the damages for the destroyed lives and property.
Finally, there is no international pressure on Russia to release Ukrainian citizens
it kidnapped or that Russia lets Ukraine take control of its State border in Eastern
Ukraine.
This position is viewed by the Ukrainian public as fundamentally unfair. Any
actions that can be interpreted as legitimizing the separatist regimes of Donetsk
and Lugansk Republics risk causing more violence and destabilization of an
already fragile political equilibrium in Ukraine.
Without public support in Ukraine, any political resolution will not be sus-
tainable. Having Ukraine’s political elites on board is not enough. A case in
point is the political settlement between Mr. Yanukovich and the opposition
leaders in February of 2014, mediated by the Western and Russian representa-
tives. This settlement was rejected by the public and Yanukovich’s regime fell
just days after.
Understanding causes of the conflict in the East of Ukraine1

At the time of the beginning of the insurgency in the East of Ukraine in April
2014, some observers predicted that the separatist movement would spread to
other parts of southeast Ukraine, throughout the vast territory Russian President
Vladimir Putin referred to as historical “Novorossiya.”
Contrary to these forecasts, the insurgency remained surprisingly contained.
No region outside Donetsk or Luhansk experienced large-scale armed conflict or
fell under separatist control. Not only were separatists unable to realize the
project of a greater “Novorossiya” stretching from Kharkiv to Odessa, they
failed to consolidate their grip even within the borders of the Donbas. Not more
than 63 percent of municipalities in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts were under
separatist control at any time during the first year of the conflict, and less than a
quarter of these territories showed resistance to Ukrainian government forces
during Kyiv’s attempt to liberate them in the spring and the summer of 2014.
In order to design the best policy to resolve the conflict it is important to
understand the causes for local variation in the intensity of the conflict.
The most common answers to this question in the press and policy analysis
have fallen into one of two categories: ethnicity and economics. The first view
expects insurgency to be more likely and more intense in areas home to large
concentrations of ethnolinguistic minorities – in this case, Russians or Russian-
speaking Ukrainians. According to this logic, geographically concentrated
minorities can overcome some of the collective action problems associated with
insurgency – such as monitoring and punishing defectors – while attracting an
influx of fighters, weapons and economic aid from co-ethnics in neighboring
states. Among others, Vladimir Putin too has cast the Donbas conflict as a prim-
arily ethnic one: “The essential issue is how to ensure the legitimate rights and
interests of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in the southeast of Ukraine”
(Putin, 2014).
An alternative explanation for variation in insurgency intensity is economic
opportunity costs. According to this view, as income from less risky legal activ-
ities declines relative to income from insurgency behavior, participation in insur-
gency should rise. As Maidan and the Revolution of Dignity proclaimed
adherence to European values and set the path towards Europe and away from
the Customs Union with Russia, the opportunity costs of insurgency declined in
the Donbas. As a heavily industrialized region with deep economic ties to
Russia, the Donbas was uniquely exposed to potential negative economic shocks
caused by trade openness with the EU, austerity and trade barriers with Russia.
A rebel fighter with the Vostok battalion summarized this view: “Many mines
started to close. I lost my job. Then, with what happened during the spring, I
decided to go out and defend my city” (Langston, 2015).
Micro-level data on violence, ethnicity and economic activity in eastern
Ukraine allows to evaluate the relative explanatory power of these two perspec-
tives. The evidence suggests that local economic factors are stronger predictors
of violence and territorial control than Russian ethnicity or language. Ethnicity
only had an affect where economic incentives for insurgency were already weak.
Separatists in eastern Ukraine were “pro-Russian” not because they spoke
Russian, but because their economic livelihood had long depended on trade with
Russia and they now saw this livelihood as being under threat.
The economic roots of the pro-Russian rebellion are evident from new data
on violence and control, assembled from incident reports released by Ukrainian
and Russian news agencies, government and rebel statements, daily ‘conflict
maps’ released by both sides, and social media news feeds. The data include
10,567 unique violent events in the Donbas, at the municipality level, recorded
between then President Viktor Yanukovych’s flight in February 2014 and the
second Minsk ceasefire agreement of February 2015. Figure 2.2 shows the geo-
graphic distribution of rebel violence and territorial control during the first year
of the conflict.
To explain variation in the timing and intensity of violence and control, one
can consider the proportion of Russian speakers residing in each municipality,
Rebel violence Rebel control
Kramators’k Luhansk Kramators’k Luhansk
Donetsk Donetsk
Mariupol Mariupol
Rebel violence (3/2014 – 2/2015) Rebel control (3/2014 – 2/2015)

0 attacks 2–5 11–20 101> Government Rebel
1 attacks 6–10 20–100
Figure 2.2 Rebel violence and rebel control of the territory.
and the proportion of the local labor force employed in three industries, differen-
tially vulnerable to post-Euromaidan economic shocks. These included machine-
building, which is heavily dependent on exports to Russia, highly vulnerable to
Russian import substitution, and currently lacks short-term alternative export
markets. At the other extreme, there is the metals industry, which is less
dependent on Russia, and a potential beneficiary of increased trade with the EU.
Finally, there is employment in the mining industry, which had grown dependent
on Yanukovych-era state-subsidies, and became highly vulnerable to IMF-
imposed austerity measures. Given the relative exposure of these industries to
post-Euromaidan economic shocks, one should expect the opportunity costs of
rebellion to be lowest in machine-building towns and highest in metallurgy
towns, with mining towns falling in the middle. Figure 2.3 shows the spatial dis-
tribution of these variables. The analysis also accounted for a host of other
potential determinants of violence, like terrain, logistics, proximity to the
Russian border, prewar electoral patterns, and spillover effects from rebel activ-
ity in neighboring towns.
A statistical analysis of these data reveals that a municipality’s prewar
employment mix is a stronger and more robust predictor of rebel activity than
local ethnolinguistic composition. In municipalities more exposed to negative
trade shocks with Russia (municipalities with high shares of population
employed in machinery and mining), violence was more likely to occur overall,
Russian language Prewar employment
Kramators’k Luhansk Kramators’k Luhansk
Donetsk Donetsk
Mariupol Mariupol
Russian language (2001 census) Employment by industry

Russian Ukrainian Mixed Machinery Mining Metallurgy
Figure 2.3 Proportion of Russian speakers residing in each municipality, and the propor-
tion of the local labour force employed in three industries.
and was more intense. For a median Donbas municipality, an increase in the
machine-building labor force from one standard deviation below (4 percent) to
one standard deviation above the mean (26 percent) yields a 44 percent increase
(95 percent credible interval: a 34 percent–56 percent increase) in the frequency
of rebel violence from week to week.
These municipalities – where the local population was highly vulnerable to
trade disruptions with Russia – also fell under rebel control earlier and took
longer for the government to liberate than municipalities where the labor force
was less dependent on exports to Russia. On any given day, a municipality with
higher-than-average employment in the beleaguered machine-building industry
was about twice as likely to fall under rebel control as a municipality with
below-average employment in the industry.
By contrast, there is little evidence of either a “Russian language effect” on
violence, or an interaction between language and economics. The impact of
prewar industrial employment on rebellion is the same in municipalities where a
majority of the population is Russian-speaking as it is where the majority is
Ukrainian-speaking. Russian language fared slightly better as a predictor of rebel
control, but only under certain conditions. In particular, where economic depend-
ence on Russia was relatively low, municipalities with large Russian-speaking
populations were more likely to fall under rebel control early in the conflict. The
“language effect” disappeared in municipalities where any one of the three
industries had a major presence. In other words, ethnicity and language only had
an affect where economic incentives for rebellion were weak.
The seemingly rational economic self-interest at the heart of the conflict may
seem puzzling, given the staggering costs of war. In the eighteen months since
armed men began storming government buildings in the Donbas, over 8,000
people have lost their lives, and over one million have been displaced. Regional
industrial production fell by 49.9 percent in 2014, with machinery exports to
Russia down by 82 percent. Suffering heavy damage from shelling, many fac-
tories have closed. With airports destroyed, railroad links severed and roads
heavily mined, a previously export-oriented economy has found itself isolated
from the outside world. If local machinists and miners had only known the scale
of the destruction to come, the economic rationale for rebellion would surely
have appeared less compelling. Yet when choosing between a high-risk rebellion
to retain one’s economic livelihood and an almost certain loss of income, many
people chose the first option.
From a policy standpoint, the economic roots of the Donbas conflict should
be seen as good news. Despite the ethnocentric media coverage of this war in
Russia and the West, the data show that attempts to divide Ukraine along ethnic
or linguistic lines are likely to fail. These results can also explain why the con-
flict has not spread beyond Donetsk and Luhansk. Home to a large concentration
of enterprises dependent on exports to Russia, highly subsidized and tradition-
ally shielded from competition, the Donbas became exposed to a perfect storm
of negative economic shocks after the Euromaidan. No other region in Ukraine,
or the former Soviet Union, has a similarly vulnerable economic profile. Without
a compelling economic motive, a pro-Russian rebellion is unlikely to occur else-
where in Ukraine.
Crimea
Crimea is a peninsula in the south of Ukraine which was annexed by the Russian
Federation in March 2014 in the aftermath of the Euromaidan revolution. Since
then the territory has been de facto administered by Russia. Crimea continues to
be internationally recognized as Ukrainian territory.
Annexation of Crimea leads to several fundamental problems. First, it jeop-
ardizes the viability of nuclear non-proliferation agreements. Second, annexation
of Crimea resulted in political prosecution of Crimean Tatars and, more recently,
in an economic blockade and disruption of electricity supplies to the peninsula.
Third, Crimea appears to be a semi-legal channel to move goods from Ukraine
to Russia.
In the mid-1990s, Ukraine abandoned its nuclear weapons it inherited from the
Soviet Union and joined the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear
Weapons (NPT). In exchange, three of the five permanent members of the UN
Security Council, the US, Russia and the UK, signed, together with Ukraine, a
Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances. In this memorandum, the US,
Russia and the UK assured Ukraine of its territorial integrity and political
sovereignty. Annexation of Crimea and a hybrid war in the East of Ukraine has
demonstrated that Russia abandoned the Budapest Memorandum. Despite the
political pressure, the diplomatic, financial, and material support to Ukraine, and
the sanctions imposed on Russia, the international community has not been able to
ensure the sovereignty of Ukraine. In addition, the US and the UK have not taken
an active role in mediating the conflict resolution in the East of Ukraine. These
events undermine the ability of the West to credibly promise to protect sovereignty
of the countries in exchange for joining and fulfilling the conditions of the non-
proliferation treaty and similar agreements.
Even though the international community has not legally recognized the
Russian control over Crimea, some of the EU politicians have offered indirect
support. For instance, in July 2015, a group of ten French parliamentarians
visited occupied Crimea. The deputies were violating the Western sanctions
imposed against Russia for annexation of the peninsula.
The native population of Crimea is Crimean Tatars and they constituted
majority of the population of the peninsula until mid-nineteenth century. Today,
Crimean Tatars comprise approximately 12 percent of the population of Crimea.
In 1944, the USSR resettled the majority of Crimean Tatars from Crimea to
Central Asia. From 1967, some of the population was permitted to return and in
1989 the USSR parliament condemned the removal of Tatars from Crimea.
Following annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014, Crimean Tatars have faced
political prosecution. A number of Crimean Tatar leaders were not allowed to
return to Crimea, many were arrested, their businesses raided, and their political/
societal organizations and media outlets pressured. The Ukrainian government has
failed to come up with a coherent and visible response policy to address the issue
of Crimean Tatars as well as other pro-Ukrainian population remaining in Crimea.
Internal security conflicts and risks of separatism in

other regions
Odessa and Kharkiv regions of Ukraine are potentially at risk of pro-Russian
separatisms. Attempts to destabilize these regions took place at the time of the
beginning of the insurgency in the East and, to a smaller extent, continue to
occur up to the present.
Ukraine also borders with Moldova and, specifically, Transdnistria, its break-
away region. Recently, the government officials in Moldova reiterated the
demand for the Russian troops withdrawal from Moldovan territory to Russia’s
new military attaché. Moldova suspended its relations with the previous attaché
after he attended a military parade in Transdnistria.
The evidence presented in the section on the causes of the insurgency in the
East of Ukraine suggests economic roots. Other regions in Ukraine do not have a
similarly sensitive economic profile. It is likely that a risky rebellion was a more
attractive option right after the peaceful annexation of Crimea and before the
horrors of full-scale warfare in the Donbas. Any sympathizers in the Kharkiv
and Odessa regions and possibly in other regions are less eager to join after they
have observed the destruction (materialized costs of a rebellion as opposed to
thinking about costs without any experience of it) of the Donbas than they were
in May 2014.
Social hardship
The Euromaidan revolution and the consequent annexation of Crimea and the
war in the East have plunged Ukraine into an economic crisis. Ukraine has
experienced a double-digit contraction in GDP, high inflation and increased
unemployment. This imposed a substantive burden on many people and busi-
nesses in Ukraine.
There were two fundamental factors behind the rise of inflation. First,
Hryvnia devaluation. Since the beginning of the crisis in early 2014, hryvnia
depreciated devalued by approximately 200 percent roughly two-thirds against
the US dollar. This increased the cost of imported goods and materials, and
given Ukraine’s high dependency on imports (which constitute roughly half of
GDP), the depreciation fed through into prices. Second, over the past year
energy tariffs increased massively, as they were brought closer to cost recovery
levels.
Both of these shocks are one-time events and, thus, persistently high inflation
is unlikely. However, if the government fails to contain inflation, inflation will
be highly destructive for the economy as it leads to planning uncertainty, ineffi-
cient allocation of resources, distortion in economic incentives, and redistribu-
tion of income and wealth.
If inflation pressure intensifies beyond the low and stable level, especially as
a result of external shock, it becomes destructive for the economy for many
reasons, such as planning uncertainty, ineffective capital allocation, distortion in
economic incentives, redistribution of income and wealth, menu costs.
Because low-income and most middle-income households typically have
fixed incomes in local currency (pensioners, budget sector employees, students,
etc.) and limited savings, these households suddenly become impoverished. At
the same time, high-income, wealthy households, usually having larger and
inflation-protected incomes and savings (real estate, foreign currency cash),
suffer little or even gain. Their consumption is unable to compensate for the loss
of consumption by the poorer population. This aggravates the contraction in the
economy and creates social tensions.
The current crisis is more painful than anything Ukraine has in recent decades
already exacerbate and highlight this challenge. For instance, during the 2009
crisis, that followed several years of credit-led boom, household consumption
declined by almost 15 percent year-on-year, led by the 42 percent drop in house-
holds’ spending on transport, mainly purchases of imported vehicles. However,
other types of spending experienced relatively minor contractions. The economy
thus endured necessary adjustment following several years of overconsumption.
The pattern of consumption decline is different during this crisis. For example,
food consumption, which accounted for around 37.5 percent of total household
spending in 2014, dropped by 14.2 percent year-on-year last year and was the
leading factor of a 9.8 percent decline in households consumption, signaling that
consumers are economizing on basic goods.
Rapidly rising inequality urges for quick adoption of targeted and means-
tested social assistance. This assistance may need to be increased to sustain
minimum necessary consumption levels by the poor. Extraordinary budget rev-
enues obtained due to high inflation should be used to enhance assistance to the
poorer.
Corruption
Since the Euromaidan, Ukraine has undertaken a serious anticorruption legis-
lative effort. Multiple registries have been open, new anti-corruption institutions
created. However, there are no high profile successful prosecutions of anyone
implicated in corruption or abuse of power under the previous or the current
government. Surveys consistently show that corruption is considered to be
among the topmost problems both by the public and businesses and there is no
sign that the situation is improving.
However, corruption is not the cause of the problems in Ukraine but rather is
a symptom of underlying institutional problems. Corruption occurs because of
weak property rights, rent seeking activities of politically connected businesses
and individuals, lack of transparency, and uneven playing field, where rules of
the game differ depending on one’s connections.
Success of conditionality of the IMF program with the new

government
Ukraine is going through a major transformation of its political and economic
landscape. Because the main losers from key reforms (anti-corruption, deregula-
tion, etc.) are the “old” elites, these players are interested in delaying and watering
down reforms so that they can preserve their power, rents, and access to govern-
ment contrasts. As a result, the reform process has been painfully slow (iMoRe,
2015). Indeed, old elites continue to play a significant role in the government and
thus they can create an effective barrier to rapid changes. For example, it took over
four months to appoint a chief prosecutor to the National Anti-corruption Bureau.
The civil society puts pressure to proceed with reforms as quickly as possible. But
the public’s efforts are dispersed and uncoordinated and they lack resources (finan-
cial, media, etc.). In this environment, a central pro-reform force has turned out to
be conditionality of aid given to the Ukrainian government.
Ukraine badly needs financial resources to cover fiscal deficit, to recapitalize
banks, etc. Given that the government does not have capacity to borrow in
domestic or international capital markets, the operation of the government criti-
cally depends on loans, grants, etc. it receives from the International Monetary
Fund (IMF ), European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD),
World Bank, and other donors. Thus, international financial institutions (IFIs)
and donor governments have significant leverage to influence domestic policy in
Ukraine by making financial support conditional on progress made by the
Ukrainian government.
The IMF is a leading example of using conditionality to achieve its goals. To
a large extent, this approach is motivated by the history of the IMF-Ukraine rela-
tionship: before 2013, Ukraine participated in many IMF programs, but it
received only the first tranche from the IMF and did not receive subsequent
tranches because the Ukrainian government failed to meet the targets set by IMF
programs. To ensure compliance, the IMF now uses quantitative targets and
clear deadlines for completion for the post-Maidan government. In many cases,
the commitment of the IMF to not disburse funds until a target is hit was the
reason why the Parliament and the government pushed through legislation to
further reforms. This, “tough love” has proven to be one of the strongest incen-
tives to implement measures unpopular among the current elites or the voters.
For example, in July 2015, under threat of not receiving the second trance of the
IMF ’s Extended Funding Facility program, Verkhovna Rada voted a law requir-
ing local utilities to set prices above their costs. In private, some government
officials admit that if a piece of legislation were not an IMF requirement, nothing
would have happened.
Conclusions: recommendations for the EU

The EU policy, with respect to the resolution of the crisis in Ukraine has focused
on the following directions: mediating the security crisis resolution through the
Minsk I and Minsk II agreements, trade agreement between the EU and Ukraine,
financial assistance to Ukraine, technical assistance with reforms.
The security risks in Ukraine include continuing pressure from Russia to
undermine the legitimacy of the new government, the economic and security
destabilization in the East and inside Ukraine, resurrection of the old kleptocratic
power networks and creating of the new ones, economic instability, and frustra-
tion with the government and the situation in general by the public and busi-
nesses. These risks are aggravated by the weak institutional capacity of the
government and low competence and training of public officials.
If we accept the premise of this chapter that a key factor underling the crisis
is the economics, then the resolution of the crisis should address the issue of
restoring economic and political justice. This requires rebuilding the economy
and providing the general public with economic opportunities. Creating such
opportunities will undermine the ability of the networks interested in maintain-
ing the conflict to gather support.
Political stabilization and legitimacy of the new political institutions and reso-
lution are also key for overcoming the crisis. Ukrainians perceive both the new
and old ruling elites to be corrupt and thus top-bottom approach is unlikely to
gain support among the population. Mistrust will continue to prevail, and the
reforms and conflict resolution policies are unlikely to be effective. Any reso-
lution requires an inclusive settlement and not a pact of political elites that are
fueling the crisis. Active civil society should play an important role in aggregat-
ing demands and claims in such a process.
It is possible that civil society is more active in the areas where the economic
hardship is weaker. Thus, providing economic opportunities and financial
support to disadvantaged areas, such as in the East of Ukraine, can have the
added benefit of activating engagement of the civil society in the conflict reso-
lution and political processes.
The Ukrainian political elites respond well to strict conditionality in assist-
ance. This policy should continue to be exploited and strengthened in order to
put pressure on the Ukrainian government to develop governance and political
institutions in Ukraine. There are two caveats. First, the IMF is the locomotive
of the assistance and conditionality for Ukraine. The IMF tends to require
tight fiscal policies, which can exacerbate economic recession in Ukraine.
Second, the conditionality tends to focus, although not exclusively, on liberal-
ization of the economy and dismantling state control. This approach works
well if the country can implement it. However, in the environment with weak
institutional capacity, corrupt judiciary, uneven playing field, insecure prop-
erty rights, liberalization policies carry the risk of generating additional
inequality and benefiting primarily the oligarch and the relatively well-to-do
part of the society. If this happens, the legitimacy of the economic reforms,
their long run sustainability, and the resolution of crisis in general will be
undermined. Therefore, the conditionality should also include measures for
restoring justice and preventing corruption and abuse of power. The EU does
some of this in Ukraine, but it is important to require of the Ukrainian govern-
ment to do more on the issues of prosecuting corrupt officials, introducing
transparency and accountability of the government, cracking down on rent
seeking and tax evasion. Finally, the conditionality must be credible to be
effective. The EU, the IMF and other donors should be ready to follow
through on their promise to withdraw support if the Ukrainian government
does not comply with the conditions.
Another critical risk is that pressure to implement the Minsk II agreement
might backfire internally if the agreement does not gain legitimacy in the eyes of
the Ukrainian public. We suggest that the effort to resolve the conflict at the top
level through Minsk II commitment should be complemented by initiatives that
involve broader public and grassroots initiatives in conflict resolution process.
The crucial problem with Minsk II is that it does not address the threat to
Ukraine of losing sovereignty. The EU can be much more vocal on this issue,
insisting on including broad representation of the Ukrainian public in the conflict
resolution process. It is up to Ukrainians to figure out how they should govern
themselves and how they should resolve the conflict in the East of Ukraine and
any resolution imposed from the top is unlikely to be viable as it will not be
accepted by the people.
Finally, financial assistance to Ukraine is itself a security risk as the funds can
be diverted or wasted and can be used to increase the power of the politicians
controlling the distribution of this assistance. In order to address this risk, we
suggest that the EU should create effective competition among those in Ukraine
who look for financial and technical support. In particular, the EU should
identify watchdog initiatives outside of the government and not to rely on the
government and their local offices to decide whom to fund. In addition, the EU
can change the strategy from going top-bottom to bottom-top; that is, while it is
relatively easier to give the funding to the government of Ukraine and let the
government distribute the funds, a more effective way would be to fund grass-
roots movements to build a robust civil society and put pressure on people in the
government. It is a more work intensive approach but it will be more effective: it
creates more competition, gives resources to active parts of the society and is
less bureaucratic/more adaptive/responsive to changing environment. One of the
concerns might be that this competition will create infighting among civil society
groups. Nevertheless, we believe that this risk is not too critical since the groups
today de facto already compete for the resources handed out by the government.
The governmental control (as an intermediary between the Western assistance
and the civil society) over a substantive share of the funding for civil society
initiatives create an agency problem and makes the civil society depend on the
government.
In short, we argue for creating economic opportunities for general public
(economic resolution) and using a bottom-up approach to include all parts of the
society in deliberation of how to resolve the conflict (political resolution). These
policies should be complemented by strict conditionality of the support from the
EU that requires anti-corruption policies that (a) dismantle the state economy,
but (b) more importantly dismantle rent-seeking networks of oligarchs and
restore justice.
Note
1 This section is based on Zhukov (2016).
References
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ukraine.org/2015/11/27/irregular-votes-in-rada/ (Accessed August 14, 2017).
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August 14, 2017).
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at https://voxukraine.org/2015/11/10/the-economics-of-rebellion-in-eastern-ukraine/
Zhukov, Y. (2016). Trading hard hats for combat helmets: The economics of rebellion in
eastern Ukraine. Journal of Comparative Economics 44(1): 1–15.
3 EU in the Western Balkans
Hybrid development, hybrid security
and hybrid justice
Vesna Bojicic-Dzelilovic, Denisa Kostovicova and
Elisa Randazzo
Introduction
Following its early diplomatic efforts to mediate in violent conflicts that destroyed
former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the European Union (EU) has become a lead
international actor supporting the peace-building process in the Western Balkans.1
Its engagement has been guided by the prospect of the region’s eventual accession
to the European Union, ever since the European perspective was offered in the
Thessaloniki Summit in 2003. Consequently, the Stabilisation and Association
Process (SAP), a unique reform process instituted to prepare the countries of the
Western Balkans for accession, became the main framework for the EU’s engage-
ment. Individual countries have deepened their contractual relations with the
Union since, and Croatia became the first Western Balkan member-state in 2013.
In practice, the SAP has also been paralleled by explicit instances of Common
Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) action outside and beyond the European
Security and Defence Policy missions (Tocci 2007; Kostovicova 2014).
The region’s conflict legacy presented a complex challenge to its transforma-
tion en route to the EU. On the one hand, the EU was confronted and engaged
with the issue of contested political units and borders; notably that of a political
union between Serbia and Montenegro, and an ongoing process of normalisation
of relations between Serbia and Kosovo. On the other hand, the pressing issue of
responsibility for war crimes was addressed by instituting the so-called Hague
conditionality, that linked progress in the EU accession to the countries’ co-
operation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
(ICTY). It soon became clear that compounding these evident conflict-related
issues was, what Börzel (2011) has called ‘limited statehood’ in the Balkans that
encompasses a weak state capacity and lack of the elites’ willingness for change.
This concept points to the actively-produced weakness in state-capacity (Kos-
tovicova and Bojicic-Dzelilovic 2009), which manifested itself in a range of
strategies employed by local actors to subvert the reform process prescribed by
the SAP (Bojicic-Dzelilovic and Kostovicova 2013). These strategies exposed
the limits of the EU’s normative power (Noutcheva 2009; Elbasani 2013), under-
stood as EU’s ability to bring about change in line with rights-based political
democratisation and economic liberalisation.
EU in the Western Balkans 47
While the EU’s approach to the Western Balkans has evolved over the years,
its primary focus has been to maintain security and prevent reactivation of armed
violence both within and between states through Europeanisation, that denotes a
wholesale transformation of structures, identities and values (Radaelli 2003: 30).
The tension between reforming the Western Balkans aspirants to EU member-
ship akin to their counterparts in East and Central Europe and re-constructing
post-conflict states is reflected in the understanding of the member-state building
in the Western Balkans as peace-building (Juncos 2012). Scholars have reflected
on various dimensions of the EU’s peace-building efforts in the Balkans, such as
democratisation (Keil 2013), contested political communities (Bieber 2011) or
policy prioritisation (Grimm and Mathis 2015), to name a few. These efforts
remain analytically anchored in conceptual logics and theoretical frames under-
pinning theorisation of Europeanisation, without venturing a dialogue with
related disciplines. Scholars have recognised that informal and criminal net-
works permeate post-conflict states in the region which is a key obstacle to its
political, economic and social transformation. However, they stop short of
engaging with the ‘relational turn’ (Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013) in critical
peace-building scholarship, to further our understanding both of a challenge
before the EU project and possible ways of addressing its adverse effects for
Europeanisation and for peace in the region.
In this chapter we seek to explain the outcomes of EU interventions in the
Western Balkans by engaging with the debates on hybridity in critical liberal-
peace building scholarship. We adopt a relational analysis, which focuses on the
relational aspects of human interaction, rather than on actors and categories
(Christopoulos 2008: 476), and investigate the impact of EU policies in three
areas: private sector development, security sector reform, and, justice and recon-
ciliation. The relational analysis is focused on informal networks we employ,
and is consistent with the local turn in critical perspectives on peace-building. It
allows us to capture an enduring character of relations developed through war-
time violence which are sustained and reworked in the context of a local elite’s
response to the international peace-building efforts, including EU member-state
building (Bojicic-Dzelilovic and Kostovicova 2013). At the same time, it also
allows us to capture a networked response to the post-conflict challenges of
reconstruction, reflected in the alignment of local actors with a new type of non-
hierarchical agency in line with progressive globalisation, such as transnational
human rights networks. Such an analytical perspective reveals differentiated
effects of Europeanisation across and within policy areas. We focus on EU pol-
icies that have either produced unintended consequences, had counter effects
with respect to stated objectives, or proved a qualified success. We propose that
these outcomes can be traced to three main shortcomings in the existing EU
approach: its state-centric focus, fragmentation across EU’s policy domains and
instrumental use of conditionality, which networked actors have been able to
exploit to undermine the EU’s goals in the region.
48 V. Bojicic-Dzelilovic et al.
Relational peace-building: hybridity and the local turn
What is referred to here as the local turn, is a body of work in scholarly accounts
of peace-building, calling for a change in the way in which engagement with
post-conflict territories is framed in theory and carried out in practice. These per-
spectives are critical of liberal peace-building for producing negative by-
products, and problematise the fundamental liberal ethos behind the mission
(Jabri 2013; Jahn 2007), or question the assumption that peace can be imple-
mented from the top-down (Campbell, Chandler and Sabaratnam 2011; Rich-
mond 2011a) and point to the mismatch between liberal means and illiberal ends
of said top-down projects (Castañeda 2009). Such peace-building promotes
northern and western-informed understandings of statehood and state-institutions
(Mac Ginty 2012), which have not only failed to match the expectations of
peace-builders and liberal donors alike, but have also promoted resistance of
local populations, against both the means and the aims of externally led peace
interventions.
Against the backdrop of this so-called post-liberal critique, alternative per-
spectives have proposed a re-centring of peace-building practice and theory
around the very subject of these efforts, namely the local owner of the peace
(Kappler 2013; Mac Ginty 2011; Shinko 2008). In the policy world, this has
translated into local ownership programmes which, in the Balkans particularly,
have also resulted in the significant downsizing of several missions (for example,
the EU police mission in Bosnia, the UN mission in Kosovo). Where these pol-
icies have now become commonplace in the mission statements of peace-
building agencies, scholars have condemned them as hollow and inconsequential
rhetoric (Yabanci 2015). They suggested that focusing peace-building firmly
around its local subject requires a much more fundamental ontological and epis-
temological restructuring of the logic of engaging with post-conflict actors
(Kappler 2015: 884; Mitchell 2011), one which should recognise the inherently
‘messy’, hybrid nature of the actors themselves (de Coning 2013, Mac Ginty and
Sanghera 2012: 4), of the blurred boundaries of the encounter between peace-
builder and peace-built (Sabaratnam 2013: 267), as well as of the peace that
emerges as an outcome of this encounter (Richmond 2015; Shinko 2008). The
result is a form of peace-building reconceptualisation advanced through agential
perspectives, in that it focuses on the effects of networks of interactions on
peacebuilding outcomes, by analysing relations rather than actors or categories.
This approach places particular emphasis on informal, everyday actions and
behaviours which come to construct an image of a meaningful local reality,
termed ‘everyday’ (Richmond 2009). The ‘everyday’ reflects the myriad ways in
which local agents express their identities, their desires and needs in ways which
circumvent formal institutional representation (Roberts 2008). Within this frame-
work, acts of resistance are particularly important, because resistance represents
the local’s call to reclaim the processes of peace and state-building. Resistance is
meaningful because it shows the limits of top-down impositions (Richmond
2012: 118), affirms the need to culturally and socially ground peace-building’s
goals, norms and methods (Galvanek 2013: 16), and generally counters the hege-
monic push of actors whose asymmetrical power position is said to manipulate
any attempt to build partnerships with local actors in order to co-opt local elites
and/or impose their agendas (Campbell 2011: 40).
Through resistance, scholars and policymakers alike have to come to terms
with the multiple facets of interactions that take place in post-conflict societies.
Some of them may not fit into a pre-established, normative, liberal or Western
peace agenda (Boege et al. 2008: 10). Nonetheless, they remain part and parcel
of societies emerging from war and represent an expression of the local, as much
as peace-affirming, as well as formalised forms of agency do (Randazzo 2016).
This means acknowledging the emergence of a hybrid reality, where the encoun-
ter between liberal peace-building and local actors produces messy and contin-
gent dynamics that do not always fit pre-established understandings of
peace-affirming behaviour as an orderly progression out of violence and chaos
of war. Thus, it is about acknowledging that this hybrid reality can be positive as
well as negative (Mac Ginty and Richmond 2015; Wallis et al. 2017), and that
much can be learned from behaviours that might commonly be thought problem-
atic, for instance, violent, quasi-violent, threatening and generally disruptive acts
(Mitchell 2011).
The following analysis builds on the local turn in peace-building scholarship
by discussing how local dynamics in the Western Balkans reflect an emerging
state of hybridity in the encounter with EU’s top-down policy. It assumes
hybridity inherently reflects the messy and contingent realities that emerge from
conflict and post-conflict contexts, and thus always produces mixed results. Yet,
our analysis differs from current understandings of hybridity in one crucial
respect. Currently, perspectives on hybridity are focused on identifying which of
the messy outcomes correspond with a positive or negative form of hybrid pol-
itics (Richmond 2015), and therefore hinder or support peace efforts (Visoka
2012). The focus is often on drawing out which outcomes demonstrate a degree
of elite co-option (Mac Ginty 2008; Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013), or pinpoint
the remnants of non-inclusive, ethno-nationalist groups (Visoka 2012). These
analyses are characterised by an emphasis on identifying the short-term nature of
these hybrid outcomes, which are neither entirely local nor entirely liberal. We
suggest that this focus has not been able to understand the resilience and persist-
ence of certain types of networks, identities, and behaviours over others. We
propose that peace-building and state-building should allow for the possibility
that the negative and positive elements within hybrid outcomes cannot easily be
disaggregated from each other nor from the power relations and trajectory of the
conflicts that shaped them. This requires understanding of multiple local
dynamics that are both embedded in the fabric of society as well as altered
through interaction with the peace-building and state-building intervention. In
the Balkans this means focusing on ways in which local agents resist top-down
agendas, circumvent institutional limitations (Roberts 2011), and interact with a
wider network of agents beyond what can be easily captured through elite pol-
itics (Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013: 764; Mulaj 2011), including civil society
activism (Paffenholz 2015). We also show that attention should be paid to dis-
tinct ways in which local actors adapt both to the emergent constraints as well as
opportunities, by mobilising their social networks to that end (Zahar 2003). A
preference for engaging with formal institutions, rather than with how formal
and informal domains are connected through a web or relations, leaves those
practices outside the cognitive and instrumental purview of EU interventions.
The outcomes of EU policy in the Western Balkans
Hybrid development: subversion of the formal institutional process

The SAP framework alongside a range of supplementary instruments at the
national and regional level has been adapted to address the Western Balkans’
specific circumstances and needs. However, its core policy of supporting eco-
nomic recovery through building competitive open market economies followed
in the footsteps of the previous rounds of enlargement. The EU’s market enhanc-
ing agenda entails a set of policy reforms to liberalise local economies alongside
strengthening the state’s regulatory role. The main trust is to facilitate private
sector growth so that it can withstand competitive pressures within the EU
market, and generate sustained development. As such, this approach does not
explicitly cater for the specific Western Balkans developmental needs arising
from the impact of the 1990s wars and disintegration of former Yugoslavia’s
single economic space. Rather, the SAP economic agenda operates on an
assumption of a ‘trickle down’ effect from creating a vibrant private sector
anchored in prudent and efficient macroeconomic management leading to
improved welfare and wellbeing of local populations, and hence their economic
stake in peacebuilding.
Private sector growth across the Western Balkans has not been commensurate
with visible improvement in the uptake of regulatory reforms to cut the red tape
and facilitate private sector development, in line with the EU accession agenda
(Penev 2015). While the private sector contribution to GDP growth has
increased, its competitiveness lags by large measure behind the EU member-
states and underwrites Western Balkans economies’ vulnerability to economic
shocks. This was evident in a disproportionate and protracted impact of the 2008
global economic crisis (Bartllet and Prica 2011). War legacy has been a factor
contributing to moderate inflow of foreign investment to improve competitive-
ness, spur export-led growth and provide job opportunities (Estrin and Uvalic
2013). A corollary of private sector that has developed in the course of post-
conflict recovery is persistently high long-term unemployment, high incidence of
poverty and social exclusion, which disproportionately affect certain groups
(Bartllet and Uvalic 2016), and serve to defy a promise of peace-dividend from
general economic recovery that liberal peace-building theory suggests.
Such outcomes are linked to pervasiveness and persistence of informal prac-
tices and behaviour in economic and political conduct, expressed in the form of
large informal economy and systemic corruption, which characterise an emergent
form of hybrid development through externally supported transition (Bojicic-
Dzelilovic 2013; Strazzari and Kamphius 2012; SELDI 2016). A proportionally
small number of well-connected, rent-seeking individuals and groups across the
region, and often deploying regional and transnational connections, have captured
large swathes of local economies to pursue private and group business interests,
earning the region an infamous reputation for the prominence of ‘crony capitalism’
(Batt 2004). Benefiting from the close links with the political elites and the latter’s
influence over the judiciary, a ‘rentier business class’ (Pugh 2016) has emerged
having taken the advantage of liberalisation of local economies, at the expense of
general public interest served by the development of strong and broad economic
base. Privatisation of state owned assets as a foundational reform for the develop-
ment of functioning competitive markets, which remains at the forefront of key
policy reforms on the EU accession path, notably in Bosnia and Kosovo, has pro-
vided one of the major channels in the emergence of this class. It was a vehicle for
the reallocation of public assets among informal networks linking political and
economic elites who in many cases acquired the capital to purchase formerly state-
owned property in shady war economy dealings. Some of the most blatant abuses
of privatisation process took place in Kosovo where the EU effectively run the
United Nations Mission for Kosovo (UNMIK) economic pillar and in Bosnia and
Herzegovina where the international community, the EU included, operating a de
facto international protectorate, also had strong involvement in the design and
implementation of privatisation policies (Grasten and Uberti 2017; Donais 2005).
Subversion of policies to facilitate private sector development while local
governments managed to inch forward in the implementation of EU-mandated
reforms, reflects the failings of EU’s functional approach, focused as it is on the
quality of state level regulation in a context characterised by the adaptation of
the war-time predatory (informal and criminal) political economy to new oppor-
tunities under economic liberalisation. The EU approach presupposes the exis-
tence of a willing and committed local political and economic constituency. In
reality, it encounters a nexus of politico-economic elites engaged in selective
pursuit of those reform elements deemed as not threatening their interests. Bar-
tlett argues in relation to privatisation that ‘The anti-market consequences of
passing state and social property over to narrow economic elites with strong
political connections to incumbent ruling parties have not been sufficiently
addressed and remain a stumbling block to EU membership’ (Bartlett 2015:
224). This diagnosis applies more broadly to the consequences of the market
enhancing policies as highlighted by Pugh (2016), in their preoccupation with
building yet more ‘toothless institutions’ when informal networks including state
actors themselves, are the real power wielders (Bartlett 2015: 224; Stanojevic et
al. 2015).
EU assessments of Western Balkans countries’ progress in fulfilling the
enlargement criteria consistently point at large informal economy and systemic
corruption, as expressions of informal practices and behaviour that inhibit
private sector recovery. Both are viewed as ‘pathologies’ of the post-war, post-
communist transition arising from weak state capacity, and are addressed by a
standard sets of regulatory policies, albeit pursued separately (SELDI 2016); infor-
mal economy, through taxation system reforms within broader upgrading of busi-
ness environment; and anti-corruption through public administration and related
good governance reforms. Corruption has been at the centre of SAP conditionality
in the Western Balkans and rather than subsiding, according to the EU’s own
assessment, it has become a ‘mainstream social practice’ (Lilyanova 2017: 3).
The above EU assessment is important because of its recognition of societal
acceptance of widespread informality, in contrast to its interpretation as transi-
tory ‘pathologies’ in post-war society that can be ‘corrected’ through improved
regulatory frameworks and their more effective enforcement. The EU’s elite-
centred, institutional focus is unable to account for the sources and functionality
of informal practices and behaviour to their protagonists in everyday conduct,
and hence their persistence and resilience.2 Scholars have argued that the com-
munist legacy of informal relations developed through command economy and
patronage politics are important elements behind widespread informality afflict-
ing the post-war Balkans (Kostovicova and Bojicic-Dzelilovic 2009; Belloni and
Strazzari 2014), and that the encounters among a multitude of actors through war
economy activities contributed to transnationalisation of informal networks
(Kostovicova and Bojicic-Dzelilovic 2011; Andreas 2004) which have both
pursued ‘primitive accumulation’ as well as provided and protected livelihoods
of ordinary people. The consequences of this transformation involving elites
across borders in the Balkans, who emerged out of confluence of war, ethnic
nationalism and neoliberal transition, are enduring but remain unaddressed by
the EU.3 They are felt primarily in the uncertain prospects for strong and produc-
tive private sector entrepreneurship and development for which the EU provide
support to the Western Balkans, as well as to its peace-inducing effects.
Hybrid security: unintended consequences of institutional reform

The EU’s approach to Europeanisation has hinged upon processes of
institutionalisation understood as the adoption of formal and informal criteria in
the social context of the recipient State. The understanding of contested
statehood as a principal source of conflict is consistent with a decade long
approach to securitisation that seeks to create and promote the spread of a
specific European ‘security culture’ (Dolghi and Oliva 2011: 108). A shared
sense of security, it is suggested, is important particularly to foster reconciliation
and facilitate the processes of post-war reconstruction. Distinctively, the
promotion of the European security community acts with a threefold purpose:
(1) as a peacekeeping force, (2) as political destination for the Western Balkan
states (Cierco 2013: 430), and (3) as a technical exercise in institution building.
In this multi-pronged framework, the EU does not limit itself to addressing a
traditional, military aspect of security, but rather relies almost entirely on its
‘normative power’ as the panacea to tackle the Western Balkans ailments.
Since its inception in the form of the framework for Defence and Security in
the 1990s, the process of spreading European norms to the Western Balkans has
been marred by unsteady progress, and the occasional recurrence of violence.
These problems have usually been attributed to lack of norm assimilation and
poor capacity (Bieber 2011: 1785), thus calling for further reinforcement of
mechanisms that monitor, support and enhance said capacity. With the
establishment of a clear prospect for enlargement of the EU into the Balkans in
2003, attempts have been made to re-wire the approach to justice and security at
the state level, to reflect a concern for security threats different from that of the
early 2000s (characterised by the fear of immediate violence). However, this
section will suggest that within an unchanged foreign policy framework that had
its roots in the European efforts for peace-building in the Balkans of the early
1990s, and cemented later on in the Defence and Foreign Policy approach, the
EU’s efforts post-Thessaloniki continued to be underpinned by an ethnicised
understanding of security threats.
EU policies have reflected, despite shifts in operationalisation and sequencing,
a concern for the dangerous potential of ethnic identity and its negative impact
on the institutions of these reforming countries. This concern is visible, for
instance, in the manner in which normalisation of relations between Prishtina
and Belgrade at the regional level has become a fundamental pinnacle of state-
specific and local projects, for instance by representing one of four pillars of
EULEX’s rule of law mission in Kosovo.4 In this case it is implied that any
potential political disagreement between the two polities represents a regional
security threat and a hindrance to the institutional development of Kosovo.5
The concern for the perils of ethnic competition has become entrenched in the
EU’s narrative on accession and in EU policy towards pre-accession states,
where political lines of contestation have been tied to the potential for the re-
emergence of tensions between ethnicities,6 without much explanation of what
other factors, including ailing economic prospects, may be contributing to the
unrest. For instance, in the FYR Macedonia (FYROM), the first Western Balkan
country to sign the SAA in 2001, despite a consistent ‘high level of alignment
with the aquis’,7 the EU has identified concerns relating primarily to elements of
institutional weakness that are said to indicate FYROM’s fragility both
structurally as well as in terms of the nature of the democratic processes of the
state. The latter are identified as marred by ‘increasing politicisation’, problems
of media freedom, and inter-ethnic mistrust. The politicisation of state
institutions, the EU has suggested, has caused their erosion, and has highlighted
that in FYROM party interests supersede the national interest. Given the
reiteration of the importance of the Ohrid Agreement as the ideal model for good
democracy, the EU’s concern for the politicisation of political parties in FYROM
implies the belief that contestation (paradoxically the fulcrum of Western liberal
democracy) is dangerous because it is potentially explosive and violent. It is
unclear, for instance, why the politicisation of parties in Macedonia could be any
more dangerous for the quality of democratic institutions than any other form of
party politicisation elsewhere in Europe. Furthermore, the EU’s preference for
an ethno-centric vision of politics in FYROM is evident also in its choice not to
de-emphasise the role ethnicity has to play; in the case of the murder, in 2012, of
an ethnically Albanian youth, the EU, despite acknowledging the non-ethnic
motivation of the murder, chose to continue to assume that the event had played
a big role in sparking the ethnic mistrust that followed.8
When the institutional framework cements and reiterates the ethnic narrative
that understands any form of contestation, violence and instability as essentially
tied to matters of ethnicity and identity, social cleavages run the risk of aligning
to such existing and continuing narrative. Community strains are often, for
instance, understood to be associated with ethnically motivated tensions, rather
than symptomatic of larger cross-cutting economic concerns such as lack of
employment. In Kosovo and in Bosnia and Herzegovina various surveys have
demonstrated that such cross-cutting issues reflect more closely local opinion on
the sources of insecurity.9 Since tensions are understood as expressing
themselves in the form of ethnic competition over land, resources and power, the
EU’s response has sought to rebuild apolitical, non-ideological institutions; in
the case of the establishment of a police force in Bosnia, attempts have been
geared to foster the view of Bosnian society as one that is no longer disrupted by
division and reflects a commitment to human rights and the rule of law
(Merlingen and Ostrauskaite 2006: 19). In Bosnia, the post-Dayton policing
structure, made up of four overarching police agencies (the State Border Service
(SBS), the State Investigation and Protection Agency (SIPA), the judicial police
and the financial police) has attempted to consolidate institutional unity at the
state level. Nonetheless, the persisting grip of the informal networks originating
in war and encroaching on formal governing structures is even firmer in many
local ethnically homogenised communities, and feeds the public preference for
security provided by one’s own ethnicity and mistrust in cross-ethnic policing.
This is a form of hybrid security whereby the informality associated with an
arbitrary exercise of power under the guise of ethnic identity protection which
permeates post-war social order in the Western Balkans is a source of insecurity
for all citizens (Bojicic-Dzelilovic 2013).
Hybrid justice:10 a qualified success of a policy change

Drawing on Mac Ginty (2011), this section proposes hybrid justice in the
Western Balkans, defined in this case as justice without reconciliation. The
pursuit of transitional justice, initially outside the region of the Western Balkans,
at the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY), and then
increasingly through domestic and hybrid (domestic-international) trials, has not
been accompanied by reconciliation in the region. Different ethnic groups tend
to see themselves primarily as victims rather than also as perpetrators of crimes
committed during the wars that accompanied the dissolution of the former Yugo-
slavia; nor is there consensus on the causes and nature of the violence, or on the
appropriate redress for past wrongs (Kostovicova 2013a).
This, however, should not overshadow limited achievements of the ICTY.
Although the trials have been contested by ethnic groups, they have prevented a
blanket denial of war crimes. It has been replaced by the interpretive denial
(Cohen 2000), as ethnic groups interpret the established facts of crimes to fit in
with their ethnic narratives of the war. ICTY’s impact is linked to broader trends
of democratization, including freedom, ability and space to discuss the respons-
ibility for war crimes, both within and between ethnic groups (Gordy 2013;
Nettelfield 2012). Although the ICTY’s overall strategy only affected the ‘big
fry’, it did nonetheless offer a purge or lustration of sorts, whereby incriminated
officials were removed from holding public office. Last, the transfer of trials to
domestic judiciaries has strengthened local state capacity (Waters 2013; Gow et
al. 2013).
On balance, given that the introduction of the so-called Hague conditionality,
according to which the Western Balkan aspirants to the European Union mem-
bership were expected to meet full cooperation with the ICTY condition before
proceeding with the SAP, the EU’s record of achieving justice and reconciliation
in the region has at best been modest. A top-down focus of the EU policy on the
political elites has allowed them to instrumentalise the ICTY conditionality for
their political benefit (cf. Subotic 2009). The EU has pursued a state-centred
approach to transitional justice, which is a poor fit with the transnational nature
of violence in the Balkans. Consequently, activists and scholars have pointed to
a need for a regional instrument to transitional justice (Kandic 2007; Sriram and
Ross, 2007; Kostovicova 2009; Rangelov and Teitel 2014). The EU opted
originally to focus on the trials, preferring retributive transitional justice that
focuses on the perpetrators and punishment, as opposed to restorative transitional
justice mechanisms, that prioritise victims’ needs and the restoration of conflict-
affected relations (Kerr and Mobekk 2007). It made a U-turn and supported the
regional commission for the establishment of facts about war crimes and other
serious violations of human rights committed in the former Yugoslavia
(RECOM) as a restorative, bottom-up and a regional approach to transitional
justice, through funding (and, to an extent, giving a signal of its political
support).11 The policy change stems from the EU’s gradual recognition of civil
society as a partner in the context of EU approximation, reflected in the increased
funding to civil society since 2007.
RECOM is the initiative for the establishing the Regional Commission for
Establishing the Facts about War Crimes and other Serious Human Rights Vio-
lations in former Yugoslavia from 1 January 1991 to 31 December 2001. This
regional civil society network has grown in direct response to the perceived
weaknesses of trials as a transitional justice instrument. It recognised a need to
acknowledge the victims and overcome the limits of the state-centred approach.
The initiative’s goal is to establish the interstate war crimes commission. But, is
it a regional approach superior to a national, state-centred approach to trans-
itional justice?
Scholars have argued that a regional approach is bound to be stymied by irre-
concilable national perspectives of victims and advocates (DiLellio and McCunn
2013). The RECOM initiative has not fulfilled its aim to establish an inter-state
commission. Nonetheless, the consultations that the RECOM has organised
involved over 5,000 members from all ethnic groups in the Balkans at a local,
national and regional level. Held in the period from 2006 to 2010, they provide
insight into the merits of a regional approach. The text analysis of over half a
million words of text data documenting the consultative process on transitional
justice demonstrates that the regional-level consultations have a higher content of
the restorative justice discourse as opposed to non-regional, i.e. local and national
ones (Kostovicova 2017). These findings suggest that a regional approach is con-
ducive to a different pattern of discourse conducive to reconciliation.
Currently, the RECOM process is faced with obstacles posed by recalcitrant
authorities unwilling to back the project, disengaged societies, alongside illiberal
civil society groups actively opposed to the idea of cross-ethnic reconciliation
(Kostovicova 2006; Kostovicova and Bojicic-Dzelilovic, 2013), as well as a lack
of sustained external support, including from the EU, that would help push the
issue of reckoning with war crimes firmly on the political agenda. Hence, it is
uncertain if any benefits that have been gained during the consultative process
(Kostovicova 2013b), will be scaled up beyond the bounds of the consultative
process.
RECOM’s challenges are illustrative of broader obstacles to facing the crim-
inal past in the Western Balkans. A lack of comprehensive transitional justice
measures throughout the region has contributed to the maintenance of wartime
networks at all levels of state institutions, from local to state. Notably, these net-
works include suspects for war crimes that have escaped a selective net cast by
the ICTY focusing only on the ‘big fry’, and selective domestic prosecutions.
The figure of about 10,000 missing in the Balkans twenty-odd years after the
conflict points to the unwillingness of state authorities to unearth the facts of
crimes, alongside the human remains. The result goes beyond the dissatisfaction
and injustice for the victims. The displaced fear of returning to homes from
which they were expelled, solidifying territorial ethnic divisions drawn in blood
during the conflict. Last, the unwillingness of the authorities to establish the
exact number of victims officially, beyond efforts of civil society organisations
in the region, feeds into irreconcilable ethnic narratives about the conflict.
Equally, it leaves the perpetrators in situ at various levels of government, allow-
ing them to maintain their networks established during the conflict. In sum, iso-
lated examples of the effectiveness of EU assistance reveal a glaring gap in the
strategy to address the multifaceted criminal legacy that has persisted for over 20
years, which isolated qualified successes are insufficient to counter.
Conclusion
Since the shift in the EU approach to the Western Balkans towards EU member-
state building, securing the local political elites’ commitment and co-operation
has been central to the interaction between these elites and various EU agents.
This has involved different forms of bargaining over the terms and the direction
of policy reforms with ambiguous consequences in terms of peacebuilding.
Although the EU has an impressive track record in pursuing a multidimensional
approach to the promotion of peace and stability in the Western Balkans, the
region remains fragile both politically as well as economically. A form of hybrid
peace which has emerged in the context of the EU’s combined CFSP and enlarge-
ment intervention may have worked to prevent a reversion to armed violence, but
it does not have a grounding in improved social cohesion and reconciliation, which
these societies need to do in order to overcome the war legacy and its inherent
multiple and entangled vulnerabilities that underlie human insecurity.
Preoccupations with institutional strength, tied to the member-state building
agenda have led to a form of an ‘elite peace’ whereby wellbeing and security for
ordinary people in their everyday lives continues to be a peripheral concern for
the local authorities. Despite progress in establishing political and economic
institutions in alignment with the EU membership criteria, those institutions
have been vulnerable to the strategies of informal power networks with vested
interests in preserving the resources and influence accumulated during the
region’s turbulent transition. The EU state-centric approach focused on institu-
tional strengthening within distinctive policy domains (policy ‘silos’) has not
been able to dislodge the informal networks which operate transinstitutionally
and transnationally, through their regional (Balkan) and global ties. Instead, EU
efforts have been characterised by an approach which demonstrates a preference
for dealing with ‘front stage’ problems qualified as ethnic related tensions,
underdeveloped market economy and weak governance rather than exploring
‘backstage’ issues that may demonstrate a variety of different emergent net-
works, including those that indicate the persistence of a type of pax mafiosa
(Friesendorf 2011: 51) across ethnic groups.
The problem is partly conceptual in so far as there is insufficient understand-
ing of the different facets of social transformation produced by the multiple tran-
sitions in the Western Balkans, which includes both a post-Communist and a
post-conflict transition, and, more specifically, the modes and the mechanisms
used by those actors that have benefited in the process to maintain their positions
secured during the region’s transitions. The other issue concerns the existing EU
instruments as they have been applied in the Western Balkans, which by focus-
ing on the engagement with the elites have ‘… distanced the societal transforma-
tion [required by the EU-supported peacebuilding12] from its core – civil society
and citizens …’ (Dzankic 2015: 97–8). Our analysis, alongside the case-studies
of hybrid development, hybrid security and hybrid justice, has shown that the
EU policy in the Balkans was able to counter the regressive effect of these infor-
mal networks where it supported a regional and bottom-up (i.e. civil society)
approach, which figure prominently as principles of a human security approach
elaborated by Kaldor et al. (A Human Security Doctrine for Europe, 2004).
Our relational analytic perspective on the local turn in critical peace-building
provides a critique of both an exclusively top-down and a bottom-up approach to
peace-building. The bottom-up approach is key to understanding the emergence of
networks and plethora of relations among disparate categories of actors during the
conflict. However, it is less capable of explaining how these relations are reconfig-
ured and mobilised during the post-conflict period, to undermine international
peace-building. The chameleon-like quality of networks lies in the ability of
network members to operate simultanously both as a part of civil society and as a
part of the state, while blurring the boundaries between public and private, internal
and external, legal and illegal. Such interconnectness of networks is a lynchpin of
hybridity, as it exists in practice and in everyday processes of managing constraints
and opportunities facing actors across different levels of society and with respect
to different aspects of their lives.
Ultimately, the analysis of the EU policy in the Western Balkans points to spe-
cific policy implications. The biggest risk currently faced by the EU in the post-
conflict regions is that a raft of EU policy instruments, including formal and
contractual incorporation in the EU, will not be accompanied by normative
approximation to the EU. Instead, a formal alignment with the EU policies is likely
to coexist with their simultaneous subversion and distortion by the same actors
who are the EU’s main interlocutors, and even promoters of the EU agenda in the
region. Related to this is a risk that the norms that the EU stands for and promotes
will be rejected by broader society. For example, people may embrace corruption
and entrench corruption as an efficient way of doing things. Ultimately, a broader
society may come to perceive the EU project as illegitimate as they perceive their
political elites. Consequently, EU policies need to be directed at breaking down
the social and economic dependence of societies on their ethnic elites by strength-
ening local capacity for challenging the elites’ unaccountability as well as foster
alternative progressive transnational social exchange, by nurturing interethnic rela-
tions within and between the states in the Balkans.
Notes
1 Western Balkans includes Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, FYR Macedonia, Kosovo,
Montenegro and Serbia.
2 This has been argued extensively in the scholarship on war economy. For a similar
argument in different contexts, see: Baez-Camargo and Ledeneva 2017.
3 For the discussion on the overlooked impact of war-time actors and structures on
peacebuilding see Dziedzic 2016.
4 EULEX Kosovo (n.d.) Support to Prishtina-Belgrade Dialogue. www.eulex-kosovo.
eu/eul/repository/docs/Anglisht_Dialog_1.pdf
5 Council of the European Union (2012) 3210th GENERAL AFFAIRS Council meeting
Brussels, 11 December 2012. www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cms_data/docs/press-
data/EN/genaff/134234.pdf
6 European Commission (2014) The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia: Pro-
gress Report.
7 European Commission (2014) The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia: Pro-
gress Report, p. 1.
8 Ibid, p. 13.
9 UNDP (2014) Public Pulse 8. www.ks.undp.org/content/dam/kosovo/docs/
PublicPulse/pp.8/PP_8_Eng.pdf; Bojicic-Dzelilovic 2015.
10 Dr Kostovicova acknowledges gratefully the Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship
(RF-2015–262) that made this contribution on hybrid justice and the merits of a
regional approach to transitional justice possible.
11 It should be noted that the RECOM depends on multiple international donors.
12 The authors’ comment.
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4 EU Syria engagement from a
human security perspective
Rim Turkmani
Introduction
Little evidence is needed to support the argument that all security paradigms
have failed in Syria – the international, the state-centric and human ones. From
an EU perspective, the breakdown of security inside Syria has translated into a
security threat within Europe itself, indicating that the twentieth century distinc-
tion between internal and external security is no longer valid any more in the
context of a more complex connected world.
Violence in Syria, which started internally with excessive use of violence
by the regime against protesters, was exacerbated by the strong polarisation
between international and regional powers that supported the warring parties.
The EU was not one of those powers, yet it is the international power that
paid the biggest share of the costs of security failure in Syria. The EU is the
biggest contributor to the humanitarian bill of the Syrian crisis. It has
received substantial numbers of refugees and suffered an increase in the
security threat and multiple ISIS-related terrorist attacks. Despite this, the EU
has not – up till now – played a very significant role in resolving the conflict.
Second-generation human security is about the security of the individual,
rather than the state itself. The security paradigm in Syria, like in any authorit-
arian regime is state centric and not human centric. The events post 2011
proved that it is even the security of the regime itself rather than the state that
is the top priority. For a bloc of democratic countries like the EU, it is ulti-
mately challenging to engage with such a state and even more challenging to
engage within a human security framework. This is particularly difficult
because the aim of human security is the people, but authoritarian regimes tend
to prevent or make very difficult the access to the people they govern, and they
oppress civil society and restrict it from receiving funding from foreign
institutions.
In this chapter, we assess the overall weak record of EU policy towards the
conflict in Syria and identify those elements that could contribute to second-
generation of human security.
EU Syria engagement 65
Prior to the conflict
Many would argue that Syria enjoyed a relatively high level of security before
2011, especially for a Middle Eastern country (Kerkkänen, 2014). Alas, it is the
kind of security that comes with authoritarianism. People would generally be
physically secure as long as they did not engage in politics, with the exception of
the one and only party; the Baath. When these boundaries were crossed non-
violently by the active communist party in the seventies and eighties, most com-
munist party members ended up serving long years in jail. When they were
crossed violently by the Muslim Brotherhood around the same period, the
response was much more severe and cost the lives of tens of thousands of
Syrians, most of them civilians (Seale, 1988). The result was a false sense of
security, and a growing sense of the illegitimacy of the regime. The events over
the last six years proved how unstable this security was.
Yet, and even before the conflict, the EU could not avoid not getting it right
in Syria. The EU indeed stressed in 2007 that:
There is mutual benefit in a closer relationship between the EU and Syria.

Syria is a key factor in regional stability and plays a pivotal role as a transit
country between the EU and the Middle East. Syria and the EU have privi-
leged cultural links and there is strong potential for further strengthening
economic relations. Through its co-operation, the EU also wishes to assist
Syria in its efforts to improve the welfare of its population.
(European Neighbourhood and Partnership Instrument, 2007)
Prior to the conflict, the 1977 EU-Syria Co-operation Agreement governed

relations legally and Syria was a full participant in the Euro-Mediterranean Part-
nership. Syria also approved the Euro-Med Five-Year Work programme for
2006–2010 and the Code of Conduct on Countering Terrorism at the Barcelona
10+ Conference in November 2005.
An association agreement was being negotiated, but was never signed. The
drafting of the agreement started in 2004, it outlined the framework for the
economic, political and social dimensions of EU–Syria relations and was
meant to lead eventually to Syria’s full participation in the European Neigh-
bourhood Policy (ENP).
Although never signed, the EU argued that it had an impact as ‘the Syrian
government used the agreement as a reference for developing its reform agenda
and continues using it as a guide for the country’s modernization process’ (Euro-
pean Neighbourhood and Partnership Instrument, 2007). In 2009, the EU
Member States agreed that they wished to sign the Association Agreement, but
the Syrian government requested time to further examine the agreement, which
eventually was never signed nor ratified.
The objectives of the (2007–2013) strategy framework of EU co-operation
with Syria were mainly, and understandably, top down, but they were in theory
along the right lines of pushing for reform and requiring more accountability,
66 R. Turkmani
inclusivity and adherence to human rights. They were meant to be a transition
that prepared Syria for full participation in the European Neighbourhood Policy
in the medium-term. It demanded a satisfactory level of accountability in the
management of public funds, and encouraged reform, especially political reform.
To encourage reform, Syria was invited to take advantage of the Governance
Facility which rewarded partners who were performing well with increased
financial assistance.
The political context was addressed by stressing the commitment to ‘extend-
ing political pluralism and citizens’ participation in political life, improvement
of the situation of stateless people, civil society development, decentralisation/
local democracy, respect for human rights and the rule of law’ (European Neigh-
bourhood and Partnership Instrument, 2007).
The strategy identified the following as the key internal political challenges in
Syria, which was to ‘instigate the process of political reform; achieve good gov-
ernance and separation of powers; strengthen the protection of human rights and
develop democracy, while maintaining the remarkable diversity in society and
peaceful inter-religious and inter-community relations’. And although the
strategy was very critical of the political system, the strong presidential system
in Syria, the role of the Baath party and the corruption which hinders among
many other things the judicial authority, it still concluded that ‘genuine demo-
cratic participation nevertheless remains a possibility, as a new multi-party law
was announced at the highest level’.
But unlike governance reform, there was no facility that conditioned financial
assistance with political reform and respect for human rights. The EU also
remained very shy in criticising the human rights situation in Syria. Before the
conflict there were only a few such critical statements, mainly, the condemna-
tions of the arbitrary arrests in 2008 (Council of the European Union, 2008),
condemnations of the arrest and sentencing of human rights defenders in July
2010 (EU 2010), and the condemnation of the sentencing of Tal Al-Mallouhi to
five years in prison on February 2011 (EU, 2011a).
On 15 March, the EU issued a statement by the High Representative, Cather-
ine Ashton, welcoming the release of the lawyer Haitham al Maleh as a ‘positive
first step’ (EU, 2011b).
The EU was the main donor in Syria prior to the conflict. €286.5 million were
committed to bilateral co-operation with Syria between 1995 and 2016 and since
2000, a total of €925 million in loans of the European Investment Bank (EIB)
has been committed for Syria between 2000 and 2007.
Moving on: without a strategy

The uprising in Syria in 2011 took everyone by surprise. The existing
(2007–2013) EU strategy for engagement with Syria was not valid anymore, but
a new one was not developed until it was due in 2013, meaning that EU policies
towards Syria were taken without a strategy for more than two years – these
were the most critical two years in the conflict.
The EU reaction to the brutal government crackdown on the public uprising
in Syria was swift. Several statements were issued condemning the violent
repression and ‘urging the authorities to exercise the utmost restraint across the
country and to meet the legitimate demands and aspirations of the people with
dialogue and urgent political and socio-economic reforms’. In terms of actual
steps, the EU took its first actions against the Syrian government in May 2011.
These included: suspending the bilateral cooperation programmes between the
EU and the Syrian government under the European Neighbourhood Policy,
freezing the draft EU-Syrian Association Agreement, suspending the participa-
tion of Syrian authorities in the EU’s regional programmes, and the loan opera-
tions and technical assistance by the EIB to Syria and imposing unilateral
targeted restrictive measures (sanctions) which were later expanded.
The EU delegation to Syria remained open on a regular basis until December
2012, after that it was scaled down for security reasons, but the head of the dele-
gation continued to visit Damascus occasionally.
The Syrian government response was also swift. The Syrian foreign minister
promised in June 2011 to forget that there is Europe on the map and reminded
the EU that the world is not only Europe! Shortly afterward Syria did suspend its
membership in the Union for the Mediterranean, and it did look in other direc-
tions for support, mainly from Iran, Russia and China.
The question of legitimacy

Up until mid-August 2011, EU statements urged President Assad to end the viol-
ence and to listen to the international community. But following large-scale
military operations by the regime against several Syrian cities, the EU response
to the Syrian conflict took a major turn on 18 August when in an orchestrated
move with the US, the UK, France and Germany asked President Assad to step
aside.
In its statement, the EU justified the request of a foreign head of state to step
down by the loss of his national legitimacy: ‘The EU notes the complete loss of
Bashar al-Assad’s legitimacy in the eyes of the Syrian people and the necessity
for him to step aside’ (EU, 2011c).
The expectations appeared to be that such damage to the international legiti-
macy of the regime would lead to a similar scenario to Egypt and that if other
leaders followed this move then it would force President Assad to resign. Hilary
Clinton commented on this move saying: ‘If Turkey says it, if King Abdullah
says it, if other people say it, there is no way the Assad regime can ignore it’
(Ukman and Sly, 2011). And although other leaders followed suit, but as it
turned out, there was no strategy on what to do if Assad did not step down.
After asking the head of state to step down, there was very little the EU could
do through its usual state centric tools and instruments. This was reflected in the
EU statements issued thereafter and until 2013 when a new strategy was put
forward. The statements reiterated the EU position that the president should step
aside to allow a political transition to take place, and pledging a new partnership
68 R. Turkmani
with Syria should this happen, it reiterated its support to the UN-led efforts,
increased its humanitarian assistance and added new sanctions in addition to
reconfirming its support to civil society.
The international response to the Syrian and Libyan conflicts has been
described as leading to the birth of a new approach towards the legitimacy of
governments, which used to be considered as an internal/national issue and the
development of the nascent concept of international/external legitimacy (Oden-
dahl, 2015). In both countries, external powers used the excuse of the loss of
legitimacy of the regime as justification for their actions. Traditionally and when
similar situations have emerged, regimes would be asked to comply with inter-
national law, not to resign (Odendahl, 2015). The EU and other states were
moving in that direction in their initial response to the Syrian conflict but
dramatically shifted where they externally assigned the internal legitimacy of
another country to an entity of their choice. The international legitimacy that was
denied to the regime was being gradually, but never fully, assigned to groups of
exiled opposition despite question marks regarding their legitimacy within Syria.
On 10 December 2012, Ashton met with the President of the National Coalition
for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces (SNC), and referred to it as the
legitimate representative of the Syrian people. This move was followed with
financial and diplomatic assistance to the SNC. Another step further in this direc-
tion was the decision by the EU to consider the SNC as a legitimate power in
charge of Syria’s natural resources. This came after the oil fields in Syria came
under opposition control, the EU lifted the oil embargo on 22 April 2013, ‘so as
to help the civilian population and support the opposition in that country’ and
demanded that transactions in regard to buying this oil should go through the
opposition: ‘Before approving any such transaction, competent authorities will
consult with the Syrian National Coalition for Opposition and Revolutionary
Forces’ (Council of the European Union, 2013a).
In May 2013, the EU eased the embargo on the provision of arms and gave a
privilege to the SNC:
With regard to the possible export of arms to Syria, the Council took note of
the commitment by Member States to proceed in their national policies as
follows; The sale, supply, transfer or export of military equipment or of
equipment which might be used for internal repression will be for the Syrian
National Coalition for Opposition and Revolutionary Forces and intended
for the protection of civilians.
(Council of the European Union, 2013b)
In reality, the oil fields became the subject of fierce competition among
different armed groups and eventually ended up under the control and exploita-
tion of either ISIS or Kurdish forces. No one turned to the SNC for the permis-
sion to sell the Syrian oil as the EU requested. Instead it was either smuggled
and sold in the black market, used domestically or traded with the Syrian regime.
The same applied to arm sales. The forces on the ground had no regard for the
SNC. The environment in general was of a weak or no state and the imposition
of regulations was only in the hands of those who controlled the security on the
ground.
While the Syrian regime indeed lacked genuine national legitimacy, the top
down approach of external redistribution of legitimacy did not evidently lead to the
development of genuine internal legitimacy neither for the SNC nor for any other
authority in Syria. Internal legitimacy developed on its own in different parts in
Syria mainly through Local Administrative Councils (LACs) and civil society. The
EU has offered several forms of support to civil society; this support has contributed
more to human security and democratic transition than other top down approaches.
It was not until June 2013 that the EU put in place a new strategy for Syria
entitled ‘Towards a comprehensive EU approach to the Syrian crisis’. The new
strategy kept the same main lines in regard to support for the UN-led political
track in Geneva, its support to the opposition, civil society and humanitarian aid,
but took a step back on the request to the President to step down, and actually
did not mention the president at all. Indirectly, the strategy hinted that the regime
enjoys a level of legitimacy among the part it represents in Geneva; ‘conditions
conducive to a Syrian-led political settlement which would first require seeking
a common approach on the representatives of the two sides, which need to be
legitimate interlocutors that can make commitments’. The issue of requesting the
regime to adhere to international law and human rights was now assigned to the
UN, which the EU urged to ‘deal with claims of violations of human rights,
international humanitarian law and fundamental freedoms’.
The refugee issue featured also in the new strategy with pledged support for
hosting communities in neighbouring countries and encouraging Member States
to show solidarity with vulnerable persons who needed resettlement.
With the failure of Geneva II, the political process was halted again. Most of
the EU contributions since then were increased humanitarian funds, support for
the opposition in exile, funding civil society and adding more sanctions.
On 4 June 2014, the EU commented in an official statement on the presiden-
tial elections in Syria: ‘The election on 3 June cannot be considered as a genu-
inely democratic vote’, it called on the regime to ‘re-engage in genuine political
negotiations that will produce conditions allowing for a real expression of the
will of the Syrian people’ (EU 2014).
The emergence of Al Qaeda affiliated extremist organisations in Syria,
namely Jabhat al Nusra (JaN)1 and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS)2 led
to the development of ‘Syria and Iraq: Counter Terrorism/Foreign Fighters
Strategy’ in October 2014. Terrorism and the refugee problem were the main
new concerns, and increasingly more action and statements addressed these two
issues rather than the political process, in which the EU insisted that it cannot
play a leading role, and it can only support the UN efforts (EU, 2015).
The EU stressed in a statement on 12 October 2015 that ‘the Assad regime
cannot be a partner in the fight against Dae’sh’. This statement could be read as
pre-emptive of the regime’s attempts to regain international legitimacy by posing
as a partner in the war on terror.
70 R. Turkmani
In 2017, a new EU strategy towards Syria was announced (EU, 2017a), with
the major new element being the conditionality of economic engagement and
playing a role in reconstructions.
Contribution to human security

Nearly every dimension of security in the life of most individual Syrians has
worsened dramatically due to the conflict. Numerous internal and external inter-
ventions have been devised to enhance the human security of the Syrians inside
and outside of Syria. It is extremely difficult to judge in the context of such an
intense conflict which involves severe levels of violence, aerial bombardment,
mass flux of refugee and IDPs, whether a certain intervention has contributed to
enhanced human security or not. But it has been generally observed and acknow-
ledged that the action and impact of civil society, LACs, justice mechanisms and
humanitarian aid have contributed to enhanced security conditions for Syria
citizens (Mampilly, 2015; Gharibah et al., 2017; Zoubie, 2017; Khalaf, 2015).
Support to civil society and LACs

One of the few positive developments in Syria after the conflict is the increased
role and activities of civil society and bottom-up local governance. However,
other violent and exclusive institutions have continuously attempted to counter
their action, undermine their efforts and in some cases succeeded in completely
crushing them. Civil society space has been traditionally very narrow in Syria
and limited to traditional apolitical charitable activities.
As many areas in Syria came under the control of the armed opposition after
2011, a gradual shift of power from armed groups towards civic actors has taken
place between 2013 and 2015. The typical cycle of this shift was that initially
opposition armed groups took over control of an area from the regime, soon after
the governance system and service provision collapses. Then armed groups tried
to run civic affairs by providing services and controlling the distribution of aid;
they failed in this task and became subject to local pressure, and new local civic
organised powers rose in response to need, mainly Local Administrative Coun-
cils and CSOs. They then started dialogue and negotiations with the armed
groups to take over the running of civic affairs based on the argument ‘If you
can’t provide it, let us do it’. Gradually the civic authorities gain control of the
civic sectors and become more powerful. Their effective performance and their
response to public needs, together with their ability to bring in international
donor support, gave them popular legitimacy. This new, more legitimate and
authoritative civic body used its power to offset that of armed actors. The
balance of power between armed and civic actors varied across different areas
and it depended mainly on the level of security and stability in the area. The
more stable the area with no active fighting fronts and no aerial bombardment,
the more power civic actors had and the more the grassroots were able to express
their discontent and demonstrate. The presence of extreme actors like JaN acted
as a spoiler to this organic dynamic, but still the rise of civic power helped limit
the power of extreme actors, and made the environment less favourable for
extremism.
It has been acknowledged (Mampilly, 2015) that, the although the collapse of
services itself led to many deaths, sometimes more than that caused by violence,
the ‘rebel governance systems can often be the difference between a crisis that
kills thousands versus those that kill millions’.
Within this context, EU support and funding for civil society, good govern-
ance and Local Administrative Councils has promoted a positive trend that
empowered civic actors over armed entities and contributed to the human
security of the Syrian people. This support comes under the non-humanitarian
assistance offered by the EU which accumulated to over €2.7 billion in April
2017 (EC, 2017), and which went to support education, livelihoods, local gov-
ernance, health, access to basic services, mediation efforts inside Syria and to
macro-financial assistance to neighbouring refugee hosting countries, pro-
grammes to reduce tensions between host communities and refugees and to the
support of human rights and transitional justice.
Most of this support was channelled through the EU Regional Trust Fund in
response to the Syrian crisis, the Madad Fund (URL), which addresses the chal-
lenges and needs in the neighbouring refugees hosting countries. In addition to
the Madad Fund, the EU means of engagement in applying these priorities were
the Instrument contributing to Stability and Peace (IcSP), and direct EU Member
States contributions.
EU support to civil society was not limited to funding but also extended to
supporting its role in advocacy. For example, it supports the Syrian civil society
role in the UN led Geneva talks, the Syria conferences in London in 2016 and in
Brussels in 2017. It also supported the two mechanisms that had been set up by
the office of the UN Special Envoy to Syria to enable civil society to play a role
in the Geneva talks, namely the Civil Society Support Room and the Women’s
Advisory Board. Civil society also featured often in EU statements and its
figures were often invited to Brussels for consultations and to air their voices.
Local and integrated processes

The end of 2013 and beginning of 2014 witnessed many local ceasefires and
agreements in Syria. Although they came amid very bad conditions, including
sieges, many have led to an improvement in the humanitarian situation. These
processes were not purely local and often were multilevel integrated processes
that involved external actors (Turkmani et al., 2014). The EU played no known
direct role in these processes ceasefires. In April 2014, the EU issued a statement
criticising these ceasefires:
The EU is concerned with cases of forced surrender, labelled as local cease-

fires, imposed by the regime through starvation sieges. The EU calls on the
regime to allow effective third-party monitoring of ceasefires to sustain
72 R. Turkmani
them, to allow safe and unhindered evacuations of civilians on a voluntary
basis and the passage of humanitarian convoys and personnel.
(Council of the European Union 2014)
The Syrian Government did indeed use the tactics of sieges against civilians in
many areas to force submission to its conditions (see Syrian American Medical
Society 2015), and in some cases, like in Mouadamiya, the local agreement did
not succeed in maintaining a sustainable aid delivery to the besieged area.
However, not all the ceasefires were cases of surrender, but even where they did
mean surrender, they provided an opportunity to help civilians. The EU state-
ment rightly identified third-party monitoring as a key factor in sustaining these
ceasefires, yet it is not known that it did anything to provide this monitoring. For
example, it did not push for a mandate from the UNSC for a new UN monitoring
mission after the last one was pulled out in 2013. Neither did they send a moni-
toring mission from the Common Security and Defence Policy.
In general, the EU remained distant from the local agreements and security
arrangements. The only external actors who were able to influence these pro-
cesses were the ones involved in supporting the warring parties, especially
regional powers and Russia. The role of regional players was more often than
not a spoiler role (Turkmani et al., 2014). The complexity of the Syrian conflict
and the multiplicity of its layers meant that security on the ground had to encom-
pass three levels: the international, the regional and the local. Internationally
brokered ceasefires brought strong but short-lived reduction of violence. Local
agency proved essential for any sustainable security arrangement. The Astana
process which encompassed to a certain degree the international, regional and
local level, resulted in the development of the de-escalation zones plan and
agreements which included a tailor-made plan for each contested area, excluding
ISIS controlled areas. The de-escalation zones delivered partial success in redu-
cing the violence as a first step, but they remain fragile as long as they are not
framed within a comprehensive political solution that takes into consideration
the local and national grievances. A paper by the European Council on Foreign
Relations described the de-escalation zones as an approach that ‘offers the most
viable way to decrease violence, promote some relief for the Syrian population,
and address wider European interests. But they are neglecting the need for a
political framework’ (Barnes-Dacey, 2017).
Contributing to humanitarian relief and refugee crisis

It is estimated that more than 13.5 million Syrians are in need of humanitarian
assistance inside Syria, around 6.5 million of them are internally displaced.
While the number of refugees – registered and awaiting registration is more than
4.5 million distributed in Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt and North Africa
according to UNHCR.3 In responding to what has been described as the ‘world’s
largest humanitarian crisis since World War II’4 the EU is taking a lead in sup-
porting and funding the humanitarian programs. The EU, as Commission and
Member States, spent over €5 billion of funding. In addition, over €3 billion
were pledged at the London donor conference in February 2016.
The EU humanitarian support was not limited to funding but also extended to
working on improving the cross-border and cross-lines aid delivery, it repeatedly
called for allowing unrestricted and constant humanitarian access to ensure safe
delivery of humanitarian aid and medical care to all people in need (EC 2016).
However, lost leverage limited the ability of the EU and its Member States to
influence the regime to allow access to besieged areas. The EU has also repeat-
edly called and pushed for the respect of International Humanitarian Law, the
protection of civilians and condemned all indiscriminate attacks on civilians.
According to UNHCR (URL), over five million people have fled Syria since
2011. In responding to the refugee crisis, the EU offered support to refugees and
hosting communities in the neighbouring countries. Some Syrian refugees seeking
international protection started to reach Europe, and the number increased dramat-
ically in 2015. And while support to refugees is essential, their plight has to be
seen as a direct consequence of the failure of both state and human security in
Syria. Restoring this security is key to their return (Mojonnier 2013).
Supporting justice
One of the very challenging tasks that Syrian civil society stood up for with help
from the international community is justice. In most of its statements the political
opposition asks for justice and accountability in the face of the atrocities com-
mitted by government forces. But at many crucial moments, the issue dropped out.
For example, there was no mention of justice and accountability in the final state-
ment issued by the opposition conference in Riyadh on 10 December 2015. This
became the basis for what became known as: ‘The revolutionary forces and the
Syrian opposition group’ and which forms the core of the High Negotiations Com-
mittee (HNC) which represents the opposition in Geneva talks. Civil society
retained a much stronger commitment to justice demonstrated by several state-
ments (see for example Syria Justice and Accountability Centre, 2016).
The EU constantly showed support for justice and accountability in its state-
ments regarding Syria and helped funding efforts to document violations and
prepare for transitional justice. (For a detailed account of the role of the EU in
supporting justice mechanisms in Syria see Turkmani and Haid, 2016). It also
supports the UN-established Independent International Commission of Inquiry.
However, in international groupings the EU failed to garner support for this
approach. The EU is a member of the International Syria Support Group (ISSG).
The ISSG issued two statements in Vienna, one on 14 November 2015,5 and
‘The final declaration on the results of the Syria Talks in Vienna as agreed by
participants’ on 30 October 2015.6 Both statements do not include any reference
to the need for commitment to accountability, justice, and transitional justice
mechanisms. These statements later became the backbone of the UNSC reso-
lution 2254 (UN, 2015) issued on 18 December 2015, which also excluded any
mention of justice and accountability.
74 R. Turkmani
Economic disengagement
Economic sanctions, or what is referred to technically as unilateral coercive eco-
nomic measures have always been one of the main EU foreign policy tools,
although its effectiveness in achieving the desired outcome has been questioned
(Giumelli and Ivan, 2013 and Rosenberg et al., 2016). In response to the criti-
cism. the EU now highlights the use of smart sanctions. The new EU global
strategy (EU, 2016) stresses that such sanctions ‘in compliance with inter-
national and EU law, will be carefully calibrated and monitored to support the
legitimate economy and avoid harming local societies’. Evidence from Syria
suggests that the only economies the sanctions supported were the illicit ones.
Although the list of the sanctions has been constantly expanded and amended
up to the present time, most of them were imposed at the early stage of the con-
flict, which is an unusual action to adopt by the EU without a UNSC mandate.
‘While the sanctions process often takes years, a whole set of sanctions against
Syria have accumulated in just a few months’ (Portela, 2012).
The first set of economic measures taken against the Syrian government in
May 2011 included in addition to the suspending the bilateral cooperation pro-
grams and the freezing of the Association Agreement, the suspension of the
participation in EU’s regional programmes and a ban of payments and assistance
by the EIB including disbursement or payment in connection with any existing
loan agreements and banning the continuation by the EIB of any existing Tech-
nical Assistance Service Contracts for sovereign projects located in Syria.
The current sanctions list includes 235 persons ‘responsible for or associated
with the violent repression against the civilian population in Syria or supporting
or benefiting from the regime’ (EC, 2017). Initially the EU did not include Presi-
dent Assad himself on the travel ban list. Assad was given ‘the opportunity to
cooperate while retaining a central role in the process’ (Giumelli and Ivan,
2013), but as the government persisted in its behaviour the EU added Assad and
his family to the list. Our analysis of the impact of sanctions does not include
these sanctions on individuals.
Some of the sanctions targeted entities that contributed to the deterioration of
the human security of the Syrian people and played a role in inciting violence
and hate speech. These included sanctions targeting entities that have been
directly involved in the repression such as the intelligence agencies and some of
the bodies that have been indirectly involved in supporting the army and intelli-
gence agencies such as the Scientific Studies and Research Centre. Entities
owned by the sanctioned individuals have been sanctioned including telecom
and construction companies and investment groups. Sanctions also included
media organisations that have been involved in inciting violence such as Al
Dunia TV. An arms embargo has also been imposed including the import and
the transfer of weapons and equipment, and on equipment that could be used for
internal repression, but these did not have much impact because supplies of arms
from European countries stopped in the early 1990s. The main weapons sup-
pliers to Syria are Russia and Iran, who have increased their supply to Syria
since 2011 (BBC News, 2013). More effective than the arms embargo was the
ban on software and technologies that could be used for internet surveillance,
monitoring or interception which the regime tried to source from European
companies.7
Other measures and sanctions have had a harmful impact on the regime, the
economy and on the people, themselves. These sanctions include in addition to
the measures listed above, banning EU Member States from entering into new
commitments for grants, financial assistance or loans to the Government of
Syria, including through their participation in international financial institutions,
except for humanitarian and developmental purposes (there is no known use of
this exemption for humanitarian purposes). Many of the state-owned factories
and companies have been sanctioned, including a state organisation that
employed tens of thousands of people, the General Organisation of Tobacco and
the Cotton Marketing Organisation. It is difficult to see its direct link to oppres-
sion. Sanctions have also been imposed on state banks8 and non-state banks that
are deemed to have relations with them.9 Restrictions on the establishment of
branches and subsidiaries of and cooperation with Syrian banks have also been
imposed. The provision of insurance and re-insurance to the Government of
Syria, its public bodies, corporations and agencies has been prohibited. Restric-
tions were also imposed on issuance of and trade in certain bonds including all
Syrian public or public-guaranteed bonds issued after 1 December 2011 to and
from the Government of Syria, its public bodies, corporations and agencies and
banks. The energy and trade sectors were also heavily targeted by sanctions.
The main logic behind the EU sanctions is to bring in a change in the
behaviour of the Syrian government and the individuals who support it and to
deter it from further repressing Syrian people and committing human right viola-
tions. The current reality in Syria suggests that none of these desired results have
been achieved (Rosenberg et al., 2016).
EU officials considered that the policy of sanctions on Syria ‘seems to make the
functioning of the government more difficult’ (Mahony, 2012). But the Syrian
government and its supporters found several ways to minimise the impact of sanc-
tions. For instance, the Syrian government managed to spread its trade to different
markets (mainly to Iraq and Lebanon), and relies on the Russian banking sector to
alleviate the EU’s financial system and EIB sanctions (Efron, 2013).
Impact of sanctions
In estimating the impact of the sanctions, it is difficult to isolate the impact of
those imposed by the EU from sanctions imposed by the US, the Arab League
and other countries. The analysis on the impact of the sanctions applies to all
sanctions imposed on Syria and not only those imposed by the EU.
The damaging impact of sanctions could be summarised under three main
headings: first, accelerating war economy and illicit activities, second, increasing
the regime’s dependency on its external backers and third, contributing to the
deterioration of the socioeconomic conditions of ordinary people.
76 R. Turkmani
In simple terms, the sanctions made the formal economy of Syria informal,
and made the informal economy formal. This shift has significantly contributed
to the rise of illegitimate economy and the emergence of war economy (Yazigi,
2014 and Turkmani et al., 2015). The sanctioning of the finance sector meant
that most transactions are taking place in the shadows, untraceable and either in
cash or through mediators and third parties. Even if certain activity is not banned
by the sanctions, often banks and private companies abandon any activity that
could carry any sanction risk. This de-risking phenomenon affected even Syrians
and Syrian entities outside of Syria. Many Syrians lost their bank accounts or
had transactions cancelled. Banks in Europe decline even legal transfers by repu-
table INGOs because of Syria sanctions risks. Sanctioned institutions had to also
go underground for many of their transactions and operations. These conditions
created the perfect environment for illicit activities and for corruption to flourish
even further.
Options for circumventing sanctions were plenty and mainly available for the
rich elite but out of the reach of medium-level business and ordinary people. The
presence of the offshore option also gave many sanctioned individuals and their
associated companies a safe haven. As the Panama papers have revealed, many
of the sanctioned Syrians and their affiliated bodies had offshore accounts
(Garside and Pegg, 2016).
This effect should not come as a surprise. It has been noted as one of the
undesired consequences of sanctions not just in Syria but in other parts of the
world. ‘The effects of economic sanctions on corruption, authoritarianism, and
human development can be significant. And each of these effects can create
policy problems down the road’ (Rosenberg et al., 2016).
As economic opportunities with Europe and other Western countries were
killed, the Syrian government turned to its allies for support and to circumvent
sanctions. This support came at a political price. It heavily increased the
dependency of the Syrian government on its supporters and it rewarded them
with contracts and agreements that could dictate the future on the country in
the coming decades. This further diminished the leverage of the EU on the
authorities in Syria.
The oil embargo was the toughest set of sanctions. However, the Syrian gov-
ernment managed to secure alternative supplies from Iran and Russia (Donati and
Payne, 2012) who provided credit lines for the Syrian government (Yazigi, 2014).
In January 2013, a $1 billion credit facility agreement with Iran was announced by
the Syrian state media, which was followed in June 2013 by an additional $3.6
billion line of credit (Sadjadpour, 2013). This has been used mostly for oil imports.
In 2015 the credit line was topped up with additional $1 billion (Westall and
Al-Khalidi, 2015) making the total Iranian credit line reach $5.6 billion.
The socioeconomic impact of the sanctions was felt strongly by people as
early as January 2012 (Elaph, 2012). The sanctions contributed to the rise of
unemployment and thus indirectly provided human resources for the violence
(SCPR, 2015). Sanctions, especially on the banking sector, contributed to the
continued rise in the inflation of the national currency with unpredictable
exchange rates, which made living for ordinary Syrians even harder. Sanctions
also led to a significant drop in fiscal revenues (Yazigi, 2014).
The cost of goods has also risen, partially because of the increased cost of
import and unavailability ‘Sanctions and scarcity of hard currencies made
imports more difficult to effect and more costly to procure’ (SCPR, 2014). They
also played a role in cutting the flow of goods, due to import-export restrictions
and the impact of de-risking and the blocking of insurance services. The private
sector has also been affected, especially the industries which relied on import
and export, such as the pharmaceutical industry.10
Public services have also been affected by sanctions, not only because the
intuitions have been sanctioned but also because of inability to provide services.
Sanctions affected the supply of parts to energy and water plants either because
these parts were made by European countries or because of the difficulties in
importing. As a result, many power stations went out of service.11 The health
sector was affected for similar reasons because of the inability to provide parts
of medical devices in clinics and hospitals and the inability to import lifesaving
medical equipment and medicine. While the government turned to other sources
for importing medicine, many lifesaving medicines such as cancer medications
used to be imported from European countries.
Conditionality of re-engagement
From August 2011 until the March 2017 EU strategy for Syria, the resumption
of economic engagement with Syria was always conditioned on the stepping
aside of President Assad and the beginning of a genuine democratic transition.
At the end of nearly every statement asking the president to step aside, the fol-
lowing pledge was added:
As soon as President Assad steps aside and a genuine democratic transition

begins, the EU is ready to develop a new and ambitious partnership with
Syria across all areas of mutual interest, including mobilizing assistance,
and strengthening trade and economic links.
(Council of the European Union, 2011)
The March 2017 strategy dropped that line and outlined a new conditionality for
economic re-engagement in the context of reconstructions, affirming that the EU:
will be ready to assist in the reconstruction of Syria only when a compre-

hensive, genuine and inclusive political transition, negotiated by the Syrian
parties in the conflict on the basis of UN Security Council Resolution 2254
(2015) and the 2012 Geneva Communiqué, is firmly under way … In this
context, the EU could review the current restrictive measures, engage in
resuming co-operation with the transitional authorities, mobilise funds in
support of post-war recovery and reconstruction.
(Council of the European Union, 2017)
78 R. Turkmani
The strategy outlines its future role in Syria in partnership with other inter-
national bodies like the International Monetary Fund (IMF ), the World Bank and
the UN.
After progress in the de-escalation zones plan in Syria which was linked to
ceasefire talks in Astana, Mogherini launched at the UNGA meeting in Septem-
ber 2017 the Brussels Process for Syria, which involved
supporting the stabilisation of the areas where violence has decreased,

linking this process with Astana and Geneva and also starting to plan for
future reconstruction, making clear that it will only start when the political
transition will be agreed in Geneva.
(EU, 2017b)
While this change in strategy is enabling the EU to play a leading role again
in the process of finding a solution to the Syrian crisis, it is likely to be faced
with profound challenges.
First, it is difficult to define and to put a time line on the condition of ‘genuine
and inclusive political transition is under way’ (EU, 2017b). In a conflict like the
Syrian one, it is very difficult to envisage a political transition with a clear begin-
ning and specific steps and even more difficult to define what it actually means
and how progress on that front is going to be measured.
Second, countering the logic of war economy, avoiding feeding corruption
and crony capitalists is going to be very challenging. It requires the establish-
ment of legitimate businesses with a proper legal, financial and technical infra-
structure. The new structure of public authority and the dominant power relations
in Syria are very resistant to the kind of reforms and good governance the EU
wishes to see. Many businessmen who do not have good relations with the
regime have either left the country or lost their businesses. Some of the potential
large businesses that are likely to be part of the envisaged reconstruction of the
country are linked either directly or indirectly to the regime and its dominant
actors. The same logic applies to parts of Syria outside regime control. If these
crony capitalists are empowered with the new flow of funds to the country, then
there will be a risk of reinforcing some of the worst aspects of the regime as well
as in opposition-controlled areas even if some of the dominant actors are
removed from power. It is also unlikely that the financial infrastructure which
was badly hit by sanctions will be reactivated quickly enough to carry on the
burden of reconstruction.
Discussion and conclusion

Despite all the difficulties discussed in this chapter, we argue that the EU’s Syria
policies could be much more effective if they were within the framework of
second-generation human security.
The central pillar of such approach is political legitimacy. Advancing the
gradual development of political legitimacy in Syria requires efforts on two
different levels. First, at the top level, it is essential to keep the support and
momentum for an inclusive political settlement. Such a settlement should not
mean merely the change of faces or division of power among warring actors, but
should mean a substantial change of the structure of governance and power in
Syria that creates the right milieu for the development of legitimate local pro-
cesses and political representation. This should include changes to the constitu-
tion that end the monopoly of all powers by the head of state and introduce
separation of powers which allows for more accountable credible governance,
increases the space for civil liberties and for civil society action and for the for-
mation of political parties to allow for increased political representation. Second,
it means support for local legitimacy by continuing to support local civil society
and the emergence of local representations and leaderships.
Widening the focus on security to include an emphasis on the security of local
areas and of people themselves is also essential, especially in the context of a
very fragmented conflict where national security is not expected to be achieved
in one step. This means reinforcing security where it has been achieved locally
to provide safe zones for civilians in the middle of conflict. Supporting justice
mechanisms on all levels, including the local, is essential in that context.
Another important pillar is the development of legitimate economy. What is
needed now is a comprehensive economic reengagement and reconstruction
process that is, at one and the same time, a prevention strategy that addresses
both the consequences of the war as well as the central factors that led to the war
and that opens up legitimate economic opportunities for the people. Key for such
a process is institutional transformation and formation. Serious and substantial
efforts are needed locally with international support to construct inclusive,
accountable and effective institutions that have the capacity to manage the
process, based on building the broken trust between people and institutions.
This could be enforced by the EU in the conditionality of its funding and
reengagement as well shifting the focus more to the people and their security
which intersect with the security of the EU itself. The EU 2017 strategy shows a
move in this direction and brings the focus again on the people themselves. An
approach focused only on state could risk entrenching authoritarianism and
empowering crony capitalists and illicit activities. It rightly concludes that the
repercussions of continued conflict or continued autocratic rule in Syria ‘would
be contrary to the interests of the Syrian people, the region and the EU’. This is
why it is vital to design effective policies and actions that take into account the
ways in which financial aid has been subverted in the past and how this might be
avoided in future. While the EU has developed mechanisms and conditionality
for financial assistance and developed parameters to measure compliance, it is
unclear how progress on political solution, political reform and respect for
human rights is going to be conditioned and measured. It is important to rethink
a new set of indicators that are centred around human security such as the rate of
arbitrary arrest and the restoration of justice.
The new conditionality the EU imposed for re-engagement with Syria
which is focused on a political solution has brought the EU back to the circle
80 R. Turkmani
of influential powers in the process of resolving the Syrian conflict. This could be
strengthened and further developed as the main tool to promote peace, justice and
democracy in Syria through bringing the focus back on the people themselves.
Indeed, it could become a model for using the capacities of the EU to promote
these values and rights outside Europe not by imposing them from above, but by
helping create the environment conductive for self-organised development.
Notes
1 Now called Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).
2 Also referred to as Dae’sh, ISIL and IS.
3 ECHO Factsheet – Syria crisis – February 2016. Available at: http://bit.ly/1ftTuMD
4 Ibid.
5 The ISSG statements in Vienna on 14 November 2015 www.un.org/undpa/Speeches-
statements/14112015/syria (Accessed 1 October 2017).
6 The ISSG statements in Vienna on 30 October 2015 http://eeas.europa.eu/statements-
eeas/2015/151030_06.htm (Accessed 1 October 2017).
7 Although some Italian companies are reported to be violating that ban. See for
example ‘Italian Cops Raid Surveillance Tech Company Accused of Selling Spy Gear
to Syria’, Vice, 2 December 2016, available at: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/
article/gv5knx/italian-cops-raid-surveillance-tech-company-area-spa-selling-spy-gear-
to-syria (Accessed 1 October 2017).
8 Including Central Bank of Syria, Real Estate Bank, Industrial Bank, Popular Credit
Bank, Saving Bank, Agricultural Cooperative Bank, Commercial Bank of Syria.
9 Such as the Syrian International Islamic Bank and the Syrian Lebanese
Commercial Bank.
10 ‘Syrian pharmaceutical sector facing the current’, Dr Shawqi Mohammad, Al Hal Al
Souri, December 2015.
11 ‘Electricity sector in Syria collapses under the weight of the conflict’, Dr Shawqi
Muhammad, Al Hal Al Souri, 12 March 2016. http://bit.ly/1SJbcgR (Accessed 1
October 2017).
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5 EU policies in the DR Congo
Misaligned ambitions
Valerie Arnould and Koen Vlassenroot
Introduction
It is the aspiration of the European Union to be a global peace and security actor
(Manners, 2010). To respond to this ambition, the European Commission and
Council have developed a multitude of approaches and instruments. Conflict pre-
vention and crisis management are key objectives in its search for international
security, which is founded on the assumption that development is conditioned by
peace and stability and on the recognition that peace, security and development
are inherently connected and compounded by the imperative of good governance
(Martinelli, 2006). One of the crises in which the EU has tried to be a dominant
peace and security broker, is the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo
(DRC). For some observers, this conflict acted as ‘a laboratory for EU crisis
management’ (Knutsen, 2009: 456). It is in the DRC that the EU conducted its
first Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) intervention outside Europe,
setting important precedents for the development of future EU engagements in
Africa. Overall five different CSDP interventions have been undertaken since
2003, making the DRC the recipient of the largest number of EU CSDP missions
in one single country. In addition, the EU has mobilized a variety of develop-
ment, democracy promotion, and humanitarian assistance instruments in support
of its conflict management and stabilization objectives in the DRC. Between
2002 and 2013, European Development Fund (EDF ) budgets increased from
€120 million to €726 million (€901 million if thematic budget lines such as the
Stability Fund, Food Facility, and environment are also included). In 2013, this
made the DRC the primary beneficiary of EU development funding in Sub-
Saharan Africa and placed the EU amongst the top three donors in the DRC.1
This EU engagement broadly coincided with the emergence of human
security in its discourse on foreign and security policy, as developed in the 2004
Barcelona report. Some of the precepts of human security are clearly reflected,
though not overtly stated, in the EU’s policies in the DRC. But the extent to
which the latter have effectively contributed to promoting human security in the
DRC is mixed. We put forward three interrelated reasons for this: the EU’s
flawed assumptions about institution-building as a vehicle for change, the EU’s
ambivalent and progressively waning role as a diplomatic actor, and domestic
86 V. Arnould and K. Vlassenroot
resistance to change. The DRC experience offers a stark illustration of how
external interventions based on top-down peacebuilding and state reconstruction
policies all too often become enmeshed in, and lack the ability to change preda-
tory modes of governance that feed violence and hamper the realization of
human security goals. As the literature on hybrid peace (Richmond and Mitchell,
2012) and the political marketplace (de Waal, 2015) highlight, this raises key
challenges in terms of what kind of peace is produced by such external interven-
tions and what kind of state they may end up reinforcing or creating. The inces-
sant cycles of violence and political crises, which have marred the DRC over the
past two decades, the most recent manifestations of which are the deadlock that
has emerged around the 2016 presidential elections and the cycle of violence in
the Kasaïs, attest to the limited impact of EU and donors’ interventions in
general as drivers of change.
This chapter starts with a brief account of the Congolese crises. The second
section provides an overview of the EU’s engagement in the DRC and how it
ties in with some core precepts of human security. The following section then
presents the ways in which EU policies have in practice fallen short of deliver-
ing human security in the DRC. In the fourth section we present a number of
challenges and constraining factors which help explain this limited impact, and
we critically reflect on the EU as a peace and security actor in the DRC. Finally,
in the conclusion we draw some lessons from the EU’s experience in the DRC
and what these mean for the pursuit of second-generation human security.
The Congo crises

The Congo crises are rooted in a complex interplay of local, national and
regional dynamics. Decades of patrimonial rule and economic mismanagement,
and international and local pressures for democracy in the early 1990s, caused a
deep political crisis that further weakened the already fragile Mobutu regime. In
the eastern parts of the country, the political manipulation of unresolved local
issues of citizenship and land access added further layers to the crisis and trig-
gered a first round of armed mobilization. The spill-over effects of the Burun-
dian civil war and the Rwandan genocide only further intensified the existing
crisis, and eventually triggered an armed intervention of neighbouring countries
Uganda and Rwanda and, ultimately, the ouster of Mobutu from power in May
1997. Soon after the new Congolese president Laurent-Désiré Kabila expelled
his former Ugandan and Rwandan military allies in July 1998, a second war
broke out which resulted in an increased military fragmentation in the east. A
first peace deal, concluded in Lusaka in 1999, had little impact and only served
to entrench the political and military stalemate.
Despite international efforts to keep the peace process on track, it was only
after Joseph Kabila replaced his father in early 2001 (who was killed by one of
his guards) that a political opening emerged. Peace agreements were concluded
one year later with Rwanda and Uganda, which paved the way for the progres-
sive withdrawal of their troops from eastern Congo. In December 2002, a
EU policies in the DR Congo 87
c omprehensive peace accord was also concluded between the different Congo-
lese warring factions and political actors, which led to the establishment of a
transitional government based on the principle of political and military power
sharing. This coalition government faced the arduous task of unifying the
national territory, establishing a new legal and institutional framework, rebuild-
ing state authority, preparing for general elections, and reforming the security
sector. Several internationally supported initiatives were set up to support the
peace process and promote regional stability. These included the ‘Comité inter-
national de l’accompagnement de la transition’ (CIAT), which was tasked with
assisting and supervising the transition process and the transitional government,
the World Bank’s ‘Multi-Country Demobilization and Reintegration Program’
(MDRP) and the ‘International Conference on the Great Lakes Region’
(ICGLR), a regional cooperation framework.
While a large number of combatants were demobilized or integrated in the
newly created Congolese army, insecurity in eastern DRC persisted. The depar-
ture of most armed groups from their strongholds and the inability of the Congo-
lese army to fully deploy in these areas created security voids to the advantage
of foreign armed movements still operating on Congolese soil. Other groups
resisted reintegration and remained operational in their previous areas of control.
The peace process had little to no effect in particular on the ‘Forces démocra-
tiques de liberation du Rwanda’ (FDLR), a Rwandan Hutu militia that has its
origins in the Rwandan genocide. This group maintained its cooperation with
non-integrated Congolese militias and continued to pose a major threat to local
security in large parts of the Kivu provinces. The slow pace of the integration
process, the lack of attention to local unresolved land-access disputes, the cit-
izenship issue, and inter- and intra-community disputes over political, military or
economic influence, competition over the control of mineral exploitation and
trading networks, the nature of the state and the lack of progress in political
reform and decentralization, and regional power politics all explain the con-
tinued violence in the Kivu provinces after the start of the transition process.
The precarious security conditions in the east were dramatically illustrated by
the crisis that broke out in the Ituri District. Since 1999, several ethnically based
militias had been involved in local conflicts over land, political power and eco-
nomic control in the area. When Ugandan troops left this region in May 2003
renewed fighting broke out between these groups, causing a major humanitarian
crisis in the city of Bunia. This crisis brought “the small and poorly equipped
local UN contingent on the brink of a failure that could seriously compromise
the image of the UN and the peace process at large” (Piccolino, 2010: 125). In
order to allow MONUC to reinforce its capabilities and revise its mandate, the
UN Security Council asked for the deployment of an emergency force, which
led to the deployment of the EU’s Artemis operation. But even the United
Nations Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (MONUC)
increased troop numbers and strengthened use of force mandate failed to prevent
an attack one year later against the provincial capital Bukavu (South Kivu) by
former Tutsi rebels who had deserted from the newly formed national army
(Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (FARDC)). This
caused a major blow to the image of the UN peacekeeping force as it exposed its
inability to protect civilians even in major cities.
The first democratic elections in 2006, in turn, saw the outbreak of large-scale
violence in Kinshasa and sparked instability in the east as they considerably
reduced the power of wartime networks and former rebel movements. Fears of
further marginalization were most widespread within the Tutsi-community and
triggered the reconstitution of the Tutsi-part of The Rally for Congolese
Democracy-Goma (RCD-Goma) rebel group, under the command of General
Laurent Nkunda. His group, called the Congrès national pour la défense du
people (CNDP), quickly became the most powerful armed actor in the Kivu-
provinces and was able to consolidate its local political, military and economic
control, partly with support from Rwanda. Efforts by the Congolese army to deal
with this new security threat all ended in military defeat, leaving no other option
to the Kinshasa government than to negotiate a deal and attempt to integrate the
armed group into the FARDC. As a result, in 2008, a new inclusive peace
process was launched in the east, aimed at the demobilization of all Kivu-based
militias. But mis-incentives created by the talks themselves, the overall lack of
progress in the disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) process,
and difficulties in integrating former rebel commanders into the FARDC
command chain, meant the Amani program only resulted in new rounds of
armed mobilization.
The launch of joint military operations between Rwanda and the DRC in
December 2008 and the January 2009 agreement concluded between the CNDP
and the Congolese government led to renewed hope that the conflict could finally
be resolved. Prior to the 2011 presidential and parliamentary elections though,
the Kinshasa government tried to reduce the power of the ex-CNDP and its net-
works: it imposed a ban on the export of natural resources limiting the income
flows of the group, sought to deploy ex-CNDP troops outside of the Kivus, and
tried to cut the parallel chains of command through a reform of the FARDC. In
response, part of the former CNDP troops deserted the army and created the
M23 rebel movement, which in November 2012 managed to temporarily seize
control of the provincial capital Goma. This new escalation of violence set in
motion renewed international efforts to restore peace and stability, with (parallel)
peace talks initiated by the ICGLR and Southern African Development Com-
munity (SADC). In 2013, a UN Force Intervention Brigade was created to
bolster the United Nations Stabilization Mission in the DRC’s (MONUSCO)
offensive capabilities. But although it was aimed at neutralizing and disarming
all armed groups operating in the region through targeted military operations, it
mainly targeted the M23. The ‘Peace, Security and Cooperation Framework
Agreement’ was also signed in Addis Ababa by members of the international
community, including the ICGLR, African Union, SADC and UN. This Frame-
work was meant to end foreign backing of Congolese armed groups and foster a
comprehensive reform of Congolese state institutions, including the national
army, police and judicial sector. A newly appointed UN Special Envoy for the
Great Lakes was tasked with overseeing the implementation of the framework
agreements.
Once again though, the success of these peace efforts was limited. A recent
mapping exercise estimates that more than 70 armed groups remain active today
in eastern DRC, with more than three million people still displaced (Stearns and
Vogel, 2015). Vast rural areas continue to be prone to armed group activities,
including acts of violence, taxation and extortion. Moreover, as the eruption of
large-scale violence in Kasaï Central in 2016–2017 illustrates, the potential for
armed conflict remains a permanent threat throughout the country, not just in
eastern Congo. Different approaches to stabilization and peace of the Congolese
government and the international community, including demobilization, security
sector and institutional reform, have had meagre results (Stearns and Vogel,
2015). Even more, peace efforts have generally been an additional opportunity
to revive or reinforce existing armed structures, and have set in motion new
claims to political, military, and economic power. The current electoral crisis
(elections initially scheduled for 2016, but now postponed to an, as yet, unclear
date) is an illustration of these dynamics. While in the east there is a further
democratization of militarized politics (Vlassenroot and Verweijen, 2017), with
a mobilization of violence as a crucial part of power strategies and struggles, in
the capital the ruling regime continues to manipulate the electoral process to stay
in power.
EU–DRC policies in a human security framework

The DRC is a historical partner of the EU, with relations between the European
Commission and the DRC dating back to the first European Development Fund
in 1958–1959. Direct development cooperation was suspended between 1992
and 2002 because of a growing democratic deficit and the outbreak of war, but
since 2002 the EU’s financial and political engagement in the DRC has grown
exponentially. The EU has developed a comprehensive policy approach, encom-
passing both its civilian and military instruments and focusing on the interlock-
ing political, economic and security dimensions of the political and security
crises in the DRC. The strategic objective pursued by the EU has been to
promote peace and democracy by supporting the stabilization and reconstruction
of the country.
As a first line of response to the protracted emergency situation in the DRC,
the EU has disbursed extensive humanitarian assistance focused on support for
IDPs and refugees, malnutrition crises and epidemics. The EU institutions have
consistently ranked amongst the top three donors of humanitarian assistance in
the DRC, alongside the UK and the US. From 2002 onwards, the EU also
pursued a parallel track of mobilizing its development aid to support the infra-
structural and politico-institutional reconstruction of the country. This has also
entailed support for the organization and securitization of election processes in
the DRC – this was particularly the case for the 2006 electoral process, with over
half of the $430 million budget funded by the EU and its member states – and
the financing of projects to promote the rule of law, human rights protections,
and political participation.
In addition, the EU undertook five CSDP missions in the DRC, two military
missions (Artemis in 2003 and EUFOR DR (European Union Force in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo) Congo in 2006) and three civilian missions
(European Union Police Mission (EUPOL) Kinshasa in 2005–2006, EUPOL DR
Congo in 2007–2014, and EUSEC DR Congo (European Union Security Sector
Reform Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo) in 2005–2015). Both
military missions were temporally and geographically circumscribed deploy-
ments undertaken at the request of the UN to respond to an immediate crisis situ-
ation. Operation Artemis, the EU’s first ever CSDP mission outside of its
immediate neighbourhood, was deployed to contribute to the stabilization of
security and humanitarian conditions in the northeastern town of Bunia (Ituri),
while EUFOR DR Congo was mandated to assist the Congolese police and army
and the UN mission (MONUC) in securing the elections. In contrast, the three
civilian missions were deployed with longer-term institutional reform purposes
in mind. The two EUPOL missions were established to support police reform
process and EUSEC DR Congo to provide advice and assistance to the Congo-
lese authorities responsible for security sector reform.
The EU’s extensive engagement in the DRC reflects the EU’s growing emphasis
on using its aid and external relations policies to support conflict prevention and
management in vulnerable countries, particularly in Africa (Olsen, 2012). It also
occurred in a period when the EU was actively seeking to develop a greater global
role and define a strategic framework guiding and legitimizing its expanding
foreign policy ambitions. Accordingly, the EU’s deployment of CSDP missions in
the DRC was very much driven by political and institutional considerations, such as
projecting the role of the EU as a global actor, asserting its military autonomy from
NATO, and ‘testing out’ the EU’s new conflict management capabilities (Gegout,
2005; Koops, 2011; Piccolino, 2010). But the EU’s engagement in the DRC also
coincided with a period in which human security came to the forefront of policy
debates within the UN and the EU. The 2004 Barcelona and 2007 Madrid reports
drafted by the Human Security Group set out an ambitious agenda promoting
human security as a strategic framework for the EU’s external relations. Although
these proposals did not gain traction across the entire EU institutional milieu, the
concept of human security nevertheless framed some EU policies in practice
(Christou, 2014). This can be observed in the case of the DRC: although EU offi-
cial discourse did not explain its intervention in the DRC in the language of human
security, some of its policies were in line with human security precepts.
Especially the CSDP missions integrated some of the seven human security
principles as set out in the Barcelona report. For instance, EU interventions in
the Congo were not framed and legitimized by reference to the existence of a
security threat to the EU but by reference to the need to protect civilians and sta-
bilize security conditions on the ground.2 The CSDP missions were thus driven
by logics of conflict management rather than the conduct of war: the aim of the
interventions was not to defeat one or the other party but to protect civilians and
create spaces for conflict resolution. The emphasis placed by EU policies on
justice and security sector reform furthermore aligned with the idea that human
security should have as its aim the restoration of legitimate political authority
based on the rule of law. The EU’s crisis management policies in the DRC were
also founded on the principle of a combined use of civil-military approaches to
security, though this was not without its challenges (Knutsen, 2009; Piccolino,
2010) and did also not go so far as imposing civilian command over military
operations as advocated for by the Barcelona report. Last, the EU’s military mis-
sions in the DRC are clear instances of interventions founded on the principle of
effective multilateralism through burden-sharing with the UN. Operation
Artemis was deployed to plug a security gap in the face of a rapidly deteriorating
security situation in the Ituri region, which was threatening to overwhelm the
UN mission. The EU operation was expressly designed to support the UN in sta-
bilizing the region until a newly reinforced UN Ituri brigade could be rolled out.
In turn, EUFOR Congo was deployed with the mandate to support the Congolese
security forces and the UN, ‘in case MONUC faces serious difficulties in fulfill-
ing its mandate within its existing capabilities’, for securing the elections (UN
Security Council Resolution 1671). EU policies in the DRC thus represent a case
of human security done in practice without being clearly affirmed in discourse.
A flawed EU human security approach in the DRC

The extent to which EU policies in the DRC aligned with human security should,
however, not be overstated. Although nominally CSDP missions took indi-
viduals rather than the state as the referent of security, in practice EU policies in
the DRC remained primarily focused on short-term stabilization and state
strengthening. With EUFOR Congo, for instance, the concern of the EU lay
more with stabilizing the political transition processes than with protecting Con-
golese citizens. The principle that human security requires a bottom-up approach
was furthermore interpreted restrictively as meaning that the Congolese govern-
ment should, in the long term, take ownership of EU-driven reforms in the
justice and security sector. Not only did this turn out to be unrealistic as local
elites were resistant to the kind of changes EU reform policies pushed for
(Rayroux and Wilén, 2014), but it also placed the emphasis of bottom-up
approaches on the state rather than on the empowerment of citizens and vulner-
able communities. Most importantly, and as will be shown in this section, the
ability of EU policies to effectively achieve improved physical and material
security for individuals has been decidedly mixed. Even where EU actions
directly contributed to human security (e.g. Artemis), these have had a short-
term rather than a sustainable effect.
Human rights protection

The promotion and protection of human rights has formed part of the EU’s
declared policy objectives in the DRC, and was formally included in the mandate
of its CSDP missions. Artemis and EUFOR were expressly tasked with the protec-
tion of civilians under threat of attack (UN Security Council Resolution 1484
(2003), §1; UN Security Council Resolution 1671 (2006), §8a). Artemis, in par-
ticular, effectively contributed to strengthening civilian protection on the ground,
in no small part due to the Force commander’s resolve to use deadly force to make
Bunia and a 10 km zone around the town a no-arms area. A human rights agenda
was, in turn, integrated in the EUFOR mission through the appointment of a desig-
nated human rights adviser, the creation of a human rights monitoring system, and
the provision of human rights training to its own soldiers (Martin, 2007: 72). Fur-
thermore, EUPOL and EUSEC, as part of their role in advising the Congolese
authorities on police and army reform, were mandated to ‘promote policies com-
patible with human rights and international humanitarian law’ (Council Joint
Action 2005/355/CFSP; Council Joint Action 2007/405/CFSP). In 2009, the
mandate of EUPOL was expanded to also include the fight against sexual violence
and impunity (Council Joint Action 2009/769/CFSP). EUPOL also strongly advo-
cated for the concept of proximity policing within the PNC as a means to improve
police–citizen relations (Justaert, 2012: 224), and through this contributes to
strengthening human rights protection. In addition, the EU’s humanitarian assist-
ance has focused not only on the provision of relief but also expressly included the
pursuit of protection activities, such as assistance to victims of sexual and gender-
based violence, child protection, and encouraging the establishment of assistance
projects in isolated areas (‘protection by presence’). Last, in its Country Strategy
Papers and Council Conclusions on the DRC, the EU has on repeated occasions
expressed its commitment to combatting impunity for human rights abuses and its
support for the International Criminal Court’s investigations in the DRC (Council
Conclusion 10573/04, 14 June 2004; Council Conclusion 9375/06, 15 May 2006).
This formal commitment to human rights protection, however, has not suffi-
ciently translated into an improved human rights situation on the ground. While
the reason for this cannot solely be attributed to the EU – persistent insecurity in
eastern Congo, the nature of rebel-military integration processes, and a lack of
domestic political will to combat impunity are all key explanatory factors – it is
possible to point at two important shortcomings of EU policies in the DRC.
First, the restricted and short-term mandates of Artemis and EUFOR have
significantly limited their impact on the ground and ability to deliver human
rights protection, especially over the longer term. For instance, Artemis’ geo-
graphically limited deployment to Bunia meant it failed to impact violence in the
rest of Ituri. Even the improved security situation in Bunia was mostly cosmetic
and did not prevent the resumption of violence after the mission’s withdrawal,
which is hardly surprising considering the mission was only on the ground for
three months. As Morsut (2009: 264) observes: “the time limitation left Bunia as
a ‘weapons-invisible’ zone, rather than a ‘weapons-free zone’ ”. The CSDP mis-
sions in Congo thus attest to a limited commitment by the EU to mobilize sus-
tained credible military force to enforce human rights protection.
Second, the EU has tended to adopt a ‘soft’, mostly declaratory approach to
the human rights and impunity problem in the DRC. It has been reluctant to
c onsistently pressure the Congolese authorities on rampant human rights abuses,
particularly during the transition years when concerns with stabilization domi-
nated. While the EU has been a strong advocate for ending SGBV in the DRC, it
has been much less vocal and active on other pressing human rights concerns,
such as arbitrary detentions, the protection of human rights defenders, and the
poor human rights behaviour by the national police and army. EU sanctions have
been in force on the DRC since 2005 but it is only since 2016 that these have
expressly targeted individuals for their role in human rights abuses or violations
of international humanitarian law (Council Regulation 2016/1165). Moreover,
the EU has struggled to integrate the fight against impunity within its broader
reform policies in the DRC, particularly with regards to security sector reform
(SSR) and DDR. While resistance by Congolese actors to such efforts consti-
tuted an important impediment, the EU’s decision to focus on a technical,
capacity-building approach and eschew a more political engagement on security
and human rights issues also limited its impact in terms of human rights
protection.
Restoration of law and order

EU policies in the DRC have strongly prioritized the reform of the security
forces (police and army) and the rehabilitation of the justice sector. These were
seen as important preconditions for re-establishing state authority and law and
order, and therefore the promotion of peace and democracy. Effective security
and justice systems were seen as central to improving the physical security of
civilians and reducing state predation against the population. Alongside the
EUSEC and EUPOL missions, the EU also engaged in justice sector reform. It
undertook an audit of the justice sector in 2004 and was a driving force behind
the creation of a Comité Mixte de Justice, a donor-government coordination
mechanism to support domestic judicial reform. It further set up justice recon-
struction projects, first in Bunia in 2004 and later expanded to the €15 million
Rejusco (Restauration de la justice à l’est du Congo) project. The EU also
invested €20 million in court rehabilitation projects in the western provinces of
Bandundu, Bas-Congo, and Kinshasa, and provided funding for the mobile court
project aimed at improving access to justice in remote and conflict-affected areas
in eastern Congo.
EU policies in the security and justice sectors have made important achieve-
ments in specific areas – such as the rehabilitation of courts and armouries,
reforming the chain of payment in the army, and capacity-building of judicial
officials. Particularly in the justice sector, it is clear that EU engagement (along-
side that of other donors) has been key in pushing forwards judicial reforms,
resulting in the adoption of new legislation and the provision of increased
resources to the justice sector (Vircoulon, 2009). This has contributed to a pro-
gressive increase in domestic trials, particularly with regards to sexual violence
(Lake, 2014). However, on a broader scale, improvements in law and order are,
at best, very modest throughout the DRC. Important systemic weaknesses
persist, such as poor human rights practices by the security forces, and limited
access to justice. Furthermore:
the reform of the legal system did little or nothing to stem corruption, to
mitigate the delays in cases coming to trial, to address the low number of
judgments executed or to make the functioning of the legal system more
transparent to the people.
(Rubbers and Gallez, 2012: 84)
Users still have to deal with a formal justice system that is experienced as driven
by corruption, predation and coercion, with outcomes of court cases being unpre-
dictable, unfair and very expensive (Vinck and Pham, 2014: 67–68). Because
EU reform policies have tended to be compartimentalized and fragmented – for
instance, police reform efforts have only focused on a few PNC units while
Rejusco was heavily oriented towards infrastructure projects – their effects have
also mostly been localized. These policies have consequently struggled to give
impulse to broader and deeper reforms. Difficulties in building effective bridges
between the justice and security components of EU interventions have further
constrained the impact of its policies (Davis, 2015). In light of the recent draw-
down of its security and justice reform missions, it remains to be seen if EU
reforms will manage to have a sustainable impact. The heavy-handed police
response to protests in Kinshasa and Goma in 2015–2016 and during the crime
control Likofi Operation in 2014, as well as reports that some courts rehabili-
tated under the Rejusco project have already been abandoned as they were
poorly constructed and did not respond to operational needs, raises scepticism on
this front.
Try and fail? Constraints of the EU security and peace

policies in the DRC
Expecting that the EU alone can change the complex security and socio-political
situation in the DRC is obviously unrealistic. The challenges that need to be
addressed are huge while EU resources and capabilities are limited, as is its
ability to exert influence on various politico-military actors in the DRC. Never-
theless, three key factors have contributed to constraining the impact of EU pol-
icies on human security in DRC: the EU’s flawed assumptions about
institution-building as a vehicle for change, the EU’s ambivalent role as a diplo-
matic actor, and domestic resistance to change.
First, EU policies rely on a number of premises about how peace and human
security should be achieved, which are ill-aligned with the complexity of the
larger context of intervention and are disconnected from governance realities in
the DRC. EU policies have prioritized institution-building, based on the under-
standing that effective state institutions are a guarantor of stability and security
and the means though which legitimate political authority can be built. This
explains the focus of EU policies on the reconstruction of state capacity (to
deliver services and security), on improving management and accountability of
state institutions, on strengthening rule of law institutions, and on the organiza-
tion of free and fair elections. These assumptions about processes of change are,
however, ill-adapted to the Congolese context where the state itself is a major
source of instability and acts on the basis of extractive, abusive and repressive
logics. The dynamics of (state) governance in the DRC are also removed from
Western conceptions of governance, instead aligning more with what Alex de
Waal has described as a political marketplace in which the logic of monetized
transactional, competitive and informal politics dominates over institutionalized
politics (de Waal, 2015). The risk for donor statebuilding interventions in such
contexts is that the institutions they seek to strengthen or rebuild are coopted by
the logics of such political marketplace. At best, this means their reform projects
will flounder – unless the reforms in question manage to win the support of
powerful brokers within the political marketplace, and for as long as that broker
remains powerful or interested in the reforms. At worst, their institutional reform
projects will be distorted and repurposed to serve ends that are far removed from
the donor’s intentions, and may even contribute to violence.
This dynamic has clearly been present in the DRC, where the EU has (unwit-
tingly) supported the consolidation of a violent patronage-based system of gov-
ernance. According to Froitzheim, “the EU is focused on state-building in a
context where there is no state to build” but where instead there exists a “highly
dysfunctional and kleptocratic Congolese quasi-state” ruled by an elite driven by
personal interests (Froitzheim et al., 2011: 65). EU strategies have not been able
to reverse existing governance conditions and practices and have not focused on
structurally changing the extractive character of Congo’s politico-administrative
system. Because of structural and sociocultural constraints on the ground, such
as the dominance of practices of extortion and predation, competing structures
and sources of authority, and the existence of different networks of patronage
and political and economic control, EU reform policies have struggled to
improve not only the formal but also the informal legitimacy, or broader societal
acceptance, of state institutions. Even more, EU policies risk having an opposite
effect and reinforce the capture of state structures by domestic political elites.
A clear example is the reform of the security sector, which did not reverse the
extractive character of security services even if several programmes tried to limit
the direct control of commanders over resources and cut patronage links between
commanders and recruits, both in the police and the army. International inter-
ventions for the purpose of providing security cannot be justified à priori. Instead
these require legitimacy among its supposed beneficiaries. Yet, despite EU and
other donor strategies, security services continue to exploit their authority to levy
unofficial fines, taxes, and fees in part due to the embezzlements of resources by
their superiors. In many cases, these services de facto constitute a security risk
themselves rather than providing protection and security. As a consequence,
citizens mistrust and feel increasingly abandoned by the state. The omnipresent
popular reflex of self-protection echoes a long tradition of ‘fending-for-yourself ’
in the DRC, which is reinforced in the current context. Some of these popular
responses today are being institutionalized or supported by donor strategies and
state policies, thus reinforcing a context of multi-layered security arrangements
(Baker, 2010). The risk of such a ‘multi-layered approach’ is that it may con-
tribute to a further fragmentation of the landscape of security provision, with a
negative longer-term effect on security conditions (Vlassenroot, Hoffmann and
Büscher, 2015).
The reasons for the persistence of such practices are diverse and complex and it
has to be recognized that the EU’s ability to produce a transformation at this level is
inherently limited, due to a combination of political and resource constraints. Not-
withstanding, the EU’s focus on state- and capacity-building has contributed to
limiting its ability to produce change because of the underestimation of the complex
nature of political and institutional change in the DRC. The focus on capacity-
building relies on the assumption that formal institutional and legislative changes
equate with changes in institutional practices and individual behaviour, thereby dis-
counting the role of political factors or institutional culture in maintaining poor gov-
ernance and abusive behaviour. For instance, corruption is not merely driven by
basic economic needs but also serves broader political and strategic interests geared
towards maintaining the ruling regime in power. Corruption is thus not a ‘dysfunc-
tion’ but serves a clear political function within the Congolese state. Reform pol-
icies that only focus on changes in capabilities and material conditions are therefore
unlikely to produce wider systemic change. There is also a risk that policies focused
on capacity-building rather than genuine reform will be misappropriated by
domestic elites to reinforce their own positions. Particularly in the security sector
this runs the risk of consolidating certain power configurations and increasing the
ability of security forces to commit abuses (Davis, 2015: 111; Rayroux and Wilén,
2014: 38). The EU’s focus on stabilization (as reflected by its prioritization of elec-
tions and political accommodation) has further heightened this problem.
A second factor, which has constrained the effect of EU policies on the
ground, is the ambivalent and progressively waning role of the EU as a diplo-
matic actor in the DRC. Immediately following the conclusion of the 2003 com-
prehensive peace agreement and throughout the political transition process, the
EU enjoyed a certain degree of political influence. This was in part linked to the
credibility it enjoyed in Kinshasa as a result of the resumption of its develop-
ment cooperation, its large financial contribution to the electoral process, its
membership in the CIAT, and the initially very active role played by the EU
Special Representative. However, since 2006 the EU has seen its role and influ-
ence as a diplomatic and conflict management actor in the DRC progressively
decline, while joint donor-strategies on strategic priorities have little by little dis-
appeared. Despite the variety of instruments available to the EU, allowing it to
play a significant role throughout the life cycle of a crisis – before the crisis with
conflict-prevention, during a crisis through its crisis-management tools, such as
military deployments, diplomatic pressure and humanitarian intervention, and
after the crisis with long-term development and peace-building policies
(Hoebeke et al., 2007; Martinelli, 2006) – today the EU is no longer ‘perceived
as a credible actor in African conflict management’ (Gegout, 2009: 403).
An important factor here has been the absence of a comprehensive political
strategy on the part of the EU towards the DRC (Piccolino, 2010: 136). The EU’s
approach has been fragmented across an array of technical issue areas. This has
made it difficult for the EU to profile itself as a credible diplomatic actor, espe-
cially as it has on occasion also had to contend with disagreements between EU
member states about which policy to pursue in the DRC. This has most clearly
come to the fore in discussions about the deployment of CSDP missions in the
DRC. While strongly supported by France and Belgium, such missions have faced
reluctance on the part of countries such as Germany and the UK and indifference
on the part of other states. This resulted in a curtailment of the scope and capabil-
ities of certain missions (this was particularly the case for EUFOR Congo) or the
outright failure to set up a mission following the outbreak of a new major security
crisis in the North Kivu province in 2008. Such disagreements have thus hampered
the ability of the EU to deploy strong and credible missions.
At the same time, the EU’s visibility as a diplomatic actor has strongly
depended on the activism of countries such as France or Belgium and of high-
profile individuals such as the EUSRs Aldo Ajello and Roeland van de Geer or
EU Commissioner Louis Michel. The decision in 2011 to abolish the position of
EUSR for the Great Lakes has curtailed the EU’s ability to project a leading
diplomatic role in the DRC. Although this function has been taken over by the
Senior Coordinator for the Great Lakes region within the European External
Action Service, the decision to double-hat the person appointed to this role sent
out a message that the EU was stepping back as a frontline diplomatic actor in
the country, thereby reducing political access and the EU capacity to mediate
and manage conflict. The Senior Coordinator does work closely with other inter-
national Great Lakes envoys to respond to ongoing political and security devel-
opments in the DRC. The EU also involved itself in the 2008 Goma process (the
EUPOL and EUSEC missions were given a mandate to support the implementa-
tion of the agreement), but its role was mostly secondary, and it has not been
involved in further processes aimed at addressing the conflict in eastern DRC
(Davis, 2015). While this partly results from increasing attempts on the part of
the Congolese authorities to sidestep external involvement in the country
(whether by the EU, the UN, or Western bilateral donors), there is also a growing
political disengagement on the EU’s part from the DRC (though its development
assistance to the DRC remains high) as a result of growing disillusion with the
lack of progress achieved in the DRC and the emergence of newer security crises
that are of greater strategic importance to the EU. The political crisis resulting
from the postponement of the 2016 presidential elections, and the growing viol-
ence and state repression that has ensued, has prompted the EU to pay renewed
attention to the country. In December 2016 and May 2017, the EU adopted sanc-
tions against several Congolese officials (this initiative was primarily the result
of the diplomatic efforts of a few EU member states), however the limited
impact of its efforts so far attests to its waning diplomatic clout.
Last, domestic political constraints have also played an important role in
curtailing the effects and sustainable impacts of EU policies. The absence of
political will for reform, weak capacities within the Congolese administration,
and frequent changes in government ministers have made it difficult for the EU
to give an impulse to broader and sustainable reforms. The limited political will
on the part of Congolese state authorities to engage in donor-driven/supported
interventions and to implement genuine national reform policies have been par-
ticularly problematic. It has limited national appropriation of EU-initiated reform
processes and created significant blockages in the implementation of reforms,
particularly in the security sector. As the former head of EUPOL Jean-Paul Rikir
observed, ‘the political context in the DRC exerts a significant influence on the
degree of uneven appropriation [of reforms] by the Congolese authorities’ (cited
in Plauchut, 2015: 10). In such a context, there is only so much EU policies can
achieve in terms of improving governance and human security conditions. More-
over, the case of the DRC exemplifies the challenges in promoting governance
change and reforms, particularly in the security sector, in an unstable political
environment and while armed conflict is ongoing. Because domestic elites and
armed groups are still vying for power and control over the state, the political
stakes involved in security sector reform are incredibly high and risk creating
dynamics of resistance or misappropriation of externally driven reform efforts.
Overall, while EU policies in the DRC have achieved some important suc-
cesses, such as the short-term shoring up of security provisions through its CSDP
missions at critical times of (potential) instability or providing key stimulus and
resources for judicial reforms, it should also be acknowledged that they have
struggled to produce deeper, sustainable change, particularly in the security
sector and in terms of democratization and governance improvement. Realism
impels us to recognize that outside actors such as the EU cannot produce or
create changes in deeply entrenched governance structures ex nihilo, but can
merely encourage and provide resources to accompany domestically driven pro-
cesses of reform, and that such processes of change will be slow to unfold and
take root. Nevertheless, where EU policies contribute to creating conditions of
negative hybrid peace or are captured and misappropriated by local actors in
order to sustain predatory systems, there is a need to reflect on the appropriate-
ness of these policies.
Conclusion
EU policies in the DRC have been lauded for heralding a shift in the EU’s com-
mitment to developing stronger conflict management capabilities and deploying
a broad set of military and civilian instruments in support of protecting civilians
and the stabilization of conflict areas beyond its own borders and immediate
neighbourhood. The EU has, to some extent, pursued an agenda of human
security in the DRC without being clearly articulated in its discourse. However,
in this chapter we argue that the ability of the EU to effectively deliver on this
agenda has been limited and we suggest three reasons for this: the EU’s flawed
assumptions about institution-building as a vehicle for change, the EU’s ambiva-
lent and progressively waning role as a diplomatic actor in the DRC, and
domestic resistance to change. If the EU is to pursue an agenda of second-
generation human security, some lessons can be drawn from its past experiences
in the DRC.
A first key consideration is the need to focus on the establishment of legiti-
mate political authority in a manner that goes beyond mere institution-building
exercises.3 In contexts where the logic of the political marketplace and predatory
governance dominate, placing the onus on building the effectiveness, rather than
the legitimacy, of state institutions is unlikely to produce sustained results. The
DRC experience shows that the assumption that state effectiveness will produce
state legitimacy does not work. Strengthening institutional effectiveness may
only be achievable after the violent and predatory logic which underpins many
governance modes in the DRC is addressed. Similarly, free and fair elections
have opened up some democratic space but have had little effect in terms of
either improving governance or building legitimate political authority. More
worryingly, a focus on institutional effectiveness can have the unintended effect
of shifting the incentive structures of various political, military and economic
elites competing within a political marketplace and of entrenching the power of
some of these actors, ultimately feeding into dynamics of violence and conflict.
A second consideration is that the reliance on elite bargains to resolve armed
conflicts or political crises does not necessarily offer a guarantee for stability,
and therefore should not take centre stage in human-security focused policies.
The implication of these observations is three-fold. First, EU policies need to
be contextually grounded. That is, context should orient the identification of
policy instruments, alongside more practical considerations such as EU goals
and interests, EU capabilities, and national reform strategies. Such an assessment
should be mainstreamed into all aspects and throughout the life-time of an EU
intervention in a given country. On a regular basis, performance of EU policies
should be assessed against such context analysis in order to identify in a timely
manner if EU actions are producing unintended negative effects. Such context
analysis should not be limited to a broad-brush analysis of conflict drivers, key
actors, and the political, socioeconomic, and geopolitical country environment.
Rather, it should also include network analysis; the identification of local and
informal governance practices that may have emerged within and alongside the
state (which, dependent on context, may undermine EU reform efforts or may
instead point towards sources for local resilience on which the EU can build);
the identification of ‘peace constituencies’ or ‘reform constituencies’ both within
and outside existing state structures; and an understanding of the nature of gov-
ernance, political interactions, and state–society relations in a given country.
Compared to the period when EU policies in the DRC were first put in place,
capacities within the EU to carry out such assessments have been developed, but
the creation of the European External Action Service (EASS) and the Directorate
for Conflict Prevention and Security provides further opportunities to consoli-
date such expertise over the long term.
Second, the EU should identify clear goalposts for assessing EU policies.
Importantly, these should not be based merely on the internally oriented fulfilment
of institutional benchmarks but rather on broader change objectives. From a human
security perspective this means assessing EU policies in terms of the impact they
have on the security of individuals in the country concerned. The implication of
this is that political stabilization or security sector reform should not be treated as
end goals but as a possible means to achieve the security of individuals. It also
means placing human rights issues at the centre of EU policies.
Last, when confronted with a lack of domestic political will to implement
reforms, protect human rights, and more broadly deliver on the basic human
security needs of populations, the EU needs to develop stronger benchmarks and
consequent sanction regimes that directly affect the different support networks
and mechanisms of ruling elites. In the absence of a political will or ability to
impose sanctions, the EU should at a minimum reconsider how it engages with
state actors that systematically oppose reform efforts or when it appears that its
interventions are producing unintended negative consequences. In some
instances, it may be more judicious for the EU to withdraw or reorient its
engagement in a country than to persist in funding reform efforts that are
unlikely to produce desirable outcomes.
Notes
1 Based on OECD-DAC figures, available at www.oecd.org/dac/stats/data.htm.
2 This non-traditional and ‘strategically vague’ focus of the EU’s CSDP missions in the
DRC was one of the reasons why Germany was reluctant to take the lead of the
EUFOR Congo mission (Schmitt 2012: 67).
3 On the importance of focusing on state legitimacy in state- and peacebuilding pro-
cesses, see Roberts (2008) and Call (2012).
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6 A human security strategy for the
European Union in the
Horn of Africa and Red Sea
Alex de Waal and Rachel Ibreck
Introduction
World powers have historically identified the Horn of Africa (HoA) as the troubled
hinterland that overshadows the world’s shipping lanes. Over the decades it has
been a place where traditional, hard security calculations are at their sharpest,
where power, territory and identity are sharply contested. The three large countries
of the 1980s – Ethiopia, Somalia and Sudan – are now de jure five and de facto six
countries. Each separation was violent. It is unlikely that this territorial dispensa-
tion will be final. Every major interstate boundary is contested and most have been
transgressed in anger by state armies. Outsiders intervene at their peril. The Ethio-
Somalia border war in 1977 caused one of the most dramatic reconfiguration of
power relations of the Cold War era, while another border war in 1998–2000,
between Ethiopia and Eritrea, caused the highest number of battlefield casualties
of the post-Cold War era. Al-Qaida grew up in the HoA: its leadership lived in
Khartoum in the 1990s and it conducted operations across the region. The US and
European powers have become entangled in vast and unending counter-terror
operations and maritime security patrols. Egyptian leaders have hinted at the
modern world’s first war over water, against Ethiopia on account of the latter
damming the Nile. In 2017, the HoA was the location of 40,600 peacekeepers
serving with the United Nations, 44 per cent of the global total (United Nations
2017). If we add the further 22,000 serving with the African Union in Somalia, 55
per cent of the total of all world peacekeepers are deployed there.
The interaction between geostrategic interests, national rivalries, and local
conflicts – three or more distinct levels, each of which follows its own political
logics – makes for extraordinary complexity. A mathematical analogy helps. A
single pendulum produces such predictable movement that it can be used for
timekeeping. But two linked pendulums produce such incalculable complexity
that mathematicians call it ‘chaotic’ movement. In a similar way, the intersecting
conflict dynamics of the HoA defy any analytical model, let alone prediction.
The HoA is also the locus of some of the world’s most pressing human
security challenges. In 2017, the Horn and Yemen comprised three of the four
places where the UN issued famine warnings (O’Brien 2017), and nearly half of
the seventy million people in need of emergency food assistance worldwide
104 A. de Waal and R. Ibreck
lived in this area (FEWSNET 2017). Had Ethiopia not mounted one of the
world’s most successful drought relief operations in 2015–2016, these numbers
would be twice as high. The Horn is also one of the biggest generators of mass
distress migrants – refugees, asylum seekers, desperate migrants, internally dis-
placed persons – in the world, and is one of the major hosts of these people.
Armed conflicts are the main cause of famine and mass exodus. A human
security strategy for the HoA should be an integrated strategy. But it must also
take account of the systemic complexity of the region, and the fact that no
outside agent can seek to analyse, let alone manage, the challenges. The people
of the region are also unable to master their destiny, but they have better under-
standing and more cogent engagement than any outsiders, as well as the right to
determine their own future.
Defining the challenge

There are two approaches to human security (MacFarlane and Khong 2006). One
focuses primarily on protection from organized violence, and the second on pro-
tecting and promoting a range of human capabilities. The EU framework for
human security combines elements of both (Barcelona Group 2004).
The first kind of human security doctrine shifts focus from sovereign states to
individuals. This follows the framing of ‘sovereignty as responsibility’ (Roth-
child and Deng 1996) and the report of the International Commission on Inter-
vention and State Sovereignty (ICISS 2001) that promoted the norm of the
‘responsibility to protect’.
The second approach is associated with the broadening of economic develop-
ment to include a spectrum of human wellbeing issues, human empowerment
and resilience in the face of shocks and stresses (UNDP 1994; Alkire 2005). In
the Report of the Human Security Commission (2003), Sadaka Ogata and
Amartya Sen articulate a distinctive view, in which ‘[a]chieving human security
includes not just protecting people but also empowering people to fend for them-
selves’ (p. 4). In a notable divergence from the ICISS, they emphasize:
People’s ability to act on their own behalf – and on behalf of others – is the
second key to human security. Fostering that ability differentiates human
security from state security, from humanitarian work and even from much
development work. Empowerment is important because people develop
their potential as individuals and as communities. Strengthening peoples’
abilities to act on their own behalf is also instrumental to human security.
The EU’s strategic framework for its engagement with the HoA, adopted in
2011, foregrounds human security, while recognizing the serious political instab-
ility in the region and Europe’s strategic interests. The framework begins:
The political evolution of the Horn of Africa over the past 50 years has been
unusually turbulent. The objective of the European Union is therefore to
The Horn of Africa 105
support the people of the region in achieving greater peace, stability,
security, prosperity and accountable government.
(Council of the European Union 2011)
It goes on to identify both ‘hard’ security interests (such as the safety of shipping
lanes, mass migration and terrorism) and human welfare and poverty reduction.
The overriding concern of the governments of the Horn is political survival,
often over the short term. Successful politicians are experts at management of
the ‘political marketplace’ – the transactions that ensure political loyalties and
services in return for material reward (de Waal 2015). Most countries are
financed by rents, including oil (South Sudan and Sudan), and security
cooperation with the US or Gulf countries (Djibouti, Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan).
International aid is also a source of rent, though less important than in the
1990s. Political leaders have a well-proven track record of manipulating and
exploiting any external initiatives to their advantage. In the Cold War, Somalia
and Ethiopia used superpower patronage and arms to advance their own par-
ticular interests, nearly dragging the US and USSR into a war in 1977. Gov-
ernments in the Horn and Red Sea have similarly instrumentalized the ‘war on
terror’ for their own purposes.
Ethiopia is alone in the region in having a well-articulated long-term political
and economic programme, of the ‘democratic developmental state’. This entails,
inter alia, an ‘economy-first’ national security strategy (FDRE 2002, pp. 5 and
23), which envisages accelerated economic growth as the foundation of national
survival.
Civil society has struggled to obtain voice and influence, and is weaker than
elsewhere in Africa. African civil society networks played a leading role in for-
mulating the agenda for creating the AU at the turn of the millennium. Key
norms adopted by the AU, including the ban on unconstitutional changes in gov-
ernment, the principle of non-indifference to grievous crimes, and people’s parti-
cipation in the activities of the Union, came about in large part through civil
society pressure. Subsequently, African governments have reasserted their
primacy over all aspects of the AU, and the role of civil society has diminished.
Today, the AU and IGAD mechanisms for engaging civil society are weakly uti-
lized, and the governments of the HoA are almost uniformly hostile to civil
society (Bereketeab 2009; International Center for Not-for-Profit Law 2015).
Nonetheless there is sufficient civil society mobilization for citizens’ priorities to
be known (Life and Peace Institute 2014).
Geographical and historical background

The term ‘Horn of Africa’ is an external label. It has been used by the great
powers of the day to refer to a region that has geo-strategic concern, because of
its position adjacent to the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden and controlling the head-
waters of the Blue Nile. ‘Horn of Africa’ is not used by the people of the region
themselves.
Definitions of the HoA vary. For the EU, the HoA is officially defined as the
eight member states of the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development
(IGAD), namely: Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan,
Sudan and Uganda. However, we must add the de facto reality of the self-
declared but unrecognized Republic of Somaliland. Also, Kenya and Uganda,
while full members of IGAD, consider their membership of the East African
Community more important. In this chapter, Kenya and Uganda will be con-
sidered only in passing.
A region of unparalleled diversity

There are few parts of the world with greater diversity. The peoples of the HoA
have some of the world’s oldest and most complex civilizations: Sudan has more
and older pyramids than Egypt; Ethiopia has ancient Semitic languages and
Hebraic faiths, and some of the longest-established Christian communities in the
world; the Prophet Mohammed sent his companions to find asylum on the
southern shores of the Red Sea; and the city of Harar is one of Islam’s holiest
sites. The region today is evenly divided between Christians and Muslims, with
significant numbers of ‘noble spiritual believers’ (to use the apt terminology of
the 1973 Sudanese constitution, more accurate and respectful than the
commonly-used term ‘animists’), notably in South Sudan and south-west Ethio-
pia. Ethiopia possesses several indigenous scripts, and there is more linguistic
diversity within the Nuba Mountains of Sudan than in the entire African conti-
nent south of the Equator. While the Somali people, spread over four or five
countries in the HoA (and now with a global diaspora) possess a common lan-
guage and culture, there are also significant diverse minorities in Somalia, espe-
cially in the riverian areas of the south of the country. And the Rift Valley is of
course the site of the oldest identified human ancestors on the planet.
Most of the peoples of the HoA have multiple identities: they have allegiance
to nations, to ‘nationalities’ (the Marxist language of historically-constituted
identity remains current in Ethiopia, which has a constitution, adopted in 1995,
which echoes the Soviet Union in awarding its constituent nationalities the right
of self-determination), to ethnicities, to faiths, to livelihoods and to communities.
These identities are multiple not only in that people can call on different identity
markers depending on context, but also in that individuals and communities are
flexible and creative in the ways in which they self-identify. Modernist political
projects that try to enforce unitary ethnic or religious identities on people, do
violence to the subtle and flexible nature of allegiances.
A poor region, with fast but uneven growth

For decades, the HoA has been synonymous with famine – and may become so
again. In the 1970s and 80s, Ethiopia became notorious for its famines, while
Sudan continues to suffer humanitarian emergencies associated with war and
mass atrocity, notably in Darfur in 2004–2005. Food security crises in Ethiopia
in 2002 and 2015 have not led to mass starvation, but the country remains vul-
nerable. Somalia suffered the most severe famine of the twenty-first century thus
far in 2011, with 258,000 excess deaths (Checchi and Robinson 2013).
Vulnerability to famine is a function of politics: the HoA’s famines are
mass atrocities perpetrated in the context of war, repression and violations of
international humanitarian law. All the famines cited have been acts of men
rather than nature. The 2011 famine in Somalia is a particularly salient
example, in that not only did the extremist group Al-Shabaab impose punitive
exploitative measures on the population under its control and create extreme
difficulties for humanitarian agencies, but US counter-terror legislation com-
pounded the humanitarian challenge by criminalizing any relief efforts that
might have provided even modest material assistance to Al-Shabaab (Maxwell
and Majid 2016).
The HoA has some of the worst human development indicators in the world.
According to the 2014 data (UNDP 2015), out of 187 countries in the world,
Eritrea ranks 182, Ethiopia 173, Djibouti 170 and Sudan 166, while Somalia and
South Sudan are unranked due to lack of data. However, rapid economic growth
and progress towards the Millennium Development Goals, especially in Ethio-
pia, have meant that today’s young people in the Horn have far better life
chances than their parents or grandparents. Ethiopia’s GDP per capita (PPP) has
doubled since 2000 (from $612 to $1,218), while Eritrea’s has declined ($1,446
to $1,180) (World Bank 2018). Sudan’s GDP per capita has increased over the
same period – corresponding with its oil boom – from $2,277 to $3,370.
It is also a region of striking inequalities. Within Sudan alone, there is a tre-
mendous disparity between the levels of income and services in metropolitan
Khartoum, and the rural peripheries. While the capital city is a middle-income
enclave, many parts of rural Sudan are among the least developed places on the
planet. Somalia has achieved remarkable economic growth even during the years
of state collapse (Leeson 2007), but conflict-affected areas remain famine-prone
(Maxwell and Majid 2016).
In one respect, the diversity of the Horn has been turned to advantage. That is
efforts at regional economic integration. The countries of the region have radic-
ally different resource endowments, in terms of agriculture, water, minerals, and
potential for power. Ethiopia has identified poverty reduction as the centre of its
national security strategy and to that end has embarked upon a policy of acceler-
ated economic growth, which includes ambitious programmes of infrastructural
links to its neighbours, notably transport and power grids. This integration has
not, however, led to the dismantling of barriers to trade or the free movement of
people, as the disparities in economic development would, it is feared, dis-
advantage the less developed countries, notably Ethiopia itself. Only Eritrea –
isolated both by its own choice and by the efforts of Ethiopia – has failed to
benefit from the rapid growth of the region’s infrastructure and income. Acceler-
ated growth also brings significant tensions, notably over land (with conflicts
arising from large-scale land acquisition in all countries) and water (notably the
disputes over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile).
The HoA is vulnerable to environmental crisis, exacerbated by climate
change. This may emerge as the greatest threat to human security in the region
(Admassu et al. 2014), though the impacts are expected to be highly variable
across different countries and ecological-climatic zones. Ethiopia has pioneered
the global South’s strategies for approaching responses to climate change (FDRE
2011; Kaur 2013). There is a pressing need for the HoA to develop a coordinated
response to the threats posed by climate change, especially one that engages the
people of the region in the discussion.
A region defined by geo-strategic concerns

The HoA has historically been defined by its political troubles: it is where the
world’s great powers are obliged, against their wishes, to take an interest in regional
politics. This is important: discussions about ‘the Horn’ are framed by how it causes
problems for the rest of the world, and the corollary of how great power engage-
ment in the region complicates its politics and prolongs or escalates its conflicts.
The HoA shot to geo-strategic significance after the opening of the Suez
Canal in 1869. The Red Sea became the vital artery for trade between Europe
and Asia, and to this day it carries about 13 per cent of world trade. The biggest
prize was Egypt, and the Egyptians themselves as well as the colonial powers
who believed that whoever controlled the Nile headwaters, would have the
leverage to control Egypt (Moorhead 1962). This generated an axis of imperial
territorial claims along the Nile Valley. As more than 80 per cent of the Nile
waters come from the Blue Nile, Sobat and Tekezze rivers that rise in the Ethio-
pian highlands, the highest stakes were there, and the Ethiopian rulers were
adept and ruthless in maintaining their own independence and also joining the
colonial land-grab, albeit as a junior party (Erlich 1996).
The southern gateway to the Red Sea (the Bab al Mandab) also became a
theatre for imperial contestation, with the British occupying Aden and Somali-
land, the French occupying Djibouti, and the Italians taking the Eritrean littoral.
This has been an even more fractious zone of contestation (Aliboni 1985).
Ironically, all the powers share the same core interest in keeping the shipping
lanes open. But there has never been a mechanism for them to come to agree-
ment on how to achieve this common goal.
The legacy of the imperial-era carve-up was manifest decades later in the
fractious territorial dispensation during the post-World War Two decolonization,
which denied rights of self-determination to Somalis whose lands had been
annexed to Ethiopia and Kenya, to Eritreans, and to South Sudanese (Lewis
1983). A further twist to this tale occurred with the Somali invasion of Ethiopia
in 1977–1978, in which the United States and USSR switched their Cold War
clients. This was only one of two moments in the Cold War (the first being the
Congo Crisis) at which an African war threatened super-power confrontation.
Among other things, this illustrated the extent to which the US and USSR were
unable to dictate the behaviour of their purported client regimes, but instead
were manipulated into supporting national agendas.
The stakes in the Red Sea were further complicated by the Arab–Israeli con-
frontation, which a Saudi-led coalition intended to turn into an ‘Arab Lake’ at
the expense of the Israelis, who in response turned to an alliance with Ethiopia.
In the 1980s, Sudan was for the first time referred to as part of the HoA, as it
became dragged into the subregional Cold War, on the American side. Sudan is
the pivot of the Nile Valley and also has a Red Sea coastline, and the famine of
1984–1985 meant that it shared the humanitarian limelight with Ethiopia. Khar-
toum’s sponsorship of militant Islam in the 1990s prompted a regional coalition
of ‘new leaders’ in Eritrea, Ethiopia and Uganda to unite against it, earning the
plaudits and backing of the US. Following the genocide in Rwanda, the new
Rwandese Patriotic Front government in that country became an honorary
member of the ‘frontline states’ and ‘new breed’ of African leaders, and in
recognition of this, United States Agency for International Development
(USAID) launched a ‘Greater Horn of Africa Initiative’ that included Rwanda,
Burundi and DRC as well as the IGAD countries (de Waal 2004). This nomen-
clature did not last: Rwanda and Burundi are normally classed as part of the
‘Great Lakes’, though this broader definition is found in the World Bank Horn of
Africa Initiative.
In 2003, the US established Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, as the headquarters
of the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HoA), the US mili-
tary’s only permanent presence on the African continent. It was initially under
CENTCOM and was transferred to AFRICOM in 2008. From Djibouti, the US
flies aircraft and drones on missions in Yemen and Somalia. The US has six
other drone bases in the Horn (Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya) and one in the
Seychelles. France also maintains a Foreign Legion base in Djibouti, and China
has recently signed a lease on a base there. Russia is actively seeking a foothold
on the Red Sea coast too. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has acquired rights
to the Eritrean port and airbase at Assab, which it uses for missions in the
Yemeni war.
The crisis over Somali maritime piracy and the transnational challenge of the
militant group Al-Shabaab, brought the focus of international concern back to its
more traditional axis of the Red Sea. Recent tensions between Ethiopia and
Egypt over the Nile Waters also revived concerns over the regional politics of
the Nile Valley. These have, however, been managed with some success by the
World Bank’s Nile Basin Initiative, and in March 2015, Egypt, Ethiopia and
Sudan signed a declaration of principles over the waters of the eastern Nile
Basin. The outbreak of civil war in Yemen, generated renewed strategic interest
in the Red Sea: this accompanied Saudi plans for a Red Sea fleet, the creation of
a Saudi-led coalition of the willing to intervene in Yemen, and most recently
Egyptian–Saudi pressure which led to Djibouti, Somalia and Sudan all cutting
ties with Iran. Meanwhile, international concern with the mass exodus of young
Eritreans seeking refuge and a better life in the neighbouring countries, in Israel
and in Europe has increased. One particularly shocking dimension to this is
human trafficking, ransoming and extortion of refugees, and human organ
harvesting.
This history of security issues in the HoA has one element in common: the
problems, the agendas, the goals and the terms of the debate are set by outsiders,
in conformity with their interests. The EU strategic framework properly aims ‘to
support the people of the region in achieving greater peace, security [etc.]’: it is
critically important that this is not lip service but that the agenda and goals are
set through an inclusive process within the region.
A turbulent political marketplace

The HoA consists of small open economies at the margins of the world economy.
Their wellbeing and development is subject to the vagaries of the global markets
in oil, coffee, livestock and a handful of other commodities. They are also heavily
dependent on flows of funds from aid, remittances, and political and security
cooperation payments, which are also subject to the shifting political priorities
determined elsewhere. US policies on counter-terrorism can massively impact
remittances to Somalia, and Saudi and Emirati political cooperation policies can
similarly determine financial flows to Sudan, Eritrea and Somalia (de Waal 2015).
The Horn is influenced by extra-regional armed conflicts, notably in Yemen,
Libya, and central Africa. These are significant in several ways. First, they have
spill-over effects such as refugees. Second, IGAD member states are actively
involved in some of them (e.g. Sudan is a member of the Saudi–Egypt–UAE
coalition in Yemen; Sudan and South Sudan have forces directly or indirectly
involved in the Central African Republic (CAR)). This generates vested interests
and secondary disputes. For example, Sudan’s alignments with Egypt and Saudi
Arabia and the associated financial benefits received mean that it feels able to
spurn the African-Union (AU) on internal conflict resolution matters. The
Yemen–Eritrea dispute over the Hanish Islands, which led to a brief war in 1995,
has been formally settled but remains a source of friction still. Eritrea did not
restore diplomatic relations with Sanaa until early 2015, and provided training to
Houthi rebels until recently. In 2015, Eritrea tried vigorously but unsuccessfully
to present itself as the leading African partner for Saudi Arabia and the United
Arab Emirates over Yemen, but lost that role to Sudan.
The Horn has a long catalogue of inter-state boundary disputes, active and
latent, and other international conflicts, including countries sponsoring proxies
against one another, fighting bilateral disputes in the territory of a third country
(e.g. the Ethiopian attacks on Eritreans in Somalia in 2006), and non-state groups
that range over different territories (e.g. the Lord’s Resistance Army, which has
been active in Uganda, South Sudan, DRC and CAR, and the Justice and Equal-
ity Movement (JEM) which has been active in Sudan, Chad, CAR, Libya and
South Sudan, involving itself in internal conflicts in Chad and CAR at
minimum). Most of these inter-state military actions remained un-documented
and/or do not appear in the standard databases of conflicts, and so escape con-
ventional political science analysis (de Waal 2004). (A list of cross-border
violent incidents involving governments of the countries of the Horn between
1960 and 2015 runs to a minimum of 92 cases (Twagiramungu forthcoming).
The following are the seven major current cases of boundary disputes:
• Ethiopia–Eritrea: the most hotly disputed and politically salient unresolved

inter-state war;
• Eritrea–Djibouti: a boundary dispute that has led to war;
• Sudan–South Sudan (including armed conflict over Abyei, five other dis-
puted areas, and several areas claimed by South Sudan including Heglig);
• South Sudan–Kenya (a border dispute over the Ilemi Triangle, not currently
active);
• South Sudan–Uganda (South Sudan has made claims along the border,
which have led to local conflicts);
• Sudan–Egypt (conflict over the Halaib Triangle, which has intermittently
led to armed clashes; this dispute has the celebrated anomaly of the
‘unclaimed’ territory of Biir Tawiil);
• Somalia–Somaliland: the Somaliland Republic claims that its boundaries are
those of the former colonial territory, while the Somali region of Puntland
claims the areas inhabited by Daarood clans.
There are also political disputes/conflicts on many of these borders. Additionally,

Sudan and South Sudan are supporting one another’s rebels (for reasons only partly
associated with their boundary disputes); there is a proxy dispute between Sudan
and Uganda; and there is political competition between Ethiopia and Kenya (notably
over the Jubba Valley region of Somalia) and Ethiopia and Uganda (notably in
South Sudan). The AU Border Programme is seeking systematically to delineate
and demarcate borders and to minimize the potential for inter-state conflict.
The implication of the ubiquity of inter-state conflicts and contests, and the
involvement of neighbouring states in each and every internal conflict, means
that any peace negotiations to resolve an internal conflict requires (at minimum)
a pre-negotiation among the regional powers and stakeholders to resolve, or
accommodate, their political differences.
The most important internal conflicts are:
• Somalia: ongoing civil war/counterinsurgency of Federal Government of

Somalia against al-Shabaab, bearing in mind that should this conflict be
resolved there are numerous other latent disputes within Somalia that could
become active;
• South Sudan: the civil war has continued and indeed expanded despite the
August 2015 peace agreement mediated by IGAD;
• Sudan: ongoing armed conflict with the SPLM-North in the ‘two areas’ of
Blue Nile and Southern Kordofan, and with various Darfurian groups
including the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) (Minawi), SLA (Abdel-Wahid)
and JEM.
There are numerous local conflicts, most of which have not been systematically
mapped.
• South Sudan: IGAD identified a baseline of ninety-four local conflicts in
South Sudan (IGAD 2013).
• Ethiopia: IGAD baseline study (unpublished) identified a baseline of sixty-
eight local conflicts, many of them involving land ownership and
boundaries.
• Sudan: Darfur is a patchwork of multiple local conflicts, including many of
them among Arab groups. There are also intermittently violent conflicts in
Kordofan and eastern Sudan.
• Somalia and Somaliland: numerous local conflicts are obscured by the major
confrontation between the Federal Government and Al-Shabaab, which are
likely to surface.
The IGAD Conflict Early Warning and Response Mechanism (CEWARN)

focuses on three ‘conflict clusters’ – the Karamoja, Somali and Dhikil (Djibouti)
cross-border pastoral zones – in which conflicts are at risk of spreading across
the territories of two or more IGAD member states.
A notable historical anomaly is that, unlike in prior decades, Ethiopia is not
currently seen as the principal driver of regional insecurity. In the period from
World War Two to 1991, Ethiopia’s territorial ambitions generated crises in
Eritrea and Somalia, while its internal conflicts created refugees and led to recip-
rocal destabilization, through sponsoring armed insurgents, by the governments
of the region. Ethiopia still uses military force to maintain its national security
perimeter in depth. Its unresolved border conflict with Eritrea, and the resulting
proxy conflict between Addis Ababa and Asmara over the last fifteen years, is a
major impediment on the stabilization of the region. Ethiopia has successfully
shut off Eritrea from influence in Africa and a voice at the UN. But its policy
does not go beyond isolating and silencing Eritrea – there is no regional or inter-
national contingency plan for Eritrea. Ethiopia’s military intervention in Somalia
in 2006, to remove the Union of Islamic Courts (and the latter’s Eritrean military
advisers), is widely recognized as the key factor in the current insurgency. None-
theless, the international consensus is that Ethiopia is a force for stability in the
region, and that its dominant status vis-à-vis its neighbours to east, west and
north, is a fact of political life that should be accepted.
Contested multilateralism and the lack of a security

community
One of the striking features of the HoA is the lack of a consensual security com-
munity. This not only means that the mechanisms for resolving conflicts within
the region are weak, but there is an enduring threat to national and regional
ownership of the region’s agenda. Powers outside the region (e.g. the P5 at the
UN Security Council or the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member states)
can take political decisions with major repercussions for the HoA, without the
interests of the region in mind. There is a pressing need for a wider multilateral-
ism (a collective security mechanism involving not just the states of the region
but those in adjoining regions) and a deeper multilateralism (involving security,
economic, governance and democracy agendas).
Emperor Haile Selassie was one of the most eloquent and prescient exponents
of collective security and international law, famously in his 1936 speech at the
League of Nations, and later for his pivotal role in enabling the formation of a
single African inter-state entity, the Organisation of African Unity (no mean feat
at the height of the Cold War in 1963). Ethiopia is a historic multilateralist,
seeking to embed its foreign policies with multilateral institutions, and serving
as host to the AU. Sudan was, with Ethiopia, a founder member of the Bandung
Conference and the Non-Aligned Movement. But by the same token, multilater-
alism and multilateral institutions are treated with scepticism by others in the
Horn. Eritrea was denied its right of self-determination by the UN and OAU; the
territorial principle of uti possedites adopted by newly independent African
states in 1964, to respect inherited colonial boundaries, was vigorously disputed
by Somalia (leading to two inter-state wars); and southern Sudanese felt they
were defrauded of their right of self-determination by their northern brethren
through the stratagems used to achieve national independence for Sudan in 1956
(rather than unity with Egypt).
Today, the UN, AU and IGAD are seen by many Eritreans and Somalis as
vehicles for the power interests of the US, Europe and Ethiopia. Nonetheless, the
inter-connected nature of the conflicts and governance problems in the HoA, and
the involvement of the region in both the crises and the solutions to them, deter-
mines the need for an overall integrated and holistic regional framework.
The HoA demands not only a multilateral approach, but also an approach of
multiple and overlapping multilateralisms. In addition to the AU and IGAD,
there are numerous overlapping multilateral organizations engaged in the HoA:
African, trans-regional, and non-African, some political, some developmental,
and some both. They include: the East African Community, Common Market for
Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), Community of Sahel-Saharan States
(CEN-SAD), International Conference on the Great Lakes Region (ICGLR),
Nile Basin Initiative, League of Arab States, Organization of the Islamic Confer-
ence, Indian Ocean Rim Association, and the GCC – although the latter is more
a security pact than a multilateral organization.
Despite this plethora of multilateral organizations, there is no single agreed
regional peace and security forum. Neither the AU nor IGAD can play the
uncontested roles of custodian of norms, forum for conflict management, and
arbiter of disputes, because the members of the two organizations are divided on
too many issues. Eritrea is suspended from IGAD and the Ethiopians do not
want it readmitted. Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya and Sudan are competing for influ-
ence in South Sudan. Only in Somalia do the regional states act in concert – and
in this instance only because Eritrea’s role in Somalia has been effectively
stamped out by international pressures, discreetly but effectively orchestrated
from Addis Ababa. Ethiopia has emerged as the closest thing to a hegemon in
the region. As host of the AU and heir to a tradition of unusually skilful diplo-
macy, Ethiopia usually gets its way at the AU and the UN. Ethiopia has chaired
IGAD for the last ten years and has the support of Sudan, Djibouti and Somalia
in continuing in that position. But Ethiopia’s role is quietly resented and may yet
be challenged by its neighbours. As a potential hegemon in the wider region,
Ethiopia also remains junior to Egypt and – of particular and growing signifi-
cance – the alliance between Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Recognizing the shortcomings of IGAD, the AU has played a complementary
role in the peace and security in the Horn. It is the custodian of the June 2000
Algiers Agreement that ended the Ethio-Eritrean war and it stepped in to
organize the intervention force in Somalia in 2007, with African Union Mission
to Somalia (AMISOM) taking over from an IGAD-coordinated force. At a
regional level, in September 2013 the AU PSC mandated a conference on peace,
security, stability, cooperation and development in the Horn of Africa (AU PSC
communiqué 397). This conference has the potential to be a vehicle for articu-
lating a framework for key regional peace and security challenges.
The multilateral collective security mechanisms for the Horn of Africa have
been moderately effective in reducing armed conflict and promoting peace
agreements. However, they have increasingly become an elitist, governmental
mechanism, inaccessible to civil society and the citizenry at large. As govern-
ments have taken an authoritarian turn, the possibility of the AU and IGAD sec-
retariats acting as activist organizations promoting human security has also
diminished.
The complicated and unclear multilateral peace and security architecture of
the HoA provides an opportunity for the EU. The EU will not be a primary
security actor in the region, as it is unlikely to project any military power.
However, while using military force may be effective in making a country’s
presence known, it is much less so at finding durable solutions to political
problems. The EU’s soft power, in development assistance, diplomatic finance,
and promotion of multilateralism, may be less noisy and less impressive in terms
of battleships, but is all the more significant for that. Precisely because EU is not
seeking to project force it is a valued partner for AU and IGAD, and could take
the lead in facilitating political dialogue in sensitive areas, including for example
trans-regional multilateralism (e.g. a forum on the Red Sea).
A human security agenda

The hard security and human security challenges of the HoA make it extraordi-
narily complicated for any external actor. The challenges to security operate at
several different levels, with no level enjoying primacy over the others, and the
conventional security and human security problems interact. There is no single
formula for managing, let alone resolving, the problems of the region.
One approach to human security is to catalogue all the many kinds of actions
and policies that would contribute to the overall goals. Under this we would enu-
merate promoting human rights; addressing urgent humanitarian needs; poverty
reduction and service provision; gender issues; enhancing resilience in the face
of adversities; peace and security; environmental sustainability and natural
resource management; protection of civilians in conflict; and promoting legiti-
mate authority. The downside of such an approach is that a laundry list of this
kind becomes a menu for selective action, with decisions by the provider in line
with its interests and resources, so that analysis and policy become neither
exhaustive nor holistic. Instead, this chapter turns to the key method that distin-
guishes a human security approach.
Following on from the insight of the 2003 Human Security Report, we place
empowerment at the heart of the approach. This has both top-down and bottom-
up elements, focusing at once on states and multilateral organizations, and on
civil society and people’s issues.
Building on what exists

The most effective long-term pressures for human rights come from an informed
and active citizenry. Both IGAD and the AU have civil society and human rights
mechanisms that are, in principle, open to civil society. Independent civil society
networks for the promotion of peace and security are also forming (e.g. Naiva-
sha Declaration on Regional Civil Society Engagement in Peace, Security and
Stabilization of the Great Lakes and Horn of Africa, October 2014). There is
also a pressing need for further expansion towards trans-regional human rights
dialogue, between the HoA and the Arab world, including especially Egypt,
Yemen and the Gulf countries.
African civil society was instrumental in promoting key norms adopted by
African governments and the African Union, such as the principle of non-
indifference (developed in the wake of the genocide in Rwanda) and the ban on
accepting military coups. Civil society engagement was important in framing the
very idea of an ‘African Peace and Security Architecture’ (InterAfrica Group and
Justice Africa 2002) and in the IGAD peace and security strategy (IGAD 2007). The
consensus document on the IGAD peace and security strategy, adopted in Khartoum
in 2005, specified the following elements in ‘the way forward’ (IGAD 2007, p. 211):
The conference was the first stage in a step-by-step process to mobilize

stakeholders and engage member states and experts to produce the desired
output of a draft strategy paper and associated documents … for presenta-
tion and approval to the Council of Ministers and the Summit. Further activ-
ities include:
• Focused research on CPMR [conflict prevention, management and reso-

lution] in all IGAD Member States and other RECs;
• A series of output-oriented workshops including representatives of all
levels and perspectives (e.g. gender) of society relevant to CPMR of
violent conflict in the IGAD region;
• Assistance from consultants;
• Evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of peace processes in the
region;
• Collaboration with non-profit, profit and governmental institutions; and
• Involvement of the media and educational bodies in the region.
This recommendation was not implemented. In fact, subsequently, civil society

engagement has withered. This is partly because many of the leaders of the early
2000s pressure have either joined the AU and UN, or have died. The African
Union Peace and Security Department itself has served as a focus for bureau-
cratic activism, promoting bold solutions to peace and security challenges
through its position as the drafter of the communiqués of the AU Peace and
Security Council. However, all these pressures require constant vigilance,
because there is strong and persistent push-back from governments.
Linking national security to human security

The only country in the HoA that has articulated a national security doctrine is
Ethiopia (FDRE 2002). This arose from the background of the ruling Ethiopian
People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF ) in a ‘people’s war’ that
overthrew the vastly militarily superior army of the former military regime. The
victory of the EPRDF was based on popular mobilization, especially on social
and economic rights including protection from famine, and the lesson that the
EPRDF took into government was that the greatest threat to national security
was poverty and dictatorship. This principle is articulated in the 2002 White
Paper and the philosophy of building a ‘democratic developmental’ state.
The White Paper states that, ‘The real source of our national humiliation in
our time is poverty and backwardness’ (p. 12). It argues that national pride is not
a policy objective in itself: it must come about through realizing democracy and
development. While countries remain poor, integrated into the margins of the
global political economy and vulnerable to internal and external shocks, they
will always be insecure. Growth is therefore a matter not only of reducing
poverty but of national security, even national survival. ‘The failure to realize
development and democracy has resulted in our security being threatened. It
means we have remained impoverished, dependent and unable to hold our heads
high. The prospect of disintegration cannot be totally ruled out’ (p. 23). This
strategy, under review and revision in 2017, provides a strong foundation for a
human security strategy.
In practice, Ethiopia’s democratic and human rights record has lagged far
behind its development performance. Although the national leadership refuses to
be explicit on the point, its approach is that economic development including the
provision of essential services, should be sequenced before general political lib-
eralization (de Waal 2015). Ethiopia ranks very low on measures for freedom of
the press, civil society and political pluralism (Committee to Protect Journalists
2015). Following widespread unrest in 2016, the Ethiopian government has con-
ceded the need to open up space for dialogue, and has also undertaken a review
and updated its national security and foreign affairs policy. This is potentially an
entry point for developing a more comprehensive human security strategy.
A shared multilateralism
The HoA is not suited to a single multilateral security and human security frame-
work and mechanism, but rather to a ‘thick multilateralism’ of multiple, over-
lapping mechanisms that between them provide fora for dealing with the hot
issues and the emergent issues. A human security approach should build on what
is already there: regional economic integration, Ethiopia’s ‘democratic develop-
mental state’ and commitment to governance of diversity, and regionalized civil
society.
A proposed strategic objective for the EU’s engagement with the Horn is
championing regional and inter-regional multilateralism in pursuit of peace,
stability and human security. This distinguishes the EU strategy from other
Western approaches that have been to project power and vanquish enemies
rather than build peace. It also distinguishes itself from the dominant security
strategy in the Middle East that consists of coalitions of the willing, deterrence
and force projection. The EU strategy would, initially, be a multilateralism of
political dialogue, in which the states of the wider region manage their interests
and differences, minimizing the risk of conflict.
Extra-regional multilateralism is a critical need and a pressing gap at the
present. The AU and IGAD need to build links across the boundaries of the RECs
and into the Arab peninsula, but have not taken the steps necessary to begin this.
The League of Arab States and the Gulf Cooperation Council are the two most
immediate extra-regional partners. The EU is well-placed to step into this gap.
European interests in the Suez Canal and Red Sea are self-evident. The principle
of ‘treating Africa as one continent’, enshrined in the Joint Africa-Europe Strategy
should not hamper such extra-regional linkages and collaborations.
Other key issues to promote in a shared multilateral approach include: human-
itarian principles in conflicts involving groups designated as terrorists; managing
mass distress migration; and regional plans for responding to climate change and
associated natural resource management issues.
Finally, a deeper multilateralism should involve engagement with regional
civil society, and providing a forum in which civil society organizations can
regain their voice in peace and security issues across the region.
Empowerment on people’s issues

While the entry point for a shared multilateralism is hard security, the strategy
needs to address human security, if it is to be meaningful and successful. The
EU is already engaged across the board in almost every human security issue.
Consensus exists on the need for economic development and regional infra-
structural integration. These are uncontroversial and are a potential driver of
cooperation. Another emergent consensus is on the governance of diversity with
decentralization of power as norm of good democratic governance. The AU and
IGAD have articulated norms on this, providing a foundation for EU engage-
ment, respecting regional and national ownership.
The principle of empowerment, as articulated by the Commission for Human
Security and contained in the EU’s multiple commitments to human rights and
democratic freedoms, and to working with civil society, should be a fundamental
guide. The EU can engage with existing civil society networks and movements –
defined broadly to include the media, political parties committed to non-violent
mobilization, as well as the organized NGO sector – to promote these values and
practices. Especially where institutions are weak and the formal apparatus of
government is routinely coopted into stratagems for gain in the political market-
place, the organized demand for democratic rights and representation is essential
to human security.
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Part III
Policy arenas
7 Europe’s failed ‘fight’ against
irregular migration
Ruben Andersson
Introduction
The borders of Europe are increasingly presented to us in the media and our
political debate as the setting for a perpetual emergency: boats packed to the
brim, crowds gathering at fences, chaotic scenes outside corralled-off reception
camps. Despite the efforts to contain, control and ‘combat’ unauthorised move-
ment in the past decades, the situation has only been getting more acute. We
urgently need a better understanding of why current border policy and praxis has
failed, as well as openings towards a potential alternative approach.
This chapter delineates ethnographic findings and recommendations along
these lines. Building on my long-running anthropological research on irregular
migration on the Spanish-African borders (Andersson 2014), as well as on the
substantial interdisciplinary literature on border controls, it will show why the
‘fight against illegal migration’ is counterproductive and urgently in need of a
shift.
In considering attempts to ‘combat’ mobility, this chapter deploys the concept
of an ‘illegality industry’ as a useful tool for grasping the mechanics and eco-
nomies of border security. A large literature now exists on the negative human
consequences of powerful ‘border regimes’, with many such studies focusing on
the repressive aspects of controls, for instance as regards the deadly politics of
the high seas (e.g. Basaran 2015); the perils of encampment (Agier 2014); or the
biopolitics of controls (Fassin 2001). While building on these important findings,
this chapter will focus not on the repressive but on the ‘productive’ aspects of
border controls. Europe’s effort to ‘fight migration’, it will be argued, produces
what it is supposedly meant to curtail – more distressing forms of ‘illegal migra-
tion’, to use the problematic term still invoked in political and policing circles.
With these dynamics in mind, the term illegality industry allows us to see not
just how migration has been turned into a field of profits for many actors (see
Gammeltoft-Hansen and Sørensen 2013) but also how a (counter)productive
system has developed and congealed at the borders.1
The chapter will first give a brief overview of the historical trend, followed
by a note on public funding devoted to border security. It then considers mecha-
nisms of failure at the borders, focusing on the ‘market in border security’ and
124 R. Andersson
its counterproductive effects, before concluding with policy recommendations in
light of these findings. Reducing the negative incentives in the security market, I
assert, will be a key task in replacing a counterproductive framing of mobility-
as-threat with a ‘normalising’ and human-centred frame – although, as will
become clear, the retrenchment of a system of vested interests, combined with
the usage of border security as a short-term political tool, makes it ever harder to
envisage a shift of approach.
Overview: maritime migration in context

Historically speaking, Europe’s migration or refugee ‘crisis’ is a recent phenom-
enon with its roots in the tightened migration regimes put in place around the
time of the 1970s oil crisis. Before this time, various forms of low-skilled labour
mobility into Europe did exist. These pathways – like the US bracero pro-
gramme of the same period – had their faults, yet did not produce a migration
‘crisis’. This was to change from the 1970s onwards, however, in a pattern
repeated across the western world. At this time, the USA saw political panics
about ‘illegal aliens’ mount in parallel with reduced legal pathways and tougher
enforcement of the US–Mexico borderline (Nevins 2001). This dynamic –
similar to crackdowns in other economic spheres such as drugs – was soon to be
repeated in Europe.
In Europe, the tightened migration regimes of the 1970s did not immediately
lead to the rise of irregular land and sea migration. In fact, such migrations
hardly existed in Europe before the 1990s – the time when a border security
model akin to the US one was starting to be put in place. The reason for this shift
towards border security was the Schengen agreement on free movement, which
(largely for political and symbolic reasons) came to entail the reinforcement of
the external borders of the EU. At this time, northern European states put pres-
sure on southern counterparts to shore up their migration regimes. As they did
so, for instance by introducing visa requirements for North Africans early in the
1990s, migrant boats started appearing along their shores; legal pathways were
being replaced with irregular ones. New clandestine routes and more policing
crackdowns have since then grown in parallel – leading to an increasingly fre-
quent series of migratory ‘emergencies’, including at the Italian island of
Lampedusa in 2004; at Spain’s North African enclaves (and EU/Schengen territ-
ories) of Ceuta and Melilla in 2005; on the Spanish Canary Islands in 2006; at
the Greek–Turkish land border in 2010; again on Lampedusa during the 2011
‘Arab spring’; and in the successive crises in the central Mediterranean since
then. Europe’s ‘migration crisis’, in short, is a recent and man-made phenom-
enon – a basic observation that crucially entails the possibility of the trend being
reversed (Figure 7.1).
One important aspect stands out when looking back at the ‘border crises’
prior to 2014: they were vastly inflated in the public debate. In stark contrast
with the wild estimates and fear-inducing figures produced by many politicians
and journalists, scholars have highlighted how migration by land and sea has
Europe’s failed ‘fight’ 125
Figure 7.1 Irregular migration routes from West Africa towards Europe.
long been small relative to other means of irregular entry and residence (e.g. De
Haas 2007). Until recently, such irregular arrivals hovered around the 100,000
mark per year; by contrast, overall immigration into EU member states stands at
3.4 million a year, including 1.4 million non-European and 1.2 million intra-
European migrants. Even among irregular migrants, the majority have long been
visa overstayers, as the EU border agency, Frontex, itself has pointed out.2 The
relatively low numbers of maritime arrivals has however not prevented govern-
ments from announcing ‘emergencies’ for short-term domestic political reasons,
a point that will be returned to below.
In 2015 Europe faced a very different situation, as about 1m people arrived,
among whom well over 80 per cent came from the world’s top 10 refugee-
producing countries.3 Yet even as numbers of maritime arrivals have sharply
126 R. Andersson
risen, these need to be seen in the context of record global refugee flows. Almost
60 million people were forcibly displaced in 2015 (internally or externally), with
the vast majority (86 per cent) of refugees hosted by developing nations. The
surge of refugees since 2014 is thus but a small slice of global displacement, and
would have been manageable for a Union of 500 million inhabitants with all the
most advanced resources at its disposal – if the political will to implement a
common approach had been in place.
The roots of the troubles again go back to the 1990s, as Schengen did not
come to involve functioning common asylum or labour migration systems – pro-
ducing a ‘halfway house’ between European integration and retained sovereign
powers. As a substitute for a joined-up systemic response, European leaders
have instead largely opted for a ‘default’ border security model.
Funding for this model remains opaque thanks to the multiple pots involved,
from Interior Ministry funds to re-routed development aid, yet a few figures are
worth listing. Europe has spent at least €11 billion on deportations since 2000,
according to a recent cross-European journalistic investigation. Frontex has seen
its budget grow swiftly since its founding in 2004, from €19 million in its first
full year of operations to €143 million in 2015 (and beyond that as it now
assumes an expanded role as the ‘European Border and Coast Guard Agency’).
The EU allocated 60 per cent of its total Home Affairs budget for 2007–2013, or
€4 billion, to the ‘solidarity and management of migratory flows’, including
€1.8bn specifically for the external borders fund (EBF ). These funds contrast
with the smaller disbursals (€700 million) on the refugee fund (RF ) – a gap
between security and reception support that increases significantly in ‘frontline’
member states such as Spain, Bulgaria and Greece, with the latter receiving
€21 million from RF and €207 million from EBF over 2007–2013 (Amnesty
International 2014). In the current 2014–2020 period, the €3.8 billion Internal
Security Fund has bolstered the security-focused funding stream.4
Most border security spending takes place on a member state level,
however. Spain has in recent years built new detention, reception and control
centres while increasing its border and migration forces from 10,239 officers
in 2003 to more than 16,000 by 2010.5 Member states have also developed
costly systems and technologies to control and monitor irregular migration,
including advanced coastal radar systems such as the Spanish Sistema Inte-
grado de Vigilancia Exterior (SIVE) and fences at Greek, Bulgarian, Hungar-
ian and Spanish borders, and elsewhere post-2015. Despite recent protestations,
the EU has long supported this border work financially while increasingly
adding European-wide security initiatives, including the vastly ambitious
European external border surveillance system (EUROSUR) and new technolo-
gies developed by the defence industry under the €1.4 billion security theme of
the EU’s seventh framework programme (FP-7). Beyond such investments are
the tied ‘aid’ deals with African states, whether in the $5 billion Italy–Libya
‘Friendship Pact’ of 2008; the subtler aid, trade and diplomatic concessions of
the kind developed between Spain and African states; or the expensive EU
deal-making with Turkey of late 2015.
To sum up, the closure of legal pathways into Europe, along with the border
security response, has strongly contributed to the development of irregular land
and sea entry routes. While the migratory ‘flow’ along these routes has long been
small in comparison with other entry methods, large sums have been spent on
manpower, technology and new systems to keep people out even before the
latest sharp increase amid the global refugee crisis.6 Yet the resulting initiatives
have clearly not worked, at least not in the long run. Fatalities have sharply risen
to about 5,000 in 2016 and smuggling networks keep growing stronger, while
arrivals (setting aside the one-off spike of 2015) continue apace.7 In its dispro-
portionality and deleterious effects, Europe’s ‘fight against illegal migration’
here seems to mirror the global ‘war on drugs’, which is now widely perceived
as a costly failure in financial, human and political terms (LSE IDEAS 2014). A
different approach is needed – but for that we first need to understand the mech-
anisms of apparent failure through which today’s counterproductive investments
in ‘border security’ keep being perpetuated.
Mechanisms of ‘failure’
This section will show how European efforts to ‘combat migration’ have gener-
ated counterproductive dynamics in a downward spiral. Crucially, it will also
account for some of the reasons why a seemingly failed response keeps perpetu-
ating itself despite evidence showing that it does not ‘work’ in the way it is
‘advertised’ to electorates. The sections that follow in turn trace the framing of
migration as an emergency in need of a security response; the market in security
enabled by this framing; and this market’s destructive nature, especially when
approached on a global level.
The security slippage

In April 2015, the UN Security Council president rebuked Europe over a plan
for destroying smugglers’ boats by saying that the issue was ‘not about protect-
ing Europe; it’s about protecting the refugees’.8 This slippage is key to much
punitive migration policy today. Since the 1990s, migration has increasingly
been treated as a ‘border security’ issue in Europe, as seen in its most extreme
form in the association between migration and terrorism. Yet in most cases, the
security approach is more subtle, encompassing the aspects addressed below.
First, institutional arrangements have increasingly come to favour a security
model. Since the 1970s, low-skilled (irregular) migration has shifted from being
a concern for labour and industry ministries to become progressively ‘appro-
priated’ by European interior ministries as their field of action (Guild 2005).
This trend was strengthened in the 1990s, when migration became a ‘home
affairs’ issue, congealing into what is now DG HOME. This political and
bureaucratic arrangement, in turn, has channelled specific type of ‘solutions’ to
the migration ‘problem’. Research has shown that, on Commission level, while
the diagnosis of the migration situation may often be quite complex, the
128 R. Andersson
p roposed interventions tend to be security-oriented (Svantesson 2014). Through
such institutional path dependency, Brussels and member state priorities on
(fighting) migration have come to dovetail.
Second and equally important, the emergency frame applied to maritime
migration – a ‘spectacle’ broadcast by the media and fanned by politicians – has
further paved the way for the security model. The emergency frame, in repeat-
edly presenting the migratory situation as an ‘unprecedented crisis’, enables a
two-faced reactive response of ‘humanitarian’ action and more policing. Rescues
are often thought of in opposition to border security, yet the trend is towards an
increasing integration of these responses within a common emergency frame. In
West Africa, to give one prominent example, humanitarianism has served as a
key legal, moral and political justification for pre-emptive interceptions of
migrant boats by Spanish, African and Frontex vessels collaborating under Joint
Operation HERA, rolled out in response to the Canaries ‘boat crisis’ in 2006
(Andersson 2014). In North Africa, Spanish forces call their Moroccan or Alge-
rian colleagues when they spot a boat on their surveillance systems, so that these
states’ authorities can proceed with ‘rescuing’ the passengers against their will.
As one border guard explained to this author, you have to ‘prevent [migrants]
from leaving’ so as to avoid them putting themselves in danger – with little
evident regard for the legal obligation not to expel people into countries where
they may face harm (non-refoulement). Similar attempts have been made along
Italy’s coasts, although the outcome of the ‘Hirsi case’ in the European Court of
Human Rights, along with growing conflict in Libya, has complicated the picture
there (Tondini 2012).
Third, risk discourse has provided a set of tools for the security model to
develop in new directions. Frontex – as the pivot in ‘integrated border manage-
ment’ – has reinforced the security response (and, to some extent, the emergency
frame) through its language and practice of risk analysis. The agency defines risk
as ‘a function of threat, vulnerability and impact’, or put differently, ‘the likeli-
hood of a threat occurring at the external borders, given the measures in place at
the borders and within the EU, which will impact EU internal security and/or the
security of the external borders’.9 In these definitions, the border is seen as ‘vul-
nerable’, while the people crossing it are construed as a threat. Through its large
Risk Analysis Unit and its Europe-wide network for collating data on border
crossings (Frontex Risk Analysis Network), Frontex ‘exports’ risk thinking to
member state agencies, reinforcing the threat and security frames in operation on
national level, while contributing to the prioritisation of migration controls at the
external borders above other tasks.
Fourth, targeting smugglers as villains has reinforced this security trend by
reinforcing ‘supply-side’ punitive policies rather than addressing demand, in a
clear parallel to the drug wars (LSE IDEAS 2014). Politicians are often keen on
presenting crackdowns as not targeting migrants, but rather as attacking what is
often erroneously referred to as ‘traffickers’, as has been the case with the
EUNAVFOR MED military operation of 2015.10 In fact, given that smuggling is
a market driven by rampant demand, punitive measures only tend to drive
b usiness further underground while new risks are transferred downwards, from
provider to client. Looking back at the past 25 years of controls, the trend
towards higher risks is clear. While sturdy wooden fishing boats were piloted by
North African migrants themselves in the 1990s, the mid-2000s saw collectively
organised trips from West Africa towards the faraway Canaries as well as small-
scale smuggling outfits developing in North Africa. Today flimsy vessels, boats
without proper captains and predatory smuggling networks are the rule rather
than the exception. A captive market has also developed, especially in Libya,
where migrants may be warehoused and harmed or tortured with impunity since
smugglers know that authorities offer no protection to their charges (Amnesty
International 2015).
Fifth, the social and material arrangements at the border have helped per-
petuate the security response. One example of such retrenchment concerns the
growth of security infrastructure and technology (Andersson 2015): this includes
control and coordination centres managed by border agencies such as Frontex, the
Spanish Civil Guard and the Italian Guardia di Finanza; fence technology, which
keeps being reinforced in response to more drama at the borders; surveillance, sat-
ellite and communications systems such as EUROSUR; and new facilities for
migrant detention. All these measures reinforce the emergency frame and its
attendant security response; worse, as the next section will show, they also help
generate a counterproductive market in controls that feeds on its own failures.
The market in border security

Once migration has been framed as an emergency in need of a security response,
a distinct system develops to fill this frame. The past 25 years have seen the con-
solidation of such a system or industry, involving actors such as European
security forces and their African counterparts; NGOs, humanitarian groups and
international bodies such as the International Organization for Migration (IOM),
often working closely with the security response; and multinational defence and
outsourcing companies. With each new crisis, this ‘border’ or ‘illegality indus-
try’ grows further. Yet it is not the ‘solution’ to the situation at the border; it is
rather a fundamental part of the problem.
The various actors working at the borders are not passive recipients of polit-
ical dictates, but rather active participants in the ‘illegality industry’. Moreover,
the efforts of ‘core’ security actors usually point to a predictable outcome – more
investments in border security. Research has shown how border agencies and
defence groups have helped create a ‘demand’ for their solutions in Brussels and
European capitals. One of the clearest examples of this was the 2003 convening
of a ‘Group of Personalities’ on security, involving industry figures and high
officials, whose 2004 report added significantly to the momentum for more
research funding for this sector (Bigo and Jeandesboz 2010). In subsequent years
the EU’s FP-7 funding stream came to include a security strand, thus bolstering
the EU goal of ‘improving the competitiveness of the European security indus-
try’ via new technology in fields such as border control and sea surveillance.11
130 R. Andersson
Lobby efforts have continued since this time, with the defence sector partici-
pating in the development of EUROSUR, in contrast with the limited public or
parliamentary scrutiny of this initiative (Hayes and Vermeulen 2012). In sum,
border security has become an opportunity both for a European defence sector
in need of new market niches and for security forces that need to justify their
role in times of austerity and as their traditional role is at risk of diminishing
(Bigo 2001).
However, the resulting security initiatives do not ‘solve the problem’. Instead,
more controls in one area generate a displacement effect towards riskier cross-
ings. As Spanish and Moroccan forces ‘closed’ the route into the enclaves of
Ceuta and Melilla in 2005, in response to the ‘border crisis’ at the enclaves’
fences that year, a new pathway opened up from West Africa towards the Canary
Islands – leading to the 2006 ‘boat crisis’ in the archipelago. Worse, both these
crises occurred in anticipation of imminent (and much-publicised) border
reinforcement, in a trend that resonates with the 2015 surge in arrivals across the
Mediterranean. As the Canaries entry point was eventually ‘closed’ through
close collaboration with West African states, routes were gradually pushed
towards the Sahara desert.12 Similarly, once a new surveillance system such as
Spain’s SIVE started covering one slice of coastline, routes moved further out at
sea, leading to investment in more coastal radar stations, and more risky cross-
ings in flimsy vessels, as the border agencies themselves recognise. In the
Eastern Mediterranean, a similar enforcement/displacement dynamic has pushed
people from the Greek-Turkish border towards the Bulgarian-Turkish border
since 2010 and, once fences covered both these land perimeters, towards the
more dangerous sea route. In short, attempts to cut the ‘risk’ of migration has led
to greater risks for those embarking – yet this very risky cycle allows for new
security solutions to be proposed.
Individual border guards are aware of the contradictions within their mission.
‘Migration is something that will never stop’, one Civil Guard Comandante told
me, even as he showed me new surveillance technology that aimed to halt it. In
Ceuta, one mid-ranking civil guard said that the new EU-funded fencing erected
in 2005 was ‘useless’. ‘For someone who has travelled thousands of kilometres
and suffered in Morocco, it doesn’t dissuade’. On ground level, meanwhile, dis-
content was widespread, with civil guards in Ceuta and Melilla complaining
about their rough and legally precarious task of expelling migrants across the
fences. Such examples show how criticism, doubt or ambivalence is widespread
even among the very actors who have gained institutionally from the border
security model.
The rest of this section will focus on Euro-African policing collaboration, the
area that most clearly illustrate the vicious cycle of investments. As in the USA
and Australia, the EU and its member states have come to involve so-called
‘transit’ states extensively in migration controls and ‘border management’.
These ‘externalisation’ policies have framed migration as a risk; transferred the
attendant risks to third states; and in the end generated further risk, feeding into
more reinforcements.
The export of a border security approach has been under way since the 1990s.
As European states such as Spain and Italy have enrolled neighbouring states in
controls, irregular migration from sub-Saharan Africa in particular has increas-
ingly come to be framed as a threat. This process has been supported by the EU,
including via the European Neighbourhood Policy/European Neighbourhood and
Partnership Instrument; the global approach to migration and mobility (GAMM),
and the broader ‘external dimension’ of justice and home affairs of which
GAMM is a part.13
In the case of Libya, long an important migrant destination, Rome and Tripoli
jointly started framing it as a ‘transit country’ in the 2000s. A security response
followed, involving both EU and Italian funds (Rinelli 2016) as well as the
above-mentioned ‘Friendship Pact’, which was purportedly about reparations for
Italy’s colonisation of Libya yet fundamentally focused on migration controls
and industrial expansion, including as regards border security technology.14 In
Morocco, another key North African ‘partner’, Spanish incentives for
cooperation have been more subtle, including in aid, trade, fishing rights and the
diplomatic question of occupied Western Sahara (Andersson 2014). The EU has
reinforced this process, including through its ‘action plans’ and ‘mobility part-
nerships’ with Morocco as well as Tunisia, which include clauses on combatting
‘irregular migration’. The partnerships promise some potential labour mobility
for Moroccans and Tunisians as a sweetener for more in-country controls, as
well as for efforts to reach agreement on these countries’ readmission of third-
country nationals.
In West Africa, Spain has gone further. Amid the 2006 ‘boat crisis’, Madrid
convinced governments to collaborate in controls and deportations by launching
an ambitious ‘Africa Plan’ for development while opening embassies across the
region (Gabrielli 2011). Development aid has here helped smooth the path for
security cooperation, and has even been used to fund new security measures out-
right (Andersson 2014). The ‘developmental’ framing around security collabora-
tion has been bolstered by the European Development Fund and facilitated by
the Euro-African ‘Rabat process’ since 2006 (now replicated via the ‘Khartoum
process’ in the Horn of Africa). Through a growing development–security nexus,
international mobility has come to be framed in terms of illegality and security
in West Africa – a region characterised by high intra-regional mobility where
such frames were previously close to non-existent.
Further, the export of a security model has given more powerful ‘partner’
states a perfect bargaining chip. In Libya, Gaddafi used the threat of maritime
migration to have the embargo lifted, and continued doing so up until the NATO
air campaign of 2011. The unrecognised Tripoli government has similarly threat-
ened, as Gaddafi did in 2010, that Europe would ‘turn black’ unless more
resources and political recognition was forthcoming.15 In Morocco, the govern-
ment has managed to extract substantial ‘geographical rent’ (Natter 2013) from
the country’s positioning on irregular migration routes in a subtler manner. In
Spain, it is widely acknowledged among border professionals that ‘if [migrants]
pass, it’s because they [the Moroccan authorities] want them to pass’, as one
132 R. Andersson
civil guard put it in interview. By selectively ‘opening’ and ‘closing’ its borders,
Rabat can maintain pressure on Spain and the EU while assuring a politics of
recognition of Morocco as a key European partner. Further south, in Mauritania
– a large labour importer – the migratory ‘threat’ has also facilitated political
recognition: the 2006 ‘boat crisis’ in the Canaries came right after a coup d’état,
forcing European leaders to engage with the new unelected regime. In Turkey,
similar processes have seemingly been at work: the beleaguered government
received substantial financial and diplomatic concessions from the EU in 2015,
and proceeded to win in the snap autumn polls. Having ‘exported’ our notion of
migration as a threat, neighbouring states may then use it strategically as what
Greenhill (2010) calls a ‘weapon of mass migration’ – with far-reaching political
consequences.
In return for favours, African states have rolled out repressive controls that
make life increasingly difficult for anyone suspected of being undocumented,
generating distress- induced (or ‘border-induced’: Lemberg-Pedersen 2012) dis-
placement. Morocco is again exemplary. Since its 1992 signing of a readmis-
sions agreement with Spain for third-country nationals, its security forces have
collaborated closely with Spanish counterparts, including in informal expulsions
of sub-Saharan migrants attempting to enter Ceuta and Melilla. By 2003, Rabat
had criminalised irregular migration, and the policing response was stepped up
through arbitrary raids and informal mass expulsions to the closed Algeria–
Morocco border (HRW 2014). Tunisia and Algeria have also criminalised irreg-
ular migration and launched punitive policies, including in the Algerian case
informal expulsions deep into the Sahara. In Mauritania, close policing collabo-
ration with Spain since 2005 has seen West African labour migrants detained
and deported as suspected ‘illegals’, negatively affecting relations with neigh-
bouring Senegal and Mali while complicating the country’s tense domestic racial
politics (Andersson 2014). Libya, finally, perfected its hostile policies in the late
Gaddafi years, where prolonged and arbitrary detention became the norm, along
with widespread human rights abuses. Such ‘hostile environment’ tactics have
had a double effect: first, a displacement of routes away from sites of more
repression; second, a fundamental under-mining of regional labour mobility
options for migrants who fit the irregular ‘profile’, including many sub-Saharan
foreigners simply targeted because of their physical traits. Subjected to arbitrary
controls, many such migrants experience increased desperation, which in turn
contributes to the wish to leave, as many migrants arriving into southern Europe
attest in interview (including with this author). This trend is seen most clearly in
Libya today, as the post-Gaddafi chaos has reinforced the legacy of treating
migrants as fair game through arbitrary detentions, extortions and violence.
Finally, closer social relations among border practitioners have cemented the
negative dynamics. Spain has here led the way, with the Civil Guard ‘hardwir-
ing’ cooperation through initiatives such as the partially EU-funded Seahorse
satellite network, managed from coordination centres in Spain and countries
including Senegal, Mauritania and Morocco (Andersson 2015). In West Africa,
a gift economy has in addition been developed with local security forces, involving
the transfer of border policing tools as well as extra pay for patrolling migration.
Other organisations and states have run parallel initiatives, with the IOM and the
EU financing new border posts and control machinery in Mali and Mauritania
(Andersson 2014; Frowd 2014). In Morocco, more well-resourced, close border
policing cooperation with Spain involves monthly joint patrols and regular high-
level meetings. The resultant strong security networks have cushioned the
authorities against some of the counterproductive effects of the emergency treat-
ment discussed above. However, even in West Africa – the supposed ‘success
story’ in fighting migration owing to the weak bargaining position of poor
partner states – security forces only half-heartedly accepted European priorities,
as this author saw during research; moreover, a constant funding stream was
necessary to keep local forces on good terms and to ‘outbid smugglers’.
In North Africa, similar dynamics are at play on a larger scale, as states such
as Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya have a much stronger bargaining posi-
tion, while the gains from participating in smuggling are higher (and increasing
the more border controls are put in place). This makes ‘policy transfer’ even
more difficult, as Italy has seen since it launched its policing collaboration with
Gaddafi. Given this reality, the principal effect of the border policing networks
is to ‘lock in’ security praxis, generating path dependency for more of the same
measures. Put differently, even as controls keep failing, the new social relation-
ship established between European and African security forces mitigates against
a change of approach.
Outsourced controls – by constituting a boon for collaborating states and a
bargaining chip vis-à-vis Europe; by undermining regional mobility even when
‘successful’; and by creating security path dependency in bilateral cooperation –
have become self-perpetuating. From the viewpoint of powerful ‘partners’ in
Europe’s neighbourhood, there is simply little incentive to let go of the asset that
the migratory ‘threat’ constitutes. Meanwhile, for sub-Saharan states, the rising
stakes in migration controls are leading to higher demands – as seen in the
November 2015 Valletta summit, when governments reacted with scepticism to
the European ‘outsourcing’ drive and the launch of an ‘EU Emergency Trust
Fund for Africa’.
In sum, Europe’s ‘fight against illegal migration’ has created a worrying
mechanism for controls to keep growing indefinitely. As more surveillance,
patrols and barriers push migrants towards riskier entry methods, new measures
keep being proposed to deal with the new risks, including technological as well
as social/policing ones such as more collaboration with third states, as is now the
case with Turkey, Niger and the Horn. In this way, the failure of controls has
created a market for ever more controls, in a self-perpetuating dynamic.
The tragedy of the ‘global commons’

How can the ‘illegality industry’ keep growing, despite its obvious failures? One
key reason is its political usefulness: it dissipates blame and accountability
across a multitude of actors and over a large geographical area. It also allows
134 R. Andersson
politicians to show short-term ‘toughness’ on migration to a domestic audience.
Moreover, in many cases there are large potential economic gains from exploit-
ing a vulnerable, irregular labour force, an insight that goes some way towards
accounting for the oft-remarked ‘policy gap’ between announced political tough-
ness and actual permissiveness on migration in Western states (Cornelius and
Rosenblum 2005).
Apparent ‘failure’ is not only a ‘success’ from a short-term political and eco-
nomic perspective, but also for participants in the ‘border security market’:
European security forces, which see their position and funding base reinforced;
the outsourcing and defence sectors, respectively providing new security-related
services and technological fixes; and neighbouring ‘partner’ states, which find
both internal and international uses for the threat-based treatment of migration.
Given displacement effects towards riskier routes, however, the outcome is not
beneficial to everyone: someone needs to deal with the new risks that have been
generated. We are here seeing a not-in-my-backyard approach with negative
effects on both regional and global levels, even as certain states may be able to
claim in the short run that they have effectively ‘halted illegal migration’.
This is seen starkly within Europe today. Despite talk of ‘solidarity’, there are
few incentives for EU member states to collaborate, given they may then be
‘stuck’ with the problem – not least owing to the Dublin regulation, which stipu-
lates that asylum seekers have to apply in the first state they enter. Greece and
Hungary knew this as they built border fences despite protestations from the
Commission, and Italy knew it whenever it allowed refugees to continue north-
wards without fingerprinting.
However, irregular routes are not just ‘regionalising’ but they are also ‘glo-
balising’ in a distressing parallel with the globalisation of the punitive border
security model itself. Australia’s Operation Sovereign Borders (OSB) has been
praised by hardliners, despite the dire human rights concerns and the fact that its
draconian provisions are very hard to replicate elsewhere.16 Yet even if taken as
a ‘success’ on its own narrow numerical terms, the nationalities that were arriv-
ing before OSB overlap with those arriving in Europe. Some 3,500 Afghans
arrived in Australia in 2012–2013; after the launch of OSB in September 2013,
overall figures dropped dramatically. Meanwhile, the number of Afghans at
Europe’s borders rose from about 9,500 in 2013 to more than 22,000 in 2014. In
another example, Israel completed a fence along its border with Egypt in early
2013; at the same time, draconian detention provisions were put in place. Until
that time, about 1,000 asylum seekers, mainly from Eritrea and Sudan, were
reaching Israel every month. Soon after, that figure was almost zero.17 Mean-
while, detections of Eritreans at the EU’s external borders shot up, from 2,604 in
2012 to 34,586 in 2014.18
The parallel globalisation of routes and security responses has led to what
may be seen as a ‘tragedy of the global commons’, in which the ‘protection’ of
one’s own borders has severe repercussions elsewhere. Yet the large chain of
interactions – ranging in Europe’s case from third states to EU border forces,
Frontex and defence contractors – allows most actors to escape accountability
and responsibility. In fact, this is a major factor in the illegality industry’s
growth: the larger the number of sectors involved, the harder it is to establish
chains of control. As the problem can always be pushed elsewhere, there are
moreover few genuine incentives in place to solve it.
Certain kinds of migration, in sum, have increasingly been framed as an
emergency in need of a security response. The result has been a proliferation of
ever more dangerous routes; stronger smuggling networks; and higher, not
lower, numbers of people using them. This ‘failure’ has in turn generated a set of
self-reinforcing dynamics and perverse incentives as actors with a stake in more
controls keep proposing more of the same medicine to solve our self-inflicted
emergency. We need a very different approach: systemic rather than ad hoc;
global rather than national or narrowly regional; and based on rights, opportunity
and ‘human security’ broadly conceived (see this volume’s introduction) rather
than on threat scenarios and border security, as the concluding recommendations
will delineate.
Breaking the vicious cycle

In investigating the counterproductive workings of Europe’s ‘illegality industry’,
this chapter has put emphasis on how many actors now have a stake in the
current security approach thanks to its apparent ‘failure’. Put differently, the
‘illegality industry’ is productive: it constantly reproduces its object of interven-
tion in ever more distressing forms, which in turn leads to its reinforcement.
Against this backdrop, the chapter concludes with a double set of recommenda-
tions. The main contribution will stem from the chapter’s ground-level focus:
how openings towards an alternative, ‘global’ model for mobility may emerge
through the contradictions and conflicts inherent in the border security model
itself.
Short-term goals: a harm reduction approach

Before giving more ambitious recommendations, short-term suggestions need to
be considered given the severe constraints in Europe’s migration politics. Here, I
suggest, policy-makers may learn from the debate around the ‘war on drugs’,
where there is a growing realisation of the additional risks created by a ‘supply-
centric’ and punitive response (LSE IDEAS 2014). As in the drug wars, a harm
reduction approach would be a big step in the right direction. This would
involve an acknowledgement that migration (both ‘forced’ and ‘voluntary’) is a
structural phenomenon that will not be remediated by punitive border policies;
and that we thus need to find rational and risk-mitigating measures to deal
with it.
Lack of space precludes a longer discussion of harm reduction measures, but
in brief these may include training for border guards, building on positive trials;
streamlined sea rescues, curtailing negative incentives for private actors to assist
while bolstering existing sea rescue provisions within the ambit of border
136 R. Andersson
surveillance; minimising the conflation of ‘humanitarian’ and coercive responses
by putting border security initiatives through a rigorous ‘do no harm’ test; ‘fire-
walling’ development funding, similarly subjecting it to ‘do no harm’ impera-
tives with the involvement of aid agencies and receiving states, creating (with
EU support) reputational risk pressures on reluctant governments; and bilateral
cooperation models for ‘human security’ ends, for instance as regards sharing
sea rescue expertise and administrative procedures with neighbouring countries,
rather than simply exporting a security model.
More ambitiously, Frontex risk analysis should shift focus from taking
borders and territories as its ‘referent object’ in need of protection and instead
focus on risk to people – a difficult change, given the agency’s mandate and DG
HOME’s securitising interventions, yet something that can be pushed by stake-
holders such as the Frontex fundamental rights consultative forum combined
with critical voices in border policing, the European parliament and other DGs.
Transparency and checks and balances on DG HOME and Frontex matters is
crucial in this regard, showing how taxpayer-provided resources are being put
towards counterproductive measures. Border security initiatives must be put
through proper audits and political scrutiny, while a full evaluation of EU-
financed security initiatives should investigate their real costs (including mainte-
nance, manpower and hidden outlays), as well as their consequences and ‘side
effects’.
The most important – and also the hardest – harm reduction measure is to (re)
establish legal pathways, learning from historical experiences in both the migra-
tion and refugee fields. Options such as humanitarian visas (already issuable
under the Visa Code), refugee resettlement, family reunification, labour migra-
tion programmes (including for refugees) and the lifting of carrier sanctions all
need to be pursued at the highest level. Instead of establishing which specific
legal options to pursue for both refugees and migrants, I will simply highlight
five arguments for them here. First, legal pathways undercut the smuggling busi-
ness, which has grown stronger thanks to the lack of alternatives. Second, the
hope of a ‘way out’ will lead to more patience among people stranded in limbo.
Third, rather than increasing the chaos, legal pathways in fact enable oversight,
control and identification – all of paramount interest to European governments.
Fourth, legal pathways are a key part of a solidarity approach towards non-
European host countries, whose cooperation is crucial for a shift in dynamics.
And fifth, safe entries may also create ‘exit options’: more border security has
been a key contributing factor to the growth of undocumented populations in the
West, thanks to the insurmountable obstacles to a potential future return. In sum,
legal pathways do not only allow for more humane procedures and incentives,
but also contributes to re-establishing control, in contrast with the risk and
chaos-producing border security model.
All these points assume a capability and willingness to change in Brussels
and some level of cooperation among member state governments; however, all
these actors have so far only managed to cooperate fully in the security model.
Amid this deadlock, frontline workers and agencies may themselves become
agents of change, since they as noted are often the first to criticise aspects of the
current approach. Harm reduction may thus fruitfully start with small measures
and day-to-day coalitions, in a ground-up approach that may circumvent obs-
tacles on larger political levels while opening up for a more ambitious model.
Long-term goals: towards a global model for mobility

A fundamental contradiction characterises today’s ‘open’ economies: relatively
free cross-border movements of goods, capital and well-off citizens versus heavy
restrictions on such movements for those who need it the most (citizens of poor,
repressive or conflict-torn countries). This contradiction – combined with the
continued demand for protection and jobs as well as for labour power from,
respectively, the ‘sender’ and ‘receiving’ ends – makes irregular migration rather
inevitable, quite regardless of border security measures. Put differently, migra-
tion cannot be treated as a separate policy sphere, but rather needs to be con-
sidered in relation to larger political and economic fields. Instead of persisting
with a short-term, supply-centric and security-focused tactic for controls of
migration, we thus need an overarching political strategy that takes into con-
sideration the ‘globalised’ nature of human movement and wider socio-economic
realities. Here I will briefly focus on how a global strategy may emerge through
four steps.
First, EU institutions must counter the emergency frame around migration and
borders. Since migration is a nation-state concern under the Treaty, it has been
excruciatingly hard to develop European initiatives that may help ‘normalise’
migration politics. Yet the Commission, the European parliament and the Euro-
pean Court of Justice can jointly help temper emergency rhetoric. Funding is a key
tool in this regard: while assistance does need to be provided to states experiencing
large influxes, it should be aimed at de-escalating the situation through financing
for creative, small-scale reception models. The Court may also investigate cases of
prolonged detention or detention-like conditions that keep building tensions at
borders. Further, based on evaluations such as those discussed above, incentives
must be put in place for harmful security technology to be de-prioritised or even
dismantled, starting with the most evidently counterproductive cases such as
border fences. Even if the European parliament or Commission cannot force
through change, they are able to make authoritative interventions in the public
sphere via objective evaluations and attendant ‘name and shame’ tactics, while EU
funds can be used to create positive or negative incentives for change, for instance
by withdrawing support over non-cooperation.
Second, third-state cooperation on migration needs to be reformulated.
Instead of exporting a punitive and counterproductive security model, European
actors should collaborate with neighbouring states to normalise migration. This
is in the medium-term interest of European states, as more favourable living cir-
cumstances will lead to less desperation and drama at the borders, while weak-
ening the political usefulness of migration as a bargaining chip. Just as European
actors have put pressure on neighbouring states to cooperate in policing through
138 R. Andersson
sticks and carrots (mobility partnerships, trade, aid, diplomacy), they can do the
same to get the opposite effect. More important than pressure, however, is
responsibility-sharing via legal pathways, to create a new environment for
genuine cooperation.
Third, within Europe, genuine solidarity and ‘normalisation’ similarly needs
to be built. Rather than mandatory ‘burden-sharing’ quotas, genuine solidarity
must involve three aspects: legal pathways from third countries, mutual recogni-
tion of asylum decisions and an end to Dublin rules that have triggered ‘beggar
thy neighbour’ behaviour – meaning, in the longer run, moves towards some
kind of functioning common asylum system. This ambitious shift needs to high-
light the benefits of mutuality and the costs of ‘going it alone’. The current lingo
of ‘burden sharing’ must be replaced by more enabling language – and incen-
tives to match it. Labour market instruments can be used to draw on the skills
and ambitions of new arrivals, while EU funds can support vulnerable refugees
as well as poorer member states. In short, with common policies and planning it
is possible to spread positive opportunities across Europe rather than compress
problems in borders areas.
Still, this shift is excruciatingly difficult, and may in the end need a drastic
move such as redrawing Schengen itself. A somewhat less dramatic measure
would be to move migration out of DG HOME to another directorate-general,
thus eroding interior ministries’ ‘monopoly’ over the phenomenon. One option
would be to move migration issues to DG Employment (labour migration) and
DG Justice (asylum); a better move would be to create a new directorate-general
for Mobility, which would support positive, evidence-based policies for intra-
European and non-European migration and asylum.
Fourth, a fully ‘global approach’ under a UN umbrella may be envisaged that
strengthens and extends refugee and ‘survival migration’ responsibility while
also involving low-skilled labour migration. The default ‘territorial’ focus in
refugee hosting needs to be replaced by a planned global system. While the
various options for ‘stretching’ or complementing the refugee regime have been
discussed elsewhere (Betts 2010), I here simply insist on the importance of a UN
framework that encompasses migrations outside the UN refugee convention –
not least since the role of the IOM (a UN-‘related’ organisation since 2016) has
often proven to be contributory to the problem, participating as it does as
‘service provider’ in security-based responses.
A strategic point can be made here regarding the distribution of risk within the
‘illegality industry’. While many political and security actors have benefited from
‘fighting migration’, novel risks have been generated and distributed downwards
in the system – towards frontline workers and countries; border and migrant com-
munities; and non-security agencies dealing with the consequences of deadly
borders. Among such risk-facing actors, there should be significant potential for
alternative international ‘mobility coalitions’ beyond the current border security
coalition. Adapting the language of Ulrich Beck, a shift can through such actors be
envisaged from a security-based ‘risk community’ to a genuinely cosmopolitan
one, learning from advances in fields such as climate change (Beck et al. 2013).
One key task here is to start identifying the costs and risks generated by the
security model, and so build political momentum around the reduction of risks to
the common good. As in the ‘drug wars’ and the climate change debate, ‘side
effects’, risks and ‘externalities’ have to be incorporated into cost assessments.
Until now, Europe’s illegality industry has succeeded in presenting its negative
effects as external to operations: that is, not as negative externalities but as risks
associated with ‘migration itself ’, seen as akin to a natural force (a ‘flood’, ‘tide’
or ‘avalanche’). Electorates, politicians, state agencies and other actors need to
be convinced that the large costs – financial, human, social, political – outweigh
the ‘gains’ produced by border security. In this endeavour, relying on the very
governments and EU institutions responsible for reinforcing the border security
model is certainly not enough. Instead momentum will have to come from other
sectors, including – in addition to the risk-facing institutions mentioned above –
UN bodies; journalists, academics and activists; and crucially refugees and
migrants themselves, who often have the sharpest analysis of the gains to be had
from their misfortune.
This chapter’s key contention is that politicians have been looking in the
wrong ‘place’ (the border) and at the wrong kind of measure (security) to
‘solve’ the migration ‘problem’. Ample evidence shows that punitive border
measures do not work; instead, the ‘mixed migration’ flows of today need to
be dealt with through other means, including economic instruments at home
and more intelligent interventions abroad. At the risk of stating the obvious, no
significant shifts on ‘distress migration’ will occur until significant political
will is put into resolving the conflicts in Libya, Syria, Somalia and Afghani-
stan; and no punitive policy will keep the poor from seeking a better life for
their families. The suggestions above are certainly no quick fixes. Yet this
should be acknowledged and even welcomed in our public and policy debates:
for the opposite – a search for a quick and visible ‘solution’ at the borders –
has proven to be no solution at all.
Acknowledgements
This chapter was previously published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration
Studies (Andersson 2015a), and is republished with the kind agreement of the
editors.
Notes
1 I here use industry as a heuristic for exploring patterns, conflicts and linkages among
seemingly disparate actors working on irregular migration.
2 See http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Migration_and_migrant_
population_statistics; and Frontex on overstayers (the language on the webpage has
changed quite recently): http://frontex.europa.eu/trends-and-routes/migratory-routes-map/
3 I use UNHCR figures since Frontex double-counts arrivals across the Balkans. See
http://data.unhcr.org/mediterranean/regional.php
4 EU funding from Commission and Frontex websites. For the journalistic investiga-
tion, see www.themigrantsfiles.com.
140 R. Andersson
5 MIR (2011).
6 Sidestepping important legal distinctions, this chapter consider ‘refugees’ and
‘migrants’ jointly owing to the security approach applied jointly to both these groups.
7 See Die Zeit on reasons behind the 2015 spike: www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2016–10/
angela-merkel-influence-refugees-open-borders-balkan-route
8 See http://migrantsatsea.org/2015/04/30/un-security-council-president-on-mediterranean-
migrant-crisis-its-not-about-protecting-europe-its-about-protecting-the-refugees/
9 See https://capacity4dev.ec.europa.eu/system/files/file/03/11/2014_-_1104/7._ciram_
guidelines_2012_interactive_v6.pdf.
10 On trafficking, see www.unodc.org/unodc/en/human-trafficking/what-is-human-
trafficking.html
11 Citation from EU FP-7 webpage, http://cordis.europa.eu/programme/rcn/861_en.html
12 One nuance: the sudden opening of the Canaries route also involved ‘opportunistic’
now-or-never departures.
13 See http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/home-affairs/what-we-do/policies/international-affairs/
index_en.htm
14 See, for example, www.nytimes.com/2011/05/19/opinion/19lucht.html?_r=0
15 See www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/7973649/Gaddafi-
Europe-will-turn-black-unless-EU-pays-Libya-4bn-a-year.html
16 Australia, like Spain in West Africa, has depended on poor neighbours for the
success of its draconian offshore policy – a solution not available in Europe’s
neighbourhood.
17 See www.irinnews.org/report/99095/horn-migrants-risk-new-routes-to-reach-europe.
18 Figures from Australia’s Department of Immigration and Border Protection website
and from Frontex, http://frontex.europa.eu/assets/Publications/Risk_Analysis/Annual_
Risk_Analysis_2015.pdf
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8 EU approaches to justice in
conflict and transition
Iavor Rangelov, Marika Theros and Nataša Kandić
Introduction
The European Union has become an important player in global efforts to
promote justice for serious human rights abuses in conflict-affected environ-
ments, in particular atrocity crimes – war crimes, crimes against humanity, and
genocide – and gross violations of human rights. EU policies in this area are rel-
atively new. Over the past decade, they have been evolving in a rather reactive
and incremental manner, driven by diverse foreign policy objectives (promoting
human rights and democracy, strengthening international law, preventing con-
flict and building peace) and pursued through a range of external instruments.
The EU has been most consistent in developing its policy in relation to the Inter-
national Criminal Court (ICC) but over time, and to varying degrees, EU justice
policies have addressed all main approaches and mechanisms associated with
transitional justice: criminal prosecutions at international, domestic and hybrid
courts; truth commissions; reparations; and institutional reform, including
security sector reform (SSR) and disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration
(DDR).
Until late 2015, the EU lacked a single policy framework that clarified the
EU’s concept of transitional justice, set out policy goals and priorities in this
area and indicated how they might be pursued in practice. Instead, references to
various aspects of justice have been scattered across a range of EU policy frame-
works, concepts and guidelines, with significant gaps and inconsistencies. The
Stockholm Programme and the European Security Strategy, for example, set out
the objective of strengthening international justice but provide little guidance for
implementation (European Council, 2008, 2009). The EU guidelines for support
to DDR include provisions for ending the culture of impunity and promoting
transitional justice, whereas the EU concept for support to SSR does not make a
direct reference to transitional justice (Council of the EU, 2006, 2005). The
absence of a policy framework has created some confusion and incoherence in
EU justice policies, but it has not precluded the EU from using the instruments
at its disposal to promote justice externally.
The EU uses legal, political, economic and security instruments in the justice
arena. It is yet to deploy the full range of instruments in one specific issue area
EU approaches to justice 143
or country/region, although the ICC and the Western Balkans come closest in
that respect. EU instruments may advance country- and region-specific object-
ives or cross-cutting priorities, such as support for the ICC. The main thematic
instruments are the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights
(EIDHR), which can support the whole range of justice processes, and the Instru-
ment for Stability (IfS), which focuses on emerging and ongoing crises. Geo-
graphic instruments have also been important, especially for supporting the ICC.
An ‘ICC clause’ is often included in agreements with third countries and
regional policy frameworks, for example in the Cotonou Agreement with
African, Caribbean and Pacific Countries, the EU–Africa Strategic Partnership,
and the European Neighbourhood Policy. In addition, the EU encourages ratifi-
cation of the Rome Statute of the ICC with regular demarches and political
dialogues with third countries (European Communities, 2008).
The EU has started to address justice concerns in the operations of Common
Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) missions and EU Special Representatives
(EUSR). The mandates of some EUSRs for countries where the ICC is active
include provisions for supporting the work of the court (Sudan and Sahel/Mali),
but others do not (Great Lakes/DRC and Southern Mediterranean/Libya) (Davis,
2014: 107). So far, justice-related provisions have been included only in the
mandates of AMM Aceh (disputed amnesties) and EULEX Kosovo (prosecution
of war crimes and ethnically motivated crimes). The mandates, of course, should
not be conflated with the actual practices of CSDP missions and EUSRs, some
of which may and do engage with justice issues in the absence of specific provi-
sions. Nevertheless, such discrepancies are indicative of an inconsistent, if not
selective, EU approach. Analysis of EU justice policies before the Lisbon Treaty
changed the three-pillar architecture suggests that the problem has not been so
much “a lack of coherence between the pillars, but rather a lack of coherence,
confusion even, within the pillar structure about transitional justice and trans-
itional justice mechanisms” (Davis, 2014: 177–178).
To address such concerns, the EU Action Plan on Human Rights and Demo-
cracy 2015–2019 included a commitment to develop and implement an EU
policy on transitional justice. In November 2015, the Foreign Affairs Council
adopted the Council Conclusions on the EU’s support to transitional justice
along with the EU’s Policy Framework on Support to Transitional Justice (here-
inafter, EU Policy Framework). The Framework adopts the widely accepted UN
definition of transitional justice and promotes a holistic approach: it incorporates
the four main elements of transitional justice – criminal justice, truth, repara-
tions, and guarantees of non-recurrence/institutional reform – and sets out the
key objectives of EU justice policy: (a) ending impunity; (b) providing recogni-
tion and redress to victims; (c) fostering trust; (d) strengthening the rule of law;
and (e) contributing to reconciliation.
The chapter examines EU approaches to justice for gross human rights viola-
tions in conflict-affected environments. It starts with a discussion of the signifi-
cance of justice for second-generation human security and emphasises the role
of accountability in tackling the spectrum of abuse and criminality – human
144 I. Rangelov et al.
rights abuse, organised crime, corruption – at the heart of today’s conflicts. The
chapter then assesses EU justice policies and practices in relation to three human
security principles: the primacy of human rights, a bottom-up approach and a
regional approach. We argue that EU engagement in justice issues plays out
differently in Liberal Peace and War on Terror contexts and draw on evidence
from the Balkans and Afghanistan to illuminate some of these differences. The
final section highlights the main challenges for the EU in advancing justice for
atrocity crimes and economic crimes and offers a set of recommendations for
aligning EU justice policies with a second-generation human security approach.
In particular, we argue for a shift in thinking about the role and potential of
justice in today’s conflicts and identify the key elements and resources needed
for developing an alternative approach.
The importance of justice

The pursuit of justice for human rights abuses offers a set of approaches for tack-
ling key characteristics and drivers of ‘new wars’, in particular the criminalised
nature of both the violence and the war economy (Kaldor, 2012). The analytical
value of the distinction between ‘political violence’ and ‘criminal violence’ is
diminishing as prevalent forms of conflict and violence do not fit easily either
category, and tend to occur in repeated cycles, thus also blurring the distinction
between ‘war’ and ‘peace’ (World Bank, 2011). From a second-generation
human security perspective, these distinctions are losing their significance as far
as the safety of human beings is concerned. Whether criminal or political or
both, violence in new wars is associated with widespread and systematic viola-
tions of international humanitarian law and human rights. Even where top-down
peace deals suspend hostilities, both human rights violations and economic
crimes tend to persist in the emerging ‘hybrid peace’ characterised by the
entrenchment of wartime networks in power structures and renewed opportun-
ities for predation (Berlin Report, 2016).
In fact, many individuals and communities experience violent conflict as a
series of abuses and injustices of different form and gravity. The prevalence of
abuse reflects the goals and methods of contemporary wars. Ethnic cleansing, for
example, takes the form of crimes against humanity and can be seen as both a
goal and a method of war: mass atrocity and displacement are used to mobilise
exclusivist identity and to establish political control over territory (Kaldor,
2013). Preventing human rights violations should be the main objective but
where serious violations have occurred, it is critical to address them with an
appropriate mix of justice instruments and to do so as early and robustly as pos-
sible. Accountability for atrocity crimes is important for shaping the calculations
of existing and potential perpetrators and for preventing the entrenchment of a
culture of impunity that encourages further abuse. Equally important, however,
is to enable recognition and redress for victims – as a way of vindicating their
rights and limiting the potential to exploit conflict-generated grievances for pur-
poses of political mobilisation or legitimation of violence.
Another critical issue concerns the linkages between atrocity crimes and eco-
nomic crimes in conflict-affected environments. The networks of state and non-
state actors responsible for serious human rights abuses are also the ones that
tend to benefit most from the predatory war economy, which feeds off and sus-
tains insecurity. Moreover, these networks often drive processes of state capture
and criminalisation and become adept at subverting international peacebuilding
and statebuilding efforts. Justice instruments may contribute to the disruption and
marginalisation of such networks in several ways. Criminal prosecution of those
most responsible for atrocity crimes is particularly important, but it is not suffi-
cient. Unlocking the full potential of criminal justice requires a broader approach
that acknowledges the linkages between human rights abuse, organised crime,
and corruption, and exploits openings for prosecution and punishment across
that spectrum. Human rights screening and vetting can provide another instru-
ment for diminishing the power and influence of illicit networks in state struc-
tures, especially in the security sector where they tend to be deeply embedded.
Again, harnessing the potential of justice-sensitive institutional reform, such as
SSR and DDR, requires taking into account and addressing the whole spectrum
of abuse and criminality.
Of course, justice instruments alone cannot resolve the problem of gross human
rights violations or disrupt the powerful networks that drive abuse and predation.
They need to be complemented and reinforced by other instruments for preventing
and suppressing human rights violations and for protecting civilians, and by sus-
tained efforts to create legitimate political authority and legitimate economic
opportunities and livelihoods. Traditional conflict-resolution approaches, however,
may have the opposite effect. In the Liberal Peace model, for example, peace
agreements and power sharing often end up entrenching perpetrators in power
structures and undermining the prospects for justice and accountability either for
atrocity crimes or for economic crimes (Rangelov, 2016). In an environment where
abuse of power is endemic and unchallenged, statebuilding may contribute to the
problem by strengthening the illicit networks and stimulating more abuse and pre-
dation. These challenges are exacerbated in conflict zones affected by the War on
Terror, where repressive regimes and warlords implicated in past and ongoing
abuses are also key allies in the fight against terrorism (Rangelov and Theros,
2012). Chinkin and Kaldor (2017, pp. 525–526) emphasise the centrality of justice
and accountability mechanisms for a second-generation human security approach
as an alternative to the Liberal Peace approach:
A post-Liberal Peace approach would presuppose war as a mutual enterprise

and would involve an inclusive process of peace-making that would margin-
alise the warring parties. In such a situation, effective justice mechanisms,
the arrest and trial of war criminals for example would be positively
beneficial.
Our analysis suggests that effective justice responses should start at home: they
need to take into account the challenges of EU aid subversion, for example, and
the ways in which counterterrorism partnerships or the agenda for Countering
Violent Extremism (CVE) serve to entrench the conflict networks and shrink the
space for justice and accountability. Moreover, the spectrum of abuse and
criminality that prevails in today’s conflict zones is embedded in economic and
social relations that are transnational in character. The conflict networks involved
in atrocity crimes and economic crimes are tied into criminal enterprises with a
global reach and invest the proceeds of abuse and predation transnationally,
including in the real estate market and financial sector of European cities. In fact,
violent conflict could be seen as a mechanism for a predatory form of global
redistribution that drives inequality both in conflict zones and in Europe. An
effective justice response depends upon recognising these linkages, taking them
seriously and aligning the EU’s internal and external policies accordingly.
Primacy of human rights

The primacy of human rights is the backbone of the human security doctrine – it
is “what distinguishes the human security approach from traditional state-based
approaches” (Barcelona Report, 2004: 14). The Treaty of the EU includes human
rights protection and strict observance of international law, as well as peace and
security, among the core objectives of EU foreign policy (European Union,
2008, Art. 3.5). Human rights principles are also reflected in the EU’s compre-
hensive approach to conflict prevention, crisis management, and peacebuilding.
This suggests that the EU considers peace, security, and human rights to be
mutually reinforcing, which provides a solid foundation for pursuing EU justice
policies that are aligned with a second-generation human security approach.
In policy documents that deal specifically with justice, however, a more
ambiguous framing reflects the peace vs. justice dilemma in the Liberal Peace
model. It suggests that in the justice arena, there are tensions and trade-offs
between the EU’s normative commitments to human rights and strategic con-
siderations such as peace and stability. The EU guidelines for compliance with
international humanitarian law, for example, state that it may be “difficult to
balance the overall aim for establishing peace and the need to combat impunity”
(Council of the EU, 2009a: 16(g)). The EU concept for mediation refers to
“potential tensions between the EU’s normative commitments in the area of
human rights and international law and short-term conflict management object-
ives” (Council of the EU, 2009b: 4(c)). Country-specific policies reflect a similar
framing. In Colombia, for example, the EU supports both peacebuilding and
justice for human rights abuses but expects that a ‘difficult balance’ has to be
struck between peace and justice.
The EU often negotiates such perceived tensions and trade-offs on a case-by-
case basis, which is one factor that might explain discrepancies in EU practice.
An underlying rationale, however, can still be detected in EU approaches to
justice and that rationale accounts for much of the uneven implementation of
justice policies and objectives. When justice and peace or stability are seen to
clash, EU actors tend to adopt a sequencing approach that effectively prioritises
peace and stability objectives and defers the pursuit of justice to a later stage
(Rangelov, 2014). This is consistent with the EU’s overall approach to conflict
resolution and peacebuilding, where sequencing means that elite-mediated peace
deals and stabilisation are the first priority, whereas governance issues are
addressed over the longer term (Faria and Youngs, 2010: 6).
The sequencing logic is evident in the Balkans, a region that has served as a
laboratory for EU approaches to peace and justice. The main peacebuilding
instrument of the EU in the region is the Stabilisation and Association Process
for South East Europe (SAP). The SAP set out ‘full cooperation’ with the Inter-
national Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) as a condition for
progress towards EU membership. Negotiations with Croatia were suspended in
2006 over a high-ranking suspect, General Gotovina, and resumed only after the
ICTY had been satisfied that Croatia was cooperating on his arrests and transfer
to The Hague. In the case of Serbia, however, the EU’s war crimes conditional-
ity was repeatedly compromised, and its implementation deferred over concerns
for stability, and was effectively used as a tool to shape election outcomes and
reactions to Kosovo’s declaration of independence (Rangelov, 2016).
In Liberal Peace interventions, such as the Balkans, the primacy of human
rights appears to be compromised by the EU’s emphasis on strategic objectives
like peace and stability, and by prevailing perceptions at the EU that justice and
accountability may clash with and complicate the pursuit of such objectives. A
key factor that shapes the EU approach might be the experience of the member
states in dealing with their own past. The EU’s consistent support for the ICC,
for example, could be explained by the lasting legacy of the Nuremberg Trials.
More generally, however, with the partial exception of the Holocaust, European
states have done little reckoning with legacies of past abuse and injustice.
The transitions from dictatorship to democracy in Southern and Eastern Europe
were mostly negotiated and involved either a very limited justice response or no
justice at all, as in Spain’s ‘pact of silence’. In large parts of Eastern Europe, the
absence of transitional justice enabled elites to convert their political power into
economic power and paved the way for plunder and criminalisation across the
region after the revolutions of 1989. Another example is the unaddressed legacy of
colonialism (see, e.g. Shepard, 2006). Since the financial crisis, in many member
states of the European Union the combination of amnesty and amnesia for past
abuse and injustice is revealing its dark underside and paving the way for historical
revisionism and the rise of fascist, racist, xenophobic, and other extremist identi-
ties and movements across Europe. It could be argued that the EU’s external pol-
icies on justice reflect the internal experience of the member states and at the
current juncture, the dangerous consequences of compromising justice are becom-
ing increasingly evident both internally and externally.
Another factor concerns a structural problem at the heart of the Liberal Peace:
political elites and their networks in conflict-affected states tend to be heavily
implicated in human rights abuses, organised crime and corruption, but they are
also the ones enlisted by the EU to serve as partners in peacebuilding and state-
building. The problem is compounded in War on Terror contexts, where the
s trategic objective of defeating an enemy creates even more space for abuse and
criminality that undermine the security of the population. Particularly significant
in that respect is the reliance on repressive regimes and local strongmen impli-
cated in human rights abuses as allies and proxies in prosecuting the war, which
often results in further entrenchment of perpetrators in power structures and
rampant impunity. Whereas in Liberal Peace interventions the justice deficit
typically reflects problems with the framing and implementation of justice pol-
icies and processes, in conflict zones affected by the War on Terror the outcome
is usually an absence of such policies and processes.
The case of Afghanistan, the first front in the War on Terror, offers important
insight into the distinct challenges that emerge when Liberal Peace and War on
Terror approaches co-exist and interact. It suggests how in conflict-affected
environments where fighting terrorism is a major concern, EU policies aimed at
peacebuilding and statebuilding may be subverted and even co-opted for further-
ing the objectives of the War on Terror. Whereas the security environment has
been decisively shaped by US military and political alliances with warlords and
strongmen networks, the EU has emphasised a civilian approach to addressing
security challenges in Afghanistan, focusing its efforts on rebuilding state insti-
tutions and striving to strengthen human rights, democracy and the rule of law.
However, in a context where many state institutions are captured by networks
implicated in past and ongoing abuses and impunity is unchallenged, EU pol-
icies that seek to strengthen the state and its security structures may exacerbate
insecurity. The average Afghan citizen interacts with the police and the judi-
ciary, for example, mainly through a series of shakedowns and corruption pay-
ments to access basic services or simply to avoid further abuse (Rangelov and
Theros, 2012). Strengthening these structures can reinforce their abusive and
exploitative character, providing fertile ground for insurgent groups like the
Taliban to mobilise and recruit.
Another challenge for the EU is to carve out space for human rights in a
highly unfavourable policy environment dominated by counterterrorism object-
ives. It is not uncommon for different EU actors and member states to work at
cross-purposes on the ground in a particular area. When this has been the case in
Afghanistan, it has constrained significantly the ability of the EU to promote a
justice and accountability agenda and to gain leverage with the United States on
these issues. Some member states consistently support justice efforts while
others have been reluctant to challenge US policies that undermine such efforts
(personal communication, EU official, 2011). Divisions have been particularly
pronounced between Europeans who work in NATO and those who work on
behalf of the EU.
At the political level, the EUSR for Afghanistan in 2002–2008, Francesc
Vendrell, played a critical role in keeping questions of justice and accountability
on the agenda, whereas subsequent EUSRs have generally neglected these
issues. In a place like Afghanistan, the importance of personalities cannot be
overstated. Vendrell came into office with more than a decade of experience in
the region and prioritised justice and accountability processes from the start. He
advocated policies to disarm militias and stressed the need for vetting mecha-
nisms in elections and appointments processes. His team provided crucial
support for the establishment of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights
Commission (AIHRC), pressed the government to adopt a transitional justice
roadmap (2005), and lobbied against the adoption of the controversial amnesty
law (2007).
In 2007 the EU deployed a police mission, EUPOL Afghanistan, which was
intended to Europeanise the German police support project in the country. The
EUSR opposed the idea of putting a European face on police reform in Afghani-
stan. His concern was that the whole effort might be overtaken by the vastly
resourced US paramilitary approach to policing. Indeed the US managed to re-task
police forces to conduct counter-insurgency operations, effectively robbing
ordinary Afghans of police protection and exacerbating the problem of abuse by
the police (Theros, 2010). The case of Chief of Police Abdul Razziq in Kandahar
is just one example: a trusted ally and model police chief for the US, he has
achieved notoriety for his brutality. Forces under his command have been accused
of torture, enforced disappearances, and extra-judicial executions (Human Rights
Watch, 2015). The failure of the EU to establish a civilian law enforcement model
reflects in part the reluctance of large member states to support the EU approach
and to merge, or at least coordinate, their bilateral police missions with EUPOL.
Without support from member states, EUPOL officials have struggled to make
themselves heard (Burke, 2014: 16). But even within EUPOL itself, a sustained
effort was never made to pursue a justice-sensitive approach to police reform and
to implement human rights screening and vetting.
At a time when violence and insecurity in Afghanistan are growing, the EU’s
commitment to justice and accountability objectives appears to be withering
away. The new country strategy stresses the importance of ending the culture of
impunity but does not provide funding for activities that might advance that
objective, and allocates less than 1 per cent of the overall budget for commit-
ments in the area of human rights (Council of the EU, 2015). And the newly
created Human Rights Dialogue with the Afghan government, while a welcome
development, does not include any transitional justice processes and mechanisms
among the agreed deliverables (European Delegation Afghanistan, 2015).
Bottom-up and regional approaches

The bottom-up principle recognises that external actors can only play an
‘enabling’ role in delivering human security and supporting the (re)construction
of legitimate authority. It is premised on the idea that continuous engagement
with affected individuals and communities is crucial to gain understanding of
critical issues and to empower citizens in the process. A bottom-up approach
may respond to the legitimacy deficit of narrowly negotiated peace agreements,
while providing a guide for external actors “on what strategies are most likely to
be effective as well as feedback and evaluation for ongoing missions” (Barce-
lona Report, 2004).
A combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches is critical for trans-
itional justice, although there are questions about the relationship between these
levels. In Liberal Peace contexts where elite-mediated peace deals and power
sharing are prevalent, such as Bosnia, a key concern for the EU is to maintain its
influence and leverage over political elites and state actors. Transitional justice is
often disruptive for the power and interests of such actors, but instead of har-
nessing and amplifying civil society demands for justice precisely for that
reason, the EU tends to view such demands as conflict-generating and destabilis-
ing (Rangelov and Theros, 2009). A top-down focus of EU support for trans-
itional justice is also reflected in the emphasis on civil society engagement with
formal justice mechanisms. Once such mechanisms are put in place, the EU pro-
vides significant support for civil society activities such as monitoring, outreach,
awareness campaigns, and engagement with victims (Davis, 2014).
The EU’s reluctance to engage with civil society on politically charged issues
of justice and accountability is even more pronounced in War on Terror con-
texts, where EU actors generally prefer to support NGO efforts in development,
reconstruction, and service provision. Nevertheless, when the EU has provided
support to civil society on politically sensitive issues in Afghanistan, for
example, it has been successful in strengthening the ability of local advocates of
justice to respond to public demands for accountability and even to push through
concrete initiatives (AIHRC, 2005).
Structurally, EU assistance programmes tend to favour support to profession-
alised, urban-based NGOs. The space for civil society is shrinking in many parts
of the world, however, and in the justice arena civil society activity increasingly
takes place outside formal justice processes and involves more informal, grass-
roots initiatives (Security in Transition, 2014). This is in effect ‘bottom-up trans-
itional justice’ and its strength is that it may reflect locally embedded
understanding of justice and may address needs and issues that are neglected in
formal processes. But these are precisely the sort of civil society actors and initi-
atives that are least likely to be able to access EU funding, especially in places
where concerns for terrorist financing loom large.
A regional approach responds to the ways in which conflict spreads “through
refugees and displaced persons, through minorities who live in different places,
through criminal and extremist networks. Indeed most situations of severe insec-
urity are located in regional clusters” (Barcelona Report, 2014: 18). It is difficult
to pursue meaningful justice for atrocity crimes without taking into account the
regional and transnational character of most contemporary conflicts and legacies
of abuse. In Africa, for example, the mismatch between regional conflicts and
crimes and statist criminal justice responses is seen as creating ‘zones of impu-
nity’ (Sriram and Ross, 2007). In fact, most types of justice instruments and pro-
cesses in today’s conflict zones are facing the challenge that perpetrators,
victims, witnesses, and evidence are often scattered across state borders.
Civil society actors in East Africa and the Balkans have drawn attention to
the regional challenges for transitional justice and have emphasised the need for
regionally focused solutions (Security in Transition, 2014: 7–8). In Latin
America, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has highlighted patterns of
persecution and repressive policies that were regional in character, reflecting the
aims of ‘Operation Condor’, for example, to counter an ostensible regional threat
of terrorism (Goibarú v. Paraguay). Abuses committed in the context of the War
on Terror are posing even greater challenges and may require a combination of
national, regional and extraterritorial approaches.
And yet, neither the EU nor other international actors have sought to develop
a regional justice approach. The EU tends to rely on the UN for leadership in the
field of transitional justice. In this case, however, the EU should lead. The EU
has unrivalled legitimacy, resources, and experience in promoting regionalism
on the world stage, as well as a wealth of experience internally in dealing with
issues like regional cooperation in criminal matters. And it has been involved for
quite some time in an ongoing experiment with regional justice in the Balkans:
RECOM, a civil society initiative that advocates the creation of a regional com-
mission to establish the facts of war crimes and other serious violations of
human rights committed on the territory of the former Yugoslavia between 1991
and 2001.
The RECOM initiative is an innovative example of the ways in which bot-
tom-up and regional approaches to justice can be productively combined and
mutually reinforcing in practice. It is also an example of the sort of ‘justice net-
works’ that the EU should be supporting because they offer a real alternative to
the conflict networks and provide a viable constituency for EU reform policies in
conflict-affected states. The idea for the RECOM initiative emerged from exten-
sive regional debates in civil society in 2006–2007, led by several civil society
organisations from Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. These discus-
sions brought together diverse sections of civil society, including many victims
and families of victims from different ethnic communities. They highlighted a
shared understanding that, first, dealing with the past in the region would require
collective efforts of civil society across all post-Yugoslav countries and, second,
a regional approach could help address the limitations of domestic war crimes
trials and could create space for confronting the experience of the ‘other’,
missing at the local level.
Once a regional approach to dealing with the past had crystallised in the dis-
cussions, the consultations focused on the question of what instruments could be
effective in creating a complete, more credible record of past human rights
abuses and opening up space for the voices of victims. At a meeting with associ-
ations of victims and veterans in May 2008, it was decided to build a regional
civil society coalition to advocate the creation of a regional commission for
establishing the facts of war crimes committed from 1991 to 2001. When the
Coalition for RECOM was established in October 2008, more than 100 civil
society organisations joined in the first few days. The Coalition’s first decision
was to organise an extensive process of consultations on the mandate and activ-
ities of a future regional commission.
The RECOM consultation process, which lasted three and half years, was
incredibly important. It involved more than 7,000 people coming from human
rights organisations, associations of the families of the missing, associations of
former camp detainees, religious communities, artists, journalists, lawyers,
researchers and academics, youth activists, and citizens concerned with the
process of dealing with the past. The Coalition organised 110 consultations and
debates to discuss the mandate and activities of RECOM, as well as eight trans-
itional justice forums with participants from the entire region and ten discussions
dedicated to the voices of the victims. A number of recurrent views and posi-
tions were articulated in these debates, some of which include:
• The regional level helps to hear the voices of victims from other com-
munities and encourages empathy with the ‘other’
• ‘In the consultations, I learned how to listen to others’
• ‘I’ve recognised that others suffer like I do’
• All victims are equal in death.
The consultations also called into question certain prejudices about the ‘other’:
• ‘I have now become convinced that not all Serbs committed crimes’
• ‘I have come to realise that not all Albanians are terrorists’.
The members of the Coalition share the conviction that only a regional body for
establishing the facts of war crimes has the potential to create favourable con-
ditions for much-needed public recognition and to promote respect of all victims.
In particular, identifying all civilians and combatants who have lost their lives in
the wars in the former Yugoslavia is seen as a critical precondition for the emer-
gence of a culture of remembrance of all victims, regardless of their ethnic and
national belonging.
The civil society coalition for RECOM has demonstrated that it has the capa-
city to initiate and carry out a process that offers an answer to the continuing
conflict over the past in the region. The most significant aspect of this process
was the drafting of a Statute of RECOM. With respect to the activities of a future
commission, participants in the consultative process prioritised identifying the
names of victims and establishing the facts of their death or disappearance,
which they saw as directly contributing to one of the main objectives of
RECOM: to create the conditions for official public recognition of all victims.
Over time, this objective started to be discussed as a key precondition for initiat-
ing reconciliation, where ‘reconciliation’ was understood as a long-term process.
Many participants also identified holding public hearings with victims as a crit-
ical aspect of the work of the commission, highlighting their potential to encour-
age solidarity with victims from the ‘other’ community.
In November 2014, the Coalition adopted amendments to the Statute of
RECOM that had been agreed by the personal representatives of the presidents
of post-Yugoslav states. Since then, however, the political environment in the
region has changed significantly. For example, the Coalition has not been able to
ensure continuity in support for RECOM among some of the newly elected
presidents and governments in the region. There is a trend, especially in Croatia
and Serbia, towards growing strength and momentum of right-wing parties and
groups.
EU conditionality for the post-conflict states in the region has emphasised the
arrest and transfer of suspects indicted by the ICTY. These policies were
effective in pressing Croatia to arrest General Gotovina in exchange for progress
towards EU membership. Over time, Serbia’s record of cooperation with the Tri-
bunal also improved. However, once the arrest of the remaining suspects sought
by the ICTY was completed, the EU appears to have lost interest in transitional
justice processes in the region. As a result, transitional justice is left in the hands
of national governments. The governments are promoting their own interpreta-
tions of reconciliation, tied to their own narrow political interests and purposes,
and successfully converting their rhetoric of reconciliation into tangible support
from the EU.
At the current juncture, the EU could play a decisive role in ensuring that the
RECOM process transitions successfully from civil society to public institutions
and becomes an intergovernmental project, with strong support from EU institu-
tions. The European Commission is providing financial support for the RECOM
initiative but so far, its political support has been limited to mentioning the
RECOM process in its reports on Serbia. The EU’s decisive political support is
seen as critical for taking the process to the next level and catalysing the neces-
sary inter-governmental negotiations. At the same time, RECOM could be
equally important for the EU. It gives EU actors a chance to assess the potential
of regional and bottom-up approaches to justice and to experiment with them in
practice. Moreover, it provides an opportunity for the EU to calibrate its policies
for strengthening the justice networks and marginalising the conflict networks
that so often subvert and hijack EU policies.
Conclusions and recommendations

The EU Policy Framework on transitional justice was adopted only in November
2015 and its impact on EU justice policies is yet to be seen. From a second-
generation human security perspective, a welcome development is that the EU
states its commitment to a holistic approach that incorporates a gender dimen-
sion and includes the whole spectrum of judicial and non-judicial, retributive
and restorative mechanisms. It is useful that the Framework clarifies the EU’s
position on amnesties: the EU opposes amnesties for war crimes, crimes against
humanity, genocide, and gross violations of human rights, including in the
context of peace negotiations. This development does not address the challenge
of de facto amnesties in peace and transitional processes, but at least it precludes
EU support for legally sanctioned impunity for international crimes.
As far as the human security principles are concerned, a major gap is the
absence of any reference to a regional approach, even though the Framework
acknowledges that local conflicts may have ‘international dimensions’. A bottom-
up approach is implicit in multiple references to civil society dialogue and
c onsultation throughout the Framework. The framing, however, is problematic
as it assumes a symbiotic relationship between civil society and the state. Civil
society is conceived as a partner and supporter of state actors and formal justice
institutions, rather than an alternative source of support and legitimacy for justice
and accountability processes in the face of prevailing resistance and backlash
from state-based actors. With respect to the primacy of human rights, the Frame-
work suggests continuity with the EU’s current approach: human rights prin-
ciples are integrated in the EU’s comprehensive approach to conflict as
normative commitments. The primacy of human rights is not addressed in the
document as it avoids going into questions of prioritising particular principles
and objectives, and does not address the ‘peace versus justice’ issue. Overall, the
Framework does not suggest that the EU is rethinking its overall approach to
justice and its relationship to conflict and peace.
From a second-generation human security perspective, our analysis of EU
justice policy and practice in conflict-affected environments suggests that from a
human security perspective, the main challenges are cognitive – they reflect the
ways in which EU actors think about justice, its significance, and its relationship
to conflict and peace. For the EU, justice tends to be a question of principle,
whereas for human security, it is about the coming together of principle and
pragmatism in a ‘practical strategy’ (Chinkin and Kaldor 2017). The primacy of
human rights has a solid foundation in EU foreign policy but the EU treats
justice and accountability mainly as normative commitments and when such
commitments are seen to clash with strategic considerations for peace and
stability, as in the Liberal Peace model, the primacy of human rights is often
compromised. These challenges are exacerbated in areas of insecurity affected
by the War on Terror, where impunity is usually the norm and perpetrators of
atrocity crimes and economic crimes are deeply embedded in state structures. In
such environments, the EU faces a real risk that its peacebuilding and statebuild-
ing policies are either subverted or co-opted for war-fighting.
Although the EU has tended to promote peace and human rights internally
without pursuing justice for past abuse and repression, this is currently called
into question by the rise of nationalist movements and extremist ideologies that
reveal the dangerous consequences of Europe’s unaddressed legacies of abuse
and injustice across the continent. Foregoing justice is even more problematic in
today’s conflict zones, where pervasive abuse and criminality – human rights
violations, organised crime, corruption – is a structural condition of persistent
conflict and a key factor in the failure of peacebuilding and statebuilding inter-
ventions to accomplish their objectives. Justice is critical for addressing the
spectrum of criminality and abuse in ‘new war’ settings but unlocking its poten-
tial contribution does require a cognitive shift. It effectively means rethinking
justice as a practical strategy for sustainable peace and stability, rather than
seeing it only as a normative commitment or aspiration of EU foreign policy.
There are five main recommendations to the EU that emerge from our ana-
lysis. First, EU justice policies need to take into account and address the entire
spectrum of abuse and criminality in contemporary conflicts. The nexus between
human rights abuses, organised crime and corruption is at the heart of the preda-
tory social condition that so often ends up subverting EU policies to conflict.
The specific justice responses most likely to be effective in disrupting the con-
flict networks will vary from one context to another. They will depend on the
ability of the EU to seize ‘windows of opportunity’ and to exploit openings for
pursuing justice for atrocity crimes, economic crimes, or both, wherever these
openings may occur.
Second, a bottom-up approach can help reframe and reinforce EU justice pol-
icies in conflict-affected environments by tapping into an alternative set of
actors, ideas, and sources of legitimacy and support for political reform and soci-
etal transformation. This, however, would require the EU to reach out to less
established, less formal structures, where the meanings of justice may differ
from Western notions, and to take seriously civil society proposals even when
they appear disruptive.
Third, a regional approach to justice is urgently needed to match the regional
character of today’s conflicts and their criminal legacies. So far, EU actors have
overlooked this issue but given its distinctive identity and strengths, the EU’s
most significant contribution in the justice arena may well be in addressing the
currently neglected regional and transnational dimensions of justice and account-
ability processes and mechanisms.
Fourth, EU justice policies must involve sustained internal and external action
to be effective. The dangerous implications of Europe’s own unaddressed legacies
of past abuse and injustice need to be confronted head-on. In fragile and conflict-
affected areas, the conflict networks benefit from transnational linkages and oppor-
tunities that can only be disrupted by tackling the problem from both ends. And
the justice networks that exist in conflict areas also depend on transnational link-
ages and opportunities for their survival and ability to offer a viable alternative.
Last, adopting a human security approach to justice for atrocity crimes and
economic crimes depends on the ability of the EU to provide financial and other
assistance to a range of internal and external actors, who often work in particu-
larly challenging environments. A designated Instrument for Justice, comple-
menting the existing Instrument for Stability, is necessary both to prioritise
justice and to provide timely and effective support to justice networks and initi-
atives in today’s conflict zones.
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9 Human security and sanctions,
from security to governance
Strengthening EU capacities and
involving the locals
Francesco Giumelli
Introduction
Sanctions have gained the centre of the international stage since the end of the
Cold War (Cortright and Lopez, 1995, 2000). The use of military force was
accepted during the Cold War, when the public discourse was filled with con-
cepts such as ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ and ‘Flexible Response’. The New
World Order was constructed on the assumption that the use of force would not
be central to solving problems in international relations, and instruments other
than war, such as sanctions, would be more suitable to deal with the con-
temporary challenges of international politics (Cortright and Lopez, 1995). The
European Union (EU) has contributed to the expansion of sanctions practices
(Portela, 2010; Eriksson, 2011; Giumelli, 2011), also led by the belief that sanc-
tions were less harmful than military force. However, sanctions reduce the influx
of resources towards certain regions and this has a negative spill-over effect over
innocent civilians (Weiss et al., 1997).
This chapter discusses sanctions from a human security perspective. Specifi-
cally, it assesses the extent to which the EU has been inspired by a human
security approach in using restrictive measures.1 The argument is that the use of
EU sanctions has been partially adapted to meet the challenges posed by human
security concerns in the last two decades, but specific steps need to be made in
order to further improve the situation. The chapter looks at the EU sanctions
practice through two principles of a human security approach: human rights and
bottom-up. Human rights concerns refer to the negative consequences of sanc-
tions on innocent civilians and the legal protections that need to be upheld when
individuals are subjects of freedom restrictions. Moreover, targeted sanctions
can affect the practices of local economies by providing incentives for illegal
activities. Bottom-up regards the consideration of local communities and actors
when the EU decides to resort to restrictive measures. Little involvement from
locals often contributes to undermining the legitimacy of the EU and, therefore,
the effectiveness of any action towards a certain community is imperilled. The
chapter suggests that stronger institutional capacities at the EU level combined
with a well-tailored strategy that takes local actors seriously would contribute to
the alignment of EU sanctions with a human security strategy for the future.
Human security and sanctions 159
The chapter is divided as follows. First, a human security perspective is pre-
sented. Second, the legal framework and the practice of EU sanctions are intro-
duced. Third, human security concerns are highlighted in relation to EU
restrictive measures. Fourth, the chapter presents specific solutions that the EU
should undertake to address existing concerns.
Human security and sanctions

A human security approach shifts the attention from the security of states to the
security of individuals (Kaldor, 2007). A report prepared by the United Nations
Development Program (UNDP) in 1994 broadens this further and identifies
human security as ‘freedom from fear and freedom from want, with an equal
opportunity to enjoy their rights and fully develop their human potential’ (United
Nations Development Programme, 1994). The Barcelona and the Madrid reports
published in 2004 and 2007 identified principles upon which a human security
strategy can be articulated (The Barcelona Report of the Study Group on
Europe’s Security Capabilities, 2004; The Madrid Report of the Human Security
Study Group, 2007). The reports identified six principles – human rights, legiti-
mate political authority, bottom-up approach, multilateralism, regional focus and
clear objectives – upon which a human security strategy should be constructed.
This approach has been further extended into a second-generation human
security, which needs to include political, security, economic and social dimen-
sions (Chinkin and Kaldor, 2017).
The implications from the original definition of freedom from fear and want,
which translates into political and economic rights, combined with the need to
adopt a bottom-up approach appear to be relevant areas for the analysis of sanc-
tions and human security.
The first category refers to the ways in which sanctions infringe upon eco-
nomic and political rights. Sanctions’ impacts can directly affect individuals,
communities, or both, thereby undermining human security directly and/or indi-
rectly. Starting with the latter, sanctions can undermine human security by nega-
tively affecting the economy of a community. This concern was especially
relevant in the 1990s, when the United Nations imposed a total embargo on Iraq
following its invasion of Kuwait. While the toll on the population was extremely
severe, Saddam Hussein managed to hold onto power (Alnasrawi, 2001). Iraq is
by far the most notorious example of this, but the conflicts in the former Yugo-
slavia and Haiti also contributed to consolidate the idea that sanctions hurt civil-
ians rather than their leaders (Paes, 2009). Sanctions have become targeted
today, but concerns remain.2 First, the economy of a targeted society can be
affected, prices can increase, there can be shortages of resources and primary
goods, and the provision of public goods can be altered (Drezner, 2011). Often it
is the policy objectives of the country’s leadership that determines the allocation
of resources and sanctions have little to do with it. For instance, the worsening
of healthcare services documented in Iran can be due to sanctions, but it can also
be due to the decision of the government to invest resources in the nuclear
160 F. Giumelli
program instead of in its healthcare system precisely because sanctions did target
other sectors (Gordon, 2013). Second, the regular functioning of the economy
can change with a new structure of incentives to trade with goods included in the
list of sanctions and beyond. For instance, new actors enter the market of spe-
cific products, smuggling and other kinds of activities emerge at the expense of
regular business practices. In other words, predatory criminalised economies
may emerge out of sanctioned societies.
Sanctions not only impact the human security of individuals via the effects on
the wider economy, but the practice of targeted sanctions has also opened the
Pandora’s Box of individual rights of due process at the international level
(Biersteker and Eckert, 2006, 2009). Indeed, legal concerns have emerged in
recent years, since individual rights should be guaranteed when restrictions to
property and freedom of movement are implemented. Therefore, principles such
as due process and effective remedy have inspired the preparation of legal texts
with a view to reduce human rights violations in the sanctions process. Several
national and regional courts have considered complaints and issued decisions on
sanctions cases and an international practice of targeted sanctions is being con-
stituted. However, guaranteeing human rights to individuals in legal proceedings
at the international level turned out to be a complicated task, so that grey areas
remain in how targeted sanctions affect the human rights of individuals.
The second relevant category of human security when sanctions are under
scrutiny is the bottom-up approach. The shift from comprehensive to targeted
sanctions is even more evident in this realm. Targeted sanctions very often replace
domestic policies, for instance in cases when spoilers of conflicts or democrat-
ization processes are targeted (Ramjoue, 2015). Therefore, involving local actors
in the decision-making process becomes an essential aspect of a human security
approach to sanctions. In fact, targeted sanctions are frequently imposed after con-
sulting with local actors, and if it is true that the nature of the instrument does not
allow this in all the occasions, this aspect still needs to be considered (Giumelli,
2013c). Indeed, sanctions are used to rectify wrongdoings and to fight deviant
behaviours; therefore targets of sanctions are by nature in disagreement with
senders.3 Nevertheless, local actors have begun to see sanctions as an instrument in
the hands of others that can also serve their own interests. In practice, this means
that while sanctions were seen as an instrument of the strong on the weak, they can
also be requested by opposition parties against their direct rulers.4 Sanctions are
today often about meeting requests coming from actors in the country under sanc-
tions, either from opposition or government forces.
Overview of EU policy on targeted sanctions

The European Union has imposed sanctions as a foreign policy instrument since
the entry into force of the Maastricht Treaty. In fact, economic sanctions had
been imposed before, but only as coordinated efforts among members of the
European community. With the creation of the European Union, sanctions
became mandatory to all members when decided by the Council, and this foreign
policy instrument was Europeanized (Giumelli, 2013a). UN sanctions and deci-
sions to suspend cooperation under the Cotonou Agreement are also similar
measures, but they lack the political weight to be considered autonomous deci-
sions of the Council. Thus, when restrictive measures are concerned, this chapter
refers to sanctions imposed as foreign policy decisions by the EU.
Sanctions are imposed under Article 29 of the Treaty on the European Union
(TEU). This article gives the Council the power to decide the Common Foreign
and Security Policy (CFSP) of the EU with the objectives sets by article 21 of
TEU, which consists of advancing:
in the wider world: democracy, the rule of law, the universality and indivisi-
bility of human rights and fundamental freedoms, respect for human dignity,
the principles of equality and solidarity, and respect for the principles of the
United Nations Charter and international law.
(European Union, 2009)
Sanctions are proposed by the High Representative and the Council has to decide
unanimously upon their imposition. Following a decision of the Council, arms
embargoes and travel bans are to be implemented by EU member states, whereas
a Council regulation according to article 215 of the Treaty on the Functioning of
the European Union (TFEU) is necessary insofar as economic restrictions are
concerned. Indeed, financial and trade bans alter the functioning of the common
market, which is one of the exclusive competences of the EU.
There are three documents that constitute the framework under which sanc-
tions operate: the Basic Principles, the Guidelines and the Best Practices. The
Guidelines were the first document approved by the Council (2003) as specific
indications were needed to cope with the post-9/11 listings and to administer the
evolution from comprehensive to targeted sanctioning. This document was
updated in 2005, 2009 and, for the last time, in 2012 (European Union, 2012).
Following the Guidelines, the activity of the EU needed to be inspired by general
norms, therefore the Basic Principles were adopted in 2004, stating that the EU
should impose targeted sanctions whenever ‘necessary’ to meet the objectives of
the EU (European Union, 2004). Finally, the Best Practices were adopted in
2008 and they are more technical indications to ensure proper and consistent
implementation across the EU (European Union, 2015). Being in constant review
by the Relex group, the most updated version of it was released in December
2016 (European Union, 2016).
There are four types of sanctions that are commonly used. The first are arms
embargoes, which are bans on sale weapons and provision of military related
services (e.g. training). The second category is travel bans and this refers to the
prohibition of entering or transiting the territory of the European Union. Third is
the range of financial restrictions, which encompasses freezing funds, to prevent-
ing payments and financial services to targets. Finally, trade restrictions regard
the sale/purchase of goods, technology and services that are considered strategi-
cally linked to the targeted political activity.
162 F. Giumelli
The area of application for sanctions has expanded greatly in the past years.
Currently, the EU is running 22 regimes of autonomous sanctions5 in a variety of
crises. The most frequent adoption regards cases of democracy promotion, like
the cases of Belarus and Zimbabwe, and conflict-related measures, such as the
cases of Russia and Syria. Additionally, anti-terrorist and non-proliferation are
also relevant areas of application as demonstrated by the Iran case, and by the
anti-terrorist list that the EU has prepared (Giumelli, 2013b). The next section
will analyse EU sanctions with the lenses of human security focusing on how
sanctions affect economic and political rights and on the role of local actors in
the decision-making process.
EU sanctions and human security

The European Union has used sanctions for over two decades. This accumulated
experience can be looked at through the lenses of the two categories of human
security identified above. The first category regards the ways in which sanctions
affects economic and political rights of individuals. The second category is about
the consideration of local actors in the sanctions decision-making process. The
section presents the negative impacts of sanctions on human security, the ways
in which sanctions have evolved to mitigate those shortcomings and the current
challenges that should be addressed to implement a sanctions policy that adheres
to human security principles.
Human rights and sanctions

The first category relates to ways in which sanctions affect economic rights of
targets and, especially, innocent civilians. As indicated above, the EU has
adopted a targeted sanctions approach in theory to limit the unintended human-
itarian consequences of sanctions, but recent decisions seem to dispute this
assumption in practice. Indeed, sanctions on Iran, Syria and Russia were clearly
going to affect innocent bystanders, so it has been questioned whether EU sanc-
tions were targeted (Portela, 2016). The first case has been Iran, where the EU
imposed, among others, a ban on the purchase of crude oil. On the one hand, this
has not been defined comprehensively because of a number of exemptions to the
general rule that has allowed more than 50 per cent of oil trade to continue, but
on the other, it is difficult to argue that such decision would not have affected
innocent bystanders as the oil sector was essential for the state budget in Iran
(Giumelli and Ivan, 2013). The oil ban was complemented by a ban on insurance
and transport of crude oil, which made business too risky for any company to
transport oil to Iran without some sorts of authorization from public authorities
(Moret, 2015). This measure was important for the European Union because 90
per cent of insurance companies working in that sector were located in London
(Moran and Salisbury, 2013). Another relevant case is Syria. After an initial
phase of targeting, EU sanctions became broader and broader (Giumelli and
Ivan, 2013). At a later stage, sanctions affected most transactions, and made
trading with Syria more difficult than before (Moret, 2015). However, this
occurred despite the fact that sanctions include several exemptions for trade that
can be granted on humanitarian grounds. For instance, dual-use goods can be
traded with Syrian actors, but the sale needs to be authorized by the competent
authorities of EU member states. Most transactions would not violate the
embargo, but the situation is complicated to the point that information is scarce
and business operators do not engage in transactions with Syria. While sanctions
are targeted in theory, they become comprehensive in practice (Bures, 2012).
Finally, sanctions on Russia were expected to strengthen the economic downturn
that had started in 2013 and, consequently, it was evident that the effects of sanc-
tions would have been felt by regular citizens as well. The EU decided to impose
sanctions after the annexation of Crimea, but sanctions were limited in scope
and impact for a few months. After having added only a few individuals and
sectors to the blacklist, the downing of the Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17
created the momentum to impose sanctions that were much broader in scope
(Giumelli, 2017). Since July 2014, several products – dual-use goods for
instance – need to be authorized for export to Russia, many of them fall outside
the scope of this decision. This extra procedure combined with the uncertainties
of the overall EU–Russia relations, the weakened structure of the Russian
economy and the depreciation of the Rubble heavily hindered EU–Russia trade
(Moret, Giumelli and Bastiat-Jarosz, 2017; Moret et al., 2016). If it can be stated
that sanctions are not the only factor to explain the problem of the Russian
economy, they are certainly one of them.
In any case, the shift to targeted sanctions has not eliminated the fact that
human security is affected with the violation of rights, either directly or indi-
rectly, by the imposition of sanctions. Even if sanctions have been more targeted,
they are not always perceived as such. Sanctions increase the perception of
instability of a country, and foreign investments also shy away from sanctioned
countries, even though their activity would most likely be allowed. Firms or
intermediaries can decide to stop having relations with a country wherein indi-
viduals were sanctioned. This is due to limited clarity of the regulations and the
fines that companies incur (Giumelli, 2017). A ban on financial transactions or
on dual-use technology affects negatively entire economies so that the economic
security of non-targeted groups would also be weakened. Moreover, prohibitions
to send money or to trade with a specific group create incentives for those who
want to profit out of illegal trading. Targeted sanctions make markets less attrac-
tive, but they also provide free riding opportunities for profit-seeking actors. In
any case, the economic conditions and, therefore, human security is weakened
by sanctions.
Restrictive measures can also have direct consequences on targeted individuals.
In general, sanctions represent a restriction that can have negative, and occasion-
ally, lethal consequences for the individuals involved. This would be the case for
the denial of payments necessary for medical expenses and the refusal to grant
visas to individuals escaping persecutions and unsafe areas. Also, targeted sanc-
tions resemble criminal measures insofar as they restrict fundamental individual
164 F. Giumelli
freedom, such as the freedom to move and the right to property (Biersteker and
Eckert, 2006). Especially since the aftermath of 09/11, this problem has become
clear when individuals were wrongly blacklisted, and found themselves unable to
rectify these mistakes. This was made even worse since individuals were neither
notified nor told why their assets had been frozen. Fundamental freedoms were
denied by targeted sanctions at the international level in ways that could not be
done at the national level without a judicial review ensuring that due process and
fair trial principles were followed.
The EU has undertaken several initiatives to mitigate the negative effects of
sanctions on human security.
First, humanitarian considerations are always part of the decision-making
process. For instance, it has been mentioned above that the European Union
imposes targeted sanctions only and, therefore, there is a structural attempt by the
Council to limit the impact of restrictive measures on policy-makers or on influen-
tial individuals/entities. Moreover, the EU gradually included exemptions to ensure
that sanctions would not hurt individuals and entities not directly targeted. For
instance, individuals who are in need of medical care can apply for a visa even if
they are banned from entering the EU. States retain the power to grant visas when
targets have to participate in international negotiations. Additionally, the effects of
sanctions should not affect third parties, therefore purchases decided before the
imposition of sanctions should still be paid in full by listed individuals, and banks
would not violate the sanction regimes in these instances.6
Second, the legal practice of the EU has allowed the Court of Justice to exer-
cise oversight over the implementation of sanctions with the view to limit human
rights violations. After an initial trend of the Court to dismiss the requests for
delisting, the Kadi case in 2008 set an important precedent. The Court said that
even if decisions are taken as foreign policy matters, they are not to violate the
principles that are established by European law (Isiksel, 2010). Other judge-
ments led to de-listing due to lack of evidence, such as the cases of five Ukrain-
ian individuals who were listed under the accusation of misappropriation of
funds (General Court of the European Union, 2016). The Court found that the
listing was based exclusively on a letter sent by the office of Ukraine’s Pro-
secutor General, which provided very limited evidence for the accusation
(O’Kane, 2016). The Court found that little evidence was provided for the case
of the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines as well, but it also ruled over the
substance of the reason (General Court of the European Union, 2013). For
instance, the Court de-listed the son of Tay Za, who had been listed in the Burma
case, because the family tie itself is not enough to justify the listing (Court of
Justice the European Union, 2012). Currently, the decision to target an indi-
vidual needs to be published with a statement of reason and the individual must
be notified of this. Anyone targeted by sanctions can have their case reviewed by
the General Court and by the Court of Justice of the European Union, which
provide a judicial review that is unique in the sanctions world.
These improvements notwithstanding, problems and doubts remain. First,
targeted sanctions provide more opportunities for evasion (Giumelli, 2011; Giumelli,
2010). This is because targeted sanctions aim at changing individual behaviours
rather than national conduct. Targeted measures take often the shape of domestic
policies, so that certain individuals will be willing to take risks in trading such
goods illegally if the expected profits are high, which is often the case when the
trade of a good becomes illegal (Giumelli, 2017). Criminal organizations are, of
course, at the forefront of such competition because they can rely on their infra-
structure to trade banned products. However, anyone in a position of power, be
it government officials or business actors, has the incentive to circumvent sanc-
tions and by doing so, the incentives of the economy of a country would be
directly and inevitably affected. There is evidence that this occurred in several
cases of UN sanctions, as documented by the reports of the Panels of experts,
and there is anecdotal evidence that this was also the case in Syria, Zimbabwe,
Myanmar, Russia and Iran among others (Andreas, 2005).
Second, the judicial review in place in the EU is still unable to ensure equal
access to justice to targeted individuals and entities. For instance, a rigorous
judicial review is not possible when classified information is used to motivate
the listing of specific individuals. Member states do not feel comfortable to share
classified information with EU courts, therefore individuals are listed at the
request of EU members, but the evidence to justify such decisions is not shown.
When this happens, eventually, individuals are de-listed, but they have been on
the list for a long time without evidence being produced to substantiate the accu-
sation that motivated the listing. In such a situation, the decision-maker needs to
strike a balance between the individual rights of targets and the right to security
of a more generalized community of individuals. Additionally, the access to
justice is still available only to people who can afford it, so that Russian olig-
archs and larger corporations managed to bring their case to the Court, while
many others had to suffer the consequences of sanctions.
Bottom-up approach and sanctions

The second relevant category for human security is the bottom-up approach. In
theory, sanctions as foreign policy decisions could be taken without considera-
tion of local communities and practices targeted by sanctions. In practice, not
involving ‘locals’ often leads to undesired outcomes. The involvement of local
forces and more knowledge about local situation/practices would mitigate the
adverse impact of sanctions on human security.
Sanctions can favour – once again directly, indirectly or both – the emergence
of criminalized economies that undermine human security of people. The impo-
sition of sanctions restricts access to certain products and goods that became
available only through smuggling and other illicit activities. A criminalized
economy emerges when such actions became essential to the functioning of a
society. For instance, this can occur when public officials are targeted by the
European Union. In order to maintain their standard of living, they are likely to
divert public resources to their own benefits, free riding on the whole com-
munity. Trading illegally is also detrimental to the proper functioning of a
166 F. Giumelli
market. For instance, if certain operators have access to credit lines while their
direct competitors do not, the latter will pay the consequence of unfair competi-
tion even if they have higher productivity. In general, targeted sanctions have a
redistributive effect for senders and especially for targeted communities. Local
actors should become partly accountable for these redistributive effects.
The EU has partially involved local actors in its decision-making. This
occurred despite the fact that sanctions are notoriously an instrument of the
strong versus the weak, therefore it is rare even that the strong involves the weak
in making decisions. Local actors were heard and inspired the imposition of
some targeted sanctions. For instance, the restrictive measures on the leaders in
Burma (Myanmar) were supported more by the National League for Democracy
(NLD) led by Aung San Suu Kyi than by certain members of the European
Union (Telegraph, 2011). The sanctions on the leaders of Zimbabwe, Mugabe
and his associates were strongly sustained by the Movement for Democratic
Change (MDC) led by Morgan Tsvangirai (Eriksson, 2007; Giumelli and Krulis,
2012), and the several rounds of measures on Lukashenko and his governments
were also welcome by the internal oppositions in Belarus (Bosse, 2012; Jarábik,
2011; Vysotskaya, 2008). Contrarily to what many believe, targeted sanctions
are often imposed after cooperation with the government of a country or with its
opposition.
However, the decision to follow the recommendations of the government or
the civil society can present problems. For instance, the ruling party may enjoy
stronger international rather than internal support; therefore its decisions would
be further weakened by the support of the international community, which is not
seen very often as a legitimate actor. To the same extent, opposition parties may
not be any more representative of the society than the government, therefore
gaining their support may not be crucial either.
The post 2010/2011 phases in Tunisia, Egypt and Ukraine have highlighted
this pattern, where the European Union imposed sanctions to support the legiti-
mate authority in the consolidation of national institutions (Giumelli, 2013b).
Under this light, the EU imposed a travel ban and a freeze of assets on indi-
viduals considered spoilers of the consolidation process. The list of individuals
targeted by sanctions is not only decided in Brussels or EU capitals, but revolves
around a list of names provided by local authorities. There has been a ‘third way’
for the EU, such as the cases of Belarus and Transnistria, where local actors have
been indirectly involved via dual-track diplomacy actions (i.e. sanctioning the
elite while supporting the civil society). In any case, the EU often cooperates
with elites, be it the government, political parties or the more internationalized
sector of the civil society, leaving the wider population out of the game.
Certainly, there have been instances wherein local actors could not have been
involved, such as in the cases of Russia and Iran. When the target is the govern-
ment (or some of its members), then sanctions may strengthen the rulers rather
than weakening them. The gatekeepers remain firmly in charge of what comes in
and out of the country; therefore they enjoy a privileged position vis-à-vis other
(and normally weaker) citizens. Moreover, rulers may be the cause of economic
troubles, but sanctions provide a scapegoat for their policies triggering the well-
known effect of the rally-around-the-flag (Galtung, 1967). This occurs because
local actors perceive sanctions as unjust actions undertaken by foreign powers
and, therefore, they prefer to sustain local politicians rather than ‘betray their
country’. A well thought bottom-up approach would contribute to solving this
problem.
A human security perspective on EU sanctions: problems

and challenges
Although the EU imposes mostly targeted sanctions, human security is often
affected and EU sanctions can, as any other sanction, worsen human security in
targeted societies. In fact, this causal link is theoretical as it is extremely compli-
cated to link the imposition of targeted sanctions with the economic performance
of targeted societies at both a macro and a micro level. Nevertheless, there are
recurrent problems that emerge when sanctions are imposed, which can be iden-
tified in relation to a human security debate. Specifically, the EU could under-
take a number of measures to deal with the unintended consequences of
sanctions with individual rights of targeted individuals and with the involvement
(or lack thereof ) of local actors in the decision of resorting to sanctions. Coun-
tering the spirit of the Lisbon Treaty to return implementing powers from the
Commission to the Council, human security would be better guaranteed if sanc-
tions were centrally implemented at the EU level rather than by member states
(Giumelli, 2017).
First, it is of utmost priority to increase the capacities of EU institutions that
can be used in all phases of a sanctions process. The sanctions unit of the Euro-
pean External Action Service (EEAS) has expanded in the recent years, but more
is required to ensure that pre-impact assessment, effective enforcement, proper
monitoring and evaluation take place. At the moment, the 28 EU members have
personnel dealing with sanctions issues in the capitals creating a situation in
which many people do the same things. Instead, the EEAS would be able to take
up several of the challenges listed above if part of this manpower were trans-
ferred from the capitals to Brussels. The immediate action to be undertaken is
the secondment of national officials, but the long-term plan to institutionalize
memory within EU institutions implies that the sanctions unit at the EEAS
should increase its staff allocation. The EU would exponentially benefit from a
little pooling and sharing in the area of sanctions. For instance, the unintended
impact of sanctions can be addressed ahead of the imposition of sanctions. A
pre-impact assessment would foresee the economic consequences of sanctions
that could create unnecessary damage to the local population. This is important
for two reasons. On the one hand, human security focuses on individuals and
crises should not justify the worsening of human conditions for non-necessary
reasons. And on the other, sanctions causing humanitarian problems are not seen
as legitimate decisions by the local population, so locals will stand by their gov-
ernments rather than by those who impose sanctions.
168 F. Giumelli
Impact assessments should be completed before sanctions are imposed in
order to anticipate the emergence of human rights crises. The situation should be
constantly monitored for changes, and enforcement practices should be shared
across EU institutions and its member states. Finally, such supervision should
lead to a flexible utilization of sanctions in order to address the constantly chang-
ing situation that can affect human security in the societies against which sanc-
tions are adopted. Pre-impact assessment would also reduce the risk to create
criminalized economies. Greater capacity means deeper knowledge, and deeper
knowledge means that sanctions could be designed to provide the minimum
incentive for illegal trading of goods and technologies.
Greater capacities also mean greater monitoring and enforcement activities.
Monitoring is especially essential to prevent and deal with unintended con-
sequences of sanctions. EU members do have uncoordinated capacities to address
emerging issues, as demonstrated by the number of amendments that were
approved related to various sanctions regimes, but more is necessary. If this activ-
ity is contingent to the situation and cannot be met with the existing personnel, the
EU should adopt the Panel of Experts system on the model designed by the United
Nations (Chesterman and Pouligny, 2003; Vines, 2007, 2012; Boucher and Holt,
2009). This turned out to be an effective way to acquire knowledge, investigate
problems, address concerns and provide recommendations to the Security Council
on sanctions matters. The EU could create a roster of experts that would be
appointed on an ad hoc basis to monitor the implementation of sanctions, and
enquire on potential violations and circumventing activities. This is also to address
potential diverging implementation practices across the EU. This exercise has pro-
vided independent and novel knowledge to the sanctions branch of the UN that has
made it a central actor in the sanctions world. This mechanism would empower the
EU to properly design sanctions, monitor its impact, and modify its decisions if
human security in targeted society is endangered. This would create a positive
trend as member states would have an incentive to strengthen cooperation, and
knowledge would be institutionalised on evasion strategies and techniques.
A more central role for the EEAS would also centralize the discussion on
sanctions in combination with other foreign policy instruments, such as foreign
aid and the deployment of Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP) mis-
sions. Sanctions cannot be disconnected from other foreign policy tools. In fact,
sanctions should be devised and designed to complement other decisions. As of
today, these instruments seem to be adopted by different actors who instead
could take advantage of a strategy based on human security. While human
security is inevitably affected by sanctions, predicting the consequences of sanc-
tions would allow the EU to take compensatory measures to reduce the negative
cost of sanctions. For instance, foreign aid could be tailored in coordination with
the kind of sanctions that are being imposed. This would ease the negative
impact of sanctions on innocent civilians while retaining the pressure on the
intended targets. At the same time, the deployment of personnel with CSDP
operations would sustain efforts to deal with the criminalization of economic
sectors created by the very same imposition of sanctions.
The creation of panels of experts is only a way to draw from civil society
competences that cannot be kept in-house by EU institutions and its member
states. The sanctions process should be institutionalized in order to draw compe-
tences and knowledge also outside of EU institutions. The number of EU sanc-
tions has increased significantly over the last two decades. It is likely that EU
policymakers will continue to deal with a high number of sanctions regimes in
the upcoming years and all sources of information should be involved. Often tar-
geted sanctions are mostly implemented by private actors, firms and NGOs,
whose specific competences should be explored when sanctions are designed,
monitored, enforced and adjusted. For example, the EU could create consultative
forums where companies and EU officials would exchange views and experi-
ences in implementing sanctions. This is extremely relevant because the imposi-
tion of sanctions does create the incentive for illegal trade, and illegal trading is
deleterious for the proper functioning of a market economy. The EU has to be
prepared to administer sanctions in new regional areas, but should also be pre-
pared to administer sanctions that are applied with specific and evolving object-
ives. For instance, there is a growing consensus over the regulation of assets
recovery done with the adoption of sanctions, as attempted by the EU in the
cases of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Ukraine. This is likely to create concerns
linked to human security that the EU should not underestimate. Such evolution
in how restrictive measures are utilized requires creative responses, and specific
knowledge from civil society already present in the EU market should be
tapped into.
More knowledge and more ownership of the listing would benefit the legiti-
macy of the sanctions process. Today, the Court of Justice of the European Union
(CJEU) ensures that mistakes are corrected post-facto, but a more coherent man-
agement of the sanctions process, combined with stronger capacities at the EU
level, would contribute to safeguarding the rights of targets ex-ante. Sufficient
evidence needs to be gathered to ensure sanctions do not end up being annulled by
the CJEU as well. If the EU were to present evidence to justify its listing before
the Court, then it is more likely that higher legal standards would be guaranteed. In
order to do it, memory needs to be institutionalized via a serious effort to collect
information and evidence that would be independent from other sources. A more
robust judicial process would guarantee the rights of those not able to access the
court system in order to challenge the Council’s decisions.
A human security strategy for sanctions also needs a bottom-up approach.
Along with the needs of security, secrecy and urgency of political crises, con-
sidering locals in the different phases of the sanctions process would reduce the
rally-around-the-flag effect, increase the legitimacy of the EU as a foreign actor,
and contribute to the knowledge on the effects of sanctions on targeted societies.
Thus, thinking strategically about sanctions should consider a bottom-up
approach for the different phases of sanctions.
The first phase focuses on ensuring that sanctions would receive internal
support in targeted countries. If local actors are antagonized by sanctions, and
local authorities are able to redirect the pain of sanctions on weaker parts of the
170 F. Giumelli
society, then the designing of sanctions should be adjusted to the extent that the
impact of sanctions does not cause unnecessary pain on the civil society that
should often be nurtured and not penalized. In fact, local actors can collaborate
with the enforcement of sanctions. For instance, sanctions are often imposed on
spoilers of democratizing processes, but if local authorities are not properly
involved and trained, the enforcement may be affected by local dynamics that
would counter the intention of the EU. Finally, a bottom-up approach is advis-
able because local actors are an invaluable source of information regarding the
impact of sanctions. The members of panels of experts could engage with civil
societies in order to gain better and more detailed knowledge on the impact of
sanctions, and a better perspective on how the lives of individuals are being
affected. Such knowledge is central to the revising of sanctions. This is done
with the intent to check that the original causes that motivated their imposition
are still in place. The EU should create the premises for a dialogue between civil
society organizations from the EU and the communities where targets are
located, which would favour the exchange of information and practices across
boundaries into targeted societies. This would strengthen the awareness of the
locals of the EU and it would shape the way in which local NGOs perceive the
European Union and its actions. This mutual exchange will facilitate the process
of dealing with the humanitarian consequences of sanctions, and the utilization
of a bottom-up approach in the future.
Conclusion
International sanctions are often criticized for the little consideration paid to
their humanitarian consequences. However, human security concerns have
shaped the understanding and the practice of sanctions in the recent years. Spe-
cifically, this can be stated if two tenets of a human security approach are con-
sidered, namely a concern for political and social rights and a bottom-up
approach. In general, sanctions have become targeted so to minimize their
impact on third parties. For instance, ensuring that economic rights are not
affected by sanctions for the civilian population is a key priority. Coherently,
exemptions are regularly included in sanctions texts with the view to shelter
innocent civilians from the negative consequences of imposing economic, finan-
cial and travel bans. Also, guaranteeing legal protections to individuals that are
targeted by sanctions has been partially addressed. The evolution from compre-
hensive to targeted sanctions has also facilitated the dialogue between civil
society groups and international actors, so that the European Union is respond-
ing with sanctions as requested by either the government, or civil society groups
where targets are located. This is an important departure from the understanding
of sanctions as an instrument of power only. Certainly, this is not only the case,
but the involvement of local actors does represent a novelty that emerges clearly
from a human security perspective.
The EU has officially adopted a targeted sanctions approach to address human
security challenges, but concerns still remain. Sanctions alter the regular functioning
of markets and, therefore, certain goods may become scarce in a society targeted by
sanctions. Inevitably, political and social rights are affected when markets need to
adapt and adjust to new situations and sanctions, so even targeted sanctions can
worsen the living conditions of innocent civilians. Restrictions to liberty and prop-
erty at the international level are not decided according to high legal standard and,
therefore, individuals’ rights are constantly endangered by targeted sanctions prac-
tices. Finally, even though locals were considered in the decision to impose sanc-
tions by the Council, this was limited to elite groups only. Consequently, the local
population was alienated by sanctions fostering a feeling of hostility and creating an
environment conducive to sanctions evasion.
This analysis leads to four recommendations to EU institutions. First, the
EEAS should strengthen its capacities to be used in the different phases of a
sanction process. This should occur with more seconded personnel in the short
term, but with more personnel in the long-term. There is also the need to institu-
tionalize memory and ensure that EU institutions would be able to run pre-
assessments when sanctions are considered. More institutional memory, but also
better coordination is advised among the different units using foreign aid and
deploying personnel when sanctions are used. Second, the EEAS should rely on
expertise from civil society to deal with sanctions issues, for instance by estab-
lishing panels of experts and by opening a dialogue with firms and NGOs who
have to implement EU restrictive measures. Third, the EU should become the
owner of the decisions regarding the listing of individuals, as it would ensure
that due process is guaranteed to targeted individuals. Finally, local actors should
be involved in the decision making in two ways. On the one hand, EU institu-
tions should have a direct dialogue with local actors, be it government officials
and/or companies. On the other, the EU should create a forum where local and
international NGOs can meet to exchange views, and share competences on spe-
cific societies were targets of sanctions are located. From being mainly an instru-
ment of power, sanctions are becoming an instrument of governance. This means
that the use of sanctions is not limited to cases of conflicts and power politics,
but it is also used to uphold norms in the international system.
Notes
1 In EU jargon, sanctions are called ‘restrictive measures’. I will use both concepts as
synonyms in this chapter.
2 The main difference stems from the evolution from comprehensive (targeting states
and whole economies) to targeted sanctions (aiming also at individuals and non-state
entities). The idea behind this evolution of sanctions was driven by the need to
minimize the consequences on innocent civilians and to maximize the burden on the
responsible individuals of undesired policies.
3 Consistently with the literature on sanctions, the chapter refers to ‘senders’ when it
talks about actors that impose sanctions and to ‘targets’ when it talks about actors that
suffer sanctions.
4 For instance, this was the case of EU sanctions on Burma.
5 Autonomous sanctions are restrictive measures imposed without the request of the
Security Council and outside of the legal framework provided by the Cotonou Agreement.
172 F. Giumelli
6 For instance, article 4 of Council Decision 273 on Syria (2011) allows national com-
petent authorities to permit payments for basic foodstuff, legal services and payments
for management of frozen funds among others. See European Union, 2011.
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10 Cybersecurity
A case for a European approach
Geneviève Schméder and Emmanuel Darmois
Introduction
Operations of business, government and civil society have become inseparable
from their activities in cyberspace. The digitalisation of our societies offers huge
benefits but also creates new vulnerabilities to accidents as well as intentional
threats. Malevolent individuals and organisations may, without any physical
presence, infiltrate all possible networks, including most of the sensitive ones;
they may modify the behaviour of applications and compromise data and distort
information. Every individual as well as every governmental, non-governmental
and business organisation may be a target.
Hence, there is an increased concern for cybersecurity, which grows in
parallel with changing approaches to security – from the security of nations and
territories to the security of individuals and communities. Even though the notion
of cybersecurity is deeply and increasingly embedded in contemporary military
practices, cyber threats have several characteristics that relate them to human
security rather than to traditional security approaches: they mostly concern civil
societies, transcend international boundaries, are in essence asymmetrical and
have a crucial human rights dimension.
This chapter deals with some of these issues. After some clarification of the
content and the actors of cybersecurity and how they relate to human security,
the chapter will focus on EU policies in the field and their specificities. The
chapter concludes by suggesting a distinctive EU approach to cybersecurity that
does reject the kind of technological determinism and mass surveillance that
tends to characterise most national approaches.
Cybersecurity: nature and reality of threats

Although there is no widely accepted definition of cybersecurity, the USA
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) provides a condensed
one: “The ability to protect or defend the use of cyberspace from cyber-attacks”
(Kessel, 2013). It has the merit of directly pointing to two key aspects: the very
large span of the problem domain and the central role of aggressive behaviours.
In a broad sense, cybersecurity has to do with the prevention, detection, mitigation
176 G. Schméder and E. Darmois
and response to destructive or malevolent practices developed in cyberspace that
affect computer systems and their associated data. To better characterise these
practices, it is useful to distinguish their motivations from the methods and tech-
nologies used to undertake them.
Motivations and attacks

The intentions of the attackers are extremely varied, may support good inten-
tions (though rarely) as well as more hideous ones, and range from the least
damaging to the potentially catastrophic. Some examples:
• Recreation and narcissism: e.g. pride and glory of being an intruder, fun of
propagating jokes, hoaxes, scams, etc. As long as these attacks are directed
to individuals, they are generally considered as out of the scope of
cybersecurity.
• Activism: e.g. support of civil society in difficult political environments,
whistleblowing, but also actions against other groups perceived as threats.
Because cyber activism is quite often considered as illegitimate by existing
powers, its actors – and hence the civil society – may need to be protected,
even if their actions sometimes fall in the next category.
• Disinformation and vandalism: e.g. dissemination of false information,
blockade of information channels, corruption of websites and data; making
use of spamming, viruses and malware (Goodin, 2015), this kind of attacks
usually disrupts nonessential services, but may have a major impact when
disrupting an electoral campaign or voting machines.
• Economic interest and greed: e.g. money extortion and laundering, illegal
trade, sale and purchase of stolen data; sexual abuse (in particular, child
abuse). All are a very fast-growing segment of cyber criminality.
• Espionage and interceptions, theft of sensitive data (personal data, intellec-
tual property, R&D, business-strategic data, etc.). All states and many com-
panies are victims of cyber espionage activities, many of which are
sponsored by states.
• Sabotage: e.g. attacks against the (physical or informational) integrity of
critical infrastructures that are used in the production or the provision of
crucial goods and services, provided by governments or the private sector,
and which are crucial to citizens’ lives (energy, transportation, water, com-
munications, etc.). In the extreme case, the intention may be to cause blood-
shed through accidents or disasters.
The gradual creation of the cyberspace since the end of the 1970s has generated
a number of “enabling factors”:
• Anonymity. Cyberspace affords perpetrators the ability to hide behind invol-

untary relays1 by seizing control of intermediary systems to launch an attack
without being traceable, so that targets are not certain of the source.
Cybersecurity: a case for a European approach 177
• Impunity. Malicious attacks do not require geographic proximity to their
target and thus present a low risk for attackers. They can avoid being dis-
covered and prosecuted by covering traces and exploit the gaps and loop-
holes of legislations.
• Flexibility. Technology offers a variety of options regarding the nature of
attacks. Direct attack is in general the most effective, with the risk of
breaching anonymity, and may favour indirect means such as the now
famous Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), which uses ‘slave computers’
to saturate the operation of a network with millions of requests that cannot
be handled, making the target service unavailable.
• Reduced investment. Cyberspace affords strong leverage with low invest-
ment since attacks can be cheap (many tools are downloadable for free) and
relatively easy to organise with limited resources, basic skills and main-
stream computers.
But the main enabling factor for the development of cyber threats is the pro-
liferation of vulnerabilities. Today’s cyber systems have complex architec-
tures (e.g. systems of systems), are highly interdependent and hard to test
exhaustively, and require vulnerable end-user devices (e.g. smartphones). On
top of the technical defects, the ‘human factor’ (people who, either by lack of
attention or by ignorance, are a weak link) create other vulnerabilities: in
classified military networks, penetrations and breaches most often occur
because of this.2
The reality of threats

Cyber-attacks from states against other states are recurrent and tend to be seen
as the most important form of cyber threats. States have well understood the
benefits of competence and the risks of not being prepared; they have allocated
huge budgets and created specialised organisations, doctrines and technolo-
gies. They are the most apt organisations when it comes to protecting against
threats.
But many other parts of societies are less protected and prepared against
cyber-attacks. Amongst the classes of attacks cited above, most have become
mainstream, extremely frequent and have growing negative economic, societal
and security consequences.
In the business world, companies and legal actors are in a difficult defensive
position. As most cyber-attacks are not very sophisticated, many companies tend
to underestimate the risk, though it may be considerable (theft of digital capital,
divulgation of confidential data from banks, dating sites, etc.). In addition, actors
under attack are generally reluctant to communicate on their problems, for fear
of loss of reputation or of negative reactions of customers or stakeholders. Fur-
thermore, effective cybersecurity requires huge investments, and securing just a
link in the chain is not enough. Economic actors thus have to arbitrate, for ins-
tance between cybersecurity and R&D.
But although it seems that the cost of poor cybersecurity is still considered as
bearable and that preference against cybersecurity spending persists, things are
likely to change rapidly, in particular because of the emergence of new threats
that pose extreme challenges to the systems on which the safety and well-being
of individuals rely. Despite the fact that, so far, very few serious incidents have
occurred, ‘sabotage’ may become a new frontier for cyber criminality, with the
risk of connected devices being captured by hackers, in new critical systems
such as Intelligent Transport Systems, eHealth, Smart Grids or the Internet of
Things. Indeed, technically, it is already feasible and possible (or it will be soon)
to get control of some connected objects, including autonomous vehicles (cars,
planes, possibly trains), or to disrupt elements of electricity distribution net-
works, water treatment plants, emergency services, and so forth. Whether this is
going to happen will depend on a variety of factors, amongst them is the capa-
city of cybersecurity to offer efficient and socially acceptable counter-measures.
States will have to play a role as they cannot let this kind of threat imperil their
existence, as well as undermine their ability to protect their citizens.
In a similar manner, some cyber-attacks have materialised recently (e.g. in
the USA or France) the risks for democracy and the need for protection of citi-
zens and states. To address those issues, it is likely that states will provide
answers that support (if not guarantee) the integrity of the democratic systems
(elections, information, etc.), while the protection of individuals and civil society
may be largely left to themselves.
Various actors and motivations

Cyberspace is often represented – especially in movies – as a battlefield between
‘attackers’ and ‘defenders’ with an emphasis put on individuals that do not take
into account the most important challenges of cybersecurity: the emergence of
cybercrime as an industry, and the blurring lines between cybercrime actors and
states who use cyber activities as a tool to pursue their political objectives.
Cybercrime as an industry
The proliferation of vulnerabilities has created a number of opportunities for
organised crime. To address this very complex new market, cybercrime has
developed innovative approaches to foster skills specialisation and the associa-
ted creation of ‘value-chains’ and ‘ecosystems’, similar to the legal high-tech
industry.
Transnational cybercriminals with a financial motivation have become a new
and dangerous breed of hackers, using cyberspace for their traditional activities.
They attach a great price to discretion and have a strong incentive to permanent
innovation, using state-of-the-art techniques (e.g. encryption, address conceal-
ment, data anonymisation, digital transactions). A flurry of new and specialised
‘small jobs’ has surfaced to exploit vulnerabilities (CCM, 2017). This division
of labour has allowed sharing the risks, but more importantly reducing the
amount of knowledge needed. Cyber criminality is systematically keeping busy
with new and advanced techniques, even if individual cybercriminals are not.
As a result, the tools and techniques used to perform cyber-attacks continu-
ously improve and the sophistication of attacks is permanently outstripping the
capabilities of organisations’ defences. Overall, the skills and the organisational
competence of cyber criminals now rival those of developed states. Year after
year, the frequency and the severity of cyber-attacks increase and counter-
measures become more complex and require greater investments.
Some military and intelligence services need to hide their aggressive and
malicious actions, acting behind or manipulating other actors, thus making it
useful for some nation-states to support efficient cyber ‘ecosystems’ that can
perform legal and illegal operations. Beyond the potentially lower costs, the
main advantage of leaving the attacks to informal cyber-gangs – as opposed to
trying to organise a formal cyber-army – is that states can deny responsibility for
the attacks. Examples of such ecosystems range from the ‘spontaneous’, bottom-
up mobilization of volunteer cyber-attacks observed in 2008 during the conflict
between Russia and the Republic of Georgia3 to the alliance of several groups,
involved in the hacking of the US Democratic Party in 2016.
Terrorists and jihadist organisations are apparently not directly involved in
the ecosystems of the cybercrime industry. They have soon recognised the
benefits of using the Internet as a part of their technical and political arsenal.
Since 11 September 2001, there is a proliferation of jihadist forums routinely
used to communicate, provide guidance to apprentices, finance criminal activi-
ties, distribute messages and PR material (e.g. beheadings and executions),
raise funds, and eventually coordinate physical attacks. Perpetrators of the
January 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, for instance, were instructed on the
Internet from abroad.4
Yet, as a new, more computer-savvy generation of terrorists comes of age, the
intensity of threats seems set to increase. Success in the physical ‘war on terror’
is likely to make them turn to unconventional weapons such as cyber terrorism.
They are aware that transition from terrestrial to virtual attacks would upgrade
their nuisance capacity (Runkle, 2015), particularly in terms of psychological
impact, media appeal and potential to inflict massive damage. But, so far,
although terrorist cyber-attacks grow in number, they have not inflicted the kind
of damage that would qualify them as cyber-terrorism (violence against persons
or property leading to death or bodily injury, or provoking severe economic loss)
(Weiman, 2004).
The contrasted roles of state actors

Amongst the different types of actors involved in cyber threats – nation-states,
cyber vandals, criminal syndicates, intruders hired by unscrupulous competitors,
disgruntled insiders, etc. – states have an eminent role. They use their cyber
capacities to pursue their military and civilian objectives, acting in ways both
defensive and offensive.
All governments consider as their minimum obligation to have capabilities
to defend their domestic infrastructures, economy and other assets, even in
times of peace. This eventually includes developing deterrence through credible
counter-strike capability. This defensive approach is well in line with the pro-
tection role that can be expected from the nation-state but, in concrete day-to-
day operations, it is largely delegated to the private sector itself; the support
from state agencies remains minimal.
But states can also be (and very often are) involved in a wide range of actions,
from disinformation, vandalism, economic cyber criminality, espionage, to –
possibly – sabotage. As they are patient, persistent and have considerable
resources, they are behind the most sophisticated cyber threats.
For many governments, cyberspace is the new battlefield. They consider that
developing capabilities to back traditional military operations by digital strikes
intended to sabotage the enemy’s equipment, infrastructures, communications
and operations is not enough and include pre-emptive cyber-attacks in their
global display. A number of states – notably the US, Russia and China, but also
Iran, Israel and several European countries – are equipped for aggressive cyber-
war activities, that include computer network attacks, conducting damaging
industrial espionage and theft of economically significant intellectual property
(Clark, 2010). As General Gerasimov, then Chief of the General Staff of the
Armed Forces and first Deputy Defence Minister of Russia, put it: “The role of
non-military means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and, in
many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effec-
tiveness” (Military–Industrial Kurier 2013). The major stakeholders in this field,
which is largely shrouded with secrecy and over-classification, are national
defence and intelligence agencies, assisted by ‘private’ hackers.
As recent intrusions into sensitive political targets in Washington, Paris and
Berlin have shown, cyber-attacks pursue not only financial but also political
gain. Targeting people as well as machines, breaking into political institutions
and spreading false information in order to create social discord and destabilisa-
tion, they have both the objective and the potential to manipulate masses and
individual consciousness, distort the perception of the world of citizens, and
jeopardise the normal course and ultimately the very existence of democracy.
They aim at affecting the confidence in public institutions and undermining
legitimate political authority, delegitimising the democratic process and eventu-
ally altering the fabric of democracy.
As instruments in a new large-scale information war, cyber-attacks have a
better price-performance ratio than conventional weapons; they are also more
discreet and can be used in an asymmetrical struggle. More importantly, they are
not regulated by any international law nor convention on the rules of the war.
There is no ‘digital Geneva Convention’ under which the world’s governments
would pledge not to engage in cyber-attacks on the private sector, to target civil-
ian infrastructure or to manipulate the democratic process. There is no human
rights regime that can deal with the global flow of data. Though the ‘weaponisa-
tion’ of data and information is a growing threat to peace and democracy,
government-backed hacks represent the sort of legal grey area that those with
bad intentions can exploit.
Cybersecurity and civil societies

The way states are using their cyber capabilities to push their political agendas
against civil societies, very often starting with their own, makes cybersecurity an
important part of human security. Cyber-attacks represent a fundamental assault
on human rights, including the right to privacy and private property, and a severe
form of violence against civil society. They promote a world without privacy,
without secret, without trust, and in which all digital interactions would be
subject to exploitation or repression.
Yet, nation-states have no genuine policy of using their cyber capabilities to
defend their civil society. From this standpoint, the case of the USA and the role
of the United States National Security Agency (NSA) is typical – as is the evolu-
tion in France after the Paris terrorist attacks, another example of trading protec-
tion against terrorists for a restriction of civil rights.
It is generally agreed that there will be a ‘before and after Snowden’, whose
revelations brought to light the magnitude of US covert illegal operations in the
cyber space and raised a public debate worldwide over the legality of US
governmental compliance with democratic principles. What is less visible is that
there is a ‘before and after NSA’; for a number of years, the NSA has developed
an incredible amount of sophisticated technologies directly targeted against
individuals (communication interception, data theft, etc.). The life of active
participants in civil society has become increasingly difficult, especially in non-
democratic countries, due to the use of this set of counter technologies by
governments and their associated pressure against the use by the public of pro-
tective technologies such as encryption.
The fragile balance between civil rights and security is constantly put in ques-
tion by governments (and also quite often by the media) under various pretexts, the
most prominent being the fight against terrorism. Obviously, nation-states feel
entitled to support both a defensive and offensive approach in their military or eco-
nomic cyber strategies but, when it comes to civil societies, governments never
feel the urge to defend them; indeed, often it is the opposite. From this standpoint,
the EU is developing a different approach that is addressed in the next sections.
The EU’s approach to cybersecurity

Cybersecurity has been a preoccupation for the EU for many decades. Yet, until
recently, there was no coherent and coordinated EU policy in that field and some
key dimensions – in particular cyber defence – were missing. On the one hand,
Member States considered that cybersecurity was predominantly their task and
prerogative; they were reluctant to adopt a common EU approach. On the other
hand, the subsidiarity principle applied, because of the cross-border nature of
information systems (any significant disruption in one Member State may affect
other Member States and the Union as a whole), and of the potential impact of
concerted policy actions on the effective protection of fundamental rights, per-
sonal data and privacy.
European initiatives in the domain of cybersecurity have been initially elabo-
rated in an ad hoc and fragmented manner and dispersed across many institu-
tions, regulations and directives. In 2002, the Council of Europe had a pioneering
role when it wrote out the Convention on Cybercrime, also known as the Buda-
pest Convention, the first (and still unique) binding international treaty to address
crime committed via computer networks.5 Entered into force in 2004, the Con-
vention embodies a commitment and provides an effective framework to har-
monise national cybersecurity legislation, but also requires signatory states to
provide international cooperation for investigations and proceedings concerning
criminal offenses related to computer systems and data, or for the collection of
evidence in electronic form of criminal offences.
The first EU actions in cyberspace were intended to fight cybercrime and
protect critical information infrastructure. The EU then progressively addressed
the whole spectrum of cybersecurity, from law enforcement to defence, security
and foreign policy. The Digital Agenda for Europe, which was adopted in May
2010 and whose main objective was to promote information technologies for
economic and social purposes, called on the Commission to establish a perma-
nent Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) for EU institutions, and on
Member States to establish their own CERTs, paving the way to a EU-wide
network. In September 2012, the CERT-EU was created, composed of IT
security experts from various EU bodies. Besides operating for the 65 EU insti-
tutions and agencies, the CERT-EU cooperates closely with CERTs in the
Member States and beyond. It also works with specialised IT security companies
in order to rapidly and efficiently react to information security incidents and
cyber threats on a 24/7-basis.
The European Cybersecurity Strategy

Presented in February 2013 by the EU Commission and the EU High Represen-
tative, the European Cybersecurity Strategy was the first attempt to set the stage
for an overarching approach to cybersecurity in the EU. It includes and coord-
inates policies across formerly separate areas, in particular civil aspects of cyber-
security and cyber defence for the Common Security and Defence Policy
(CSDP).
The Strategy starts with three basic principles (European Commission, 2013):
1 The same core values, laws and norms that apply in the physical world
apply also in the cyber domain. In particular, any information sharing on
cybersecurity, when personal data is at stake, should be compliant with EU
data protection law and take full account of the individuals’ rights.
2 The Internet is a public or collective good that should be available to and
accessible by all.6
3 The governance model for Internet should be democratic and cybersecurity
policy should be a shared and multi-stakeholder responsibility.
(See also Commission of the European Communities, 2009)
The Strategy then defines five strategic priorities:
1 Achieving overall resilience of the EU (including EU institutions).

2 Fighting cybercrime.
3 Developing cyber defence policy and capabilities related to the Common
Security and Defence Policy (CSDP).
4 Developing industrial and technological resources for cybersecurity.
5 Establishing a coherent international cyberspace policy in order to promote
core EU values (EU ‘cyber diplomacy’).
The first three pillars, which deal with cyber capabilities, are respectively associ-
ated with an already existing agency, namely:
1 The European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA), created

in 2004 and based in Heraklion (Crete), which offers a platform for inter-
governmental cooperation over cybersecurity and has the authority to force
Member States to take actions for cyber resilience.
2 The European Cyber Crime Centre (EC3), established in 2008 and opera-
tional since 2013, which, along with Eurojust, plays a pivotal role in law
enforcement. Hosted by Europol in the Hague, it merges sources and
resources for facilitating and coordinating the fight against cybercrime and
it provides training and operational support for investigations.
3 The European Defence Agency (EDA), which works with the EU Military
Staff (EUMS) to improve cyber defence capabilities.
An important objective of the Strategy is to harmonise cybersecurity capabilities

of European Member States, each of which must possess a CERT and an author-
ity to speak on behalf of the country. The Strategy also aims at strengthening
cooperation between the public and private sectors.
The defence part of the EU Cybersecurity Strategy is probably its most inte-
resting characteristic, since defence and security are domains in which EU
Member States have traditionally been the most protective of their sovereignty.
The general principle, according to which the EU has no standing military
forces, no EU-owned military equipment, and its external operations depend on
force contributions from Member States, also applies to cyber defence: only
Member States can provide cyber defence capabilities for EU-led operations.
The Strategy calls nevertheless for concepts, structures, and capabilities for
cyber defence at the EU level (see Robinson, 2014).
The fifth and last priority in the Strategy is the development of a EU ‘cyber
diplomacy’, i.e. a policy that can be projected outwards. Europe has in effect
the ambition to be a normative global actor, capable to create an effective and
constructive culture of cybersecurity within and beyond the EU. This means, in
particular, having an influence in global deliberations on norms (see Healey,
2011) and principles for cyberspace behaviour.
The comprehensive Cybersecurity Strategy was accompanied with a Euro-
pean Directive on Network and Information Security (NIS Directive). Voted in
March 2014 by both the European Parliament and Council, the directive requires
Member States to put in place a minimum level of national capabilities –in parti-
cular NIS national authorities and CERTs – to adopt national NIS strategies and
cooperation plan, and to mandate the reporting of significant cyber incidents
across all critical infrastructure sectors. It also states that operators will be liable
regardless of whether or not they carry out the maintenance of their network
internally or if they outsource.
The Cyber Defence Policy Framework and EU external missions

Cyberspace is a critical element in the success of EU external missions and opera-
tions, both military and (even more) civilian, which need strong protection against
cyber-attacks. All of them include a more or less developed cyber component.
Given the strong national differences of skills and cultures in the field, each
mission represents a challenge, not only technical but also societal and legal.
This cyber dimension of CSDP missions and operations has been taken into
account at the highest decision-making level of the EU. In December 2013, the
European Council asked the High Representative to develop a Cyber Defence
Policy Framework, with the support of the European External Action Service
(EEAS), the Commission services and the European Defence Agency (EDA).
Adopted in November 2014 by the European ministers of defence, this Policy
Framework is a non-legislative document with both a civilian and military
dimension, which clarifies the roles of the various European actors, and which
specifies five priority areas for improving CSDP cyber defence:
1 Supporting the development of Member States’ cyber defence capabilities

related to CSDP. The main focus is on developments relating to monitoring,
situational awareness, prevention, detection, protection, information sharing,
and forensics analysis.
2 Enhancing the protection and resilience of CSDP communication networks
used by EU entities, particularly the EEAS. Efforts are focused on the deve-
lopment of a unified doctrine of cybersecurity and defence covering all
CSDP missions and operations at the strategic planning level.
3 Promoting civil–military cooperation and synergies with wider EU cyber
policies, relevant EU institutions and agencies, and the private sector. The
aim is to align military R&D efforts with civilian programs, and to improve
the integration of a cyber dimension to programs (like SESAR, Galileo)
with a dual dimension.
4 Improving training, education and joint exercises. Objectives are to develop
a common culture of cybersecurity and cyber defence at the European level,
to diffuse it to the whole chain of command of CSDP operations and mis-
sions, and to elaborate training needs requirements.
5 Enhancing cooperation with relevant international partners, such as NATO.
At the EU and national levels, a lot of work is currently done to update both doc-
trine and operational means. The EDA, in particular, works on the identification
of needs in terms of critical assets, which are not only material (sensing capabili-
ties, hard and software, secured IT networks) and human (skills and expertise),
but also organisational. Once identified, required capabilities are compared to
the actual state of play to fill the gaps.
Many efforts are devoted to other crucial elements, such as training and threat
assessment planning (establishment of procedures, feedback from previous expe-
riences, etc.). An important objective is a better cyber integration between the
Crisis Management and Planning Directorate (CMPD) and the Civilian Planning
and Conduct Capability (CPCC). A lot of conceptual work is done in parallel to
develop an EU agreed concept on cyber defence and to integrate it at the doctri-
nal and international levels.
In missions and operations, the cyber dimension is integrated from the start in
the planning process. Before, what is crucial is the information and training of
participants, and many efforts are taken to ensure cybersecurity awareness of
personnel of all ranks. Needed cyber defence capabilities then vary according to
the operational phase. On the ground, the most important is to ensure informatio-
nal and networks security. This implies threat intelligence, incident response
support and information sharing. After the mission, debriefing and feedback are
key to draw lessons and update the cyber landscape. All missions are backed by
a CERT, with a possible support of the CERT-EU.
The specificities of the European cybersecurity policy

The EU cybersecurity policy diverges both from policies pursued in EU Member
States and from policies that are developed in the rest of the world in several
important respects. We will briefly examine three of them: the nature of the
‘cyber power’, the governance model and the respect of fundamental rights.
Cybersecurity and the conception of ‘cyber power’

The EU, in conformity to its norms and values, does not develop the kind of hard
and offensive ‘cyber power’ concept pursued by those states, both democratic
and authoritarian, that approach the issue of security in cyberspace through the
exclusive prism of national security and cyber superiority. In contrast, the EU
approach is basically protective and legalistic. The EU cybersecurity concept
concentrates on fighting cybercrime, on resilience to ensure rapid recovery from
cyber-attacks, and on safeguarding privacy and freedom of expression, as well
as restricting unjustifiable public–private sharing of data. EU capability develop-
ment focuses on soft power capabilities, i.e. capacities that enable detection,
response and recovery from sophisticated cyber threats. In the defence and
military field, the EU is solely engaged in cyber self-protection and assured
access to cyberspace to enable its operations and missions. Offensive capabil-
ities, when they exist, are not developed nor deployed under the EU banner.
This is a crucial difference to the concept defined in the US after the terrorist
attacks of 11 September 2001,7 and to approaches followed by other crucial state
players, in particular the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China,
all widely suspected of sponsoring various forms of cyber-attacks for political
purposes. It also contrasts with choices made by a majority of individual EU
Member States, which allocate significant budgets and personnel to the develop-
ment of cyber-offensive capabilities.
Governance models
Governance issues are crucial, both because the lack of rules and clarity is a
powerful incentive for aggressors, and because they strongly influence forms of
social, economic and political control. Until recently, the virtual world was
essentially an open arena with very few established rules. Given the complexity
of the cyberspace and the number of actors involved in its management and use,
most of its control came from business and civil society, mainly online com-
munities; the role of states was limited to indirect rather than direct influence,
until the creation in 1997 by the US government of the Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), responsible, among other things, for
operating the domain name system (DNS). The exponential Internet develop-
ment, however, made more regulation necessary and the issue of its governance
the subject of intense debates, in particular in relation to the role of governments.
While there is a quasi-consensus on the need for more effective and democratic
governance, there is no agreement on the form it should take nor on what demo-
cratisation means.
Models of governance pushed by states are very disparate. They oppose,
broadly, multi-stakeholder to governmental models. A number of non-European
countries, in particular the US, Japan, Canada and Australia, share with the EU
the vision of multi-stakeholder governance. Supported by civil organisations and
private companies, they consider that traditional top-down state-centred models
are ill suited to decentralised, global, publicly shared but largely privately
developed communication networks, and that governments alone cannot regulate
cyberspace successfully. They do not agree, however, on the list of relevant
stakeholders. While the EU recommends the inclusion of all players – from
citizens to governments – the US government argues for a predominantly non-
governmental model with a strong participation of the business sector, insists on
regulating cybersecurity through technological standards, that it views as com-
mercially beneficial to the US economy, and calls for industry-government
cooperation over an industry-led standardisation of the Internet’s security.
The multi-stakeholder approach is highly contested by those countries, such
as Russia, China, Iran, India or Saudi Arabia, which defend both a centralised
and intergovernmental approach to cyber governance. Their argument is that
Western countries – in particular the US – are holding too much power over the
management of the Internet, while themselves are under-represented in the
current global governance institutions (Internet Governance Forum, standard
setting forums, technical organisations, etc.). They consider – particularly after
Snowden’s disclosure of the scope and efficiency of the surveillance systems of
the US – that the privacy policies adopted by the US government and private US
transnational corporations like Google, Facebook or Twitter threaten their digital
sovereignty and information security. Thus, they plead in favour of much more
governmental involvement in cyberspace, and of governance of the Internet at
the international level by inter-governmental organisations such as the Inter-
national Telecommunication Union (ITU), a UN agency. The Shanghai
Cooperation Organization (SCO) members (China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,
Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) have, for instance, an agreement in place –
the International Information Security Agreement – that emphasises a primary
role for the state in controlling information technology and managing risks and
threats.
The problem, however, is more complex than a binary choice between private
or public, states or civil society, freedom or control. While the world’s (US)
major technology firms have already moved into all the cyberspace regulating
bodies in order to push ahead their private interests, demographic and economic
factors tend to increase the weight of countries where freedom is an elusive and
unsettled concept. Any move away from the current status quo that would
strengthen interstate regulation, however, would lead to the fragmentation of
cyberspace and to forms of closure and control that would not be compliant with
the original spirit of the Internet, nor the respect of fundamental rights.
The EU, given its unique features, has in theory the potential to be a model
for other regions of the world. In the field of cybersecurity, it is a remarkable
full-size ‘institutional laboratory’, which must constantly find compromises and
trade-offs between opposing actors, principles, instruments and interests.
Because it is genuinely committed to promote an alternative integrated model in
Europe, it had to move beyond the traditional top-down state-centred approaches
and to adopt a multi-stakeholder approach, making it possible to bring together
suppliers, users, public sphere, academics and civil society representatives. The
EU has built a consistent and comprehensive governance model, with a decen-
tralised structure in which different agencies and institutions are responsible for
different aspects of the digital world, and political and legal control is respec-
tively exercised by two major institutional players: the EU Parliament and the
European Court of Justice, which play an essential role in avoiding the capture
of the regulatory game by economic lobbies, political leaders or technological
experts, ensuring a balance between cybersecurity, public interest and other
legitimate economic, commercial or regional interests, and defending the Euro-
pean citizens’ rights and freedoms.
While the EU has the claimed ambition to be a normative power in the field
of cybersecurity, however, its record at the international level is disappointing.
This is due partly to its failure to conduct discussions and defend its model both
in multilateral negotiations and in bilateral cyber dialogues with its closest part-
ners – the US and NATO – but also partly to its insistence, at least on paper, on
the defence of fundamental rights. This emphasis, which is perhaps its main dis-
tinctive characteristic, is also the main obstacle to convergence with the rest of
the world.
The protection of fundamental rights

In the cyber domain, the main difference between the EU and other approaches
is the attention paid to the respect of civil liberties and the rule of law, including
international law, and to the promotion and defence of fundamental rights. While
the EU, which cannot depart from the principles of the European Charter of
Human Rights, is preoccupied with balancing cybersecurity with the protection
of such rights, individual countries – both outside and inside Europe – are more
ready to accept derogations for reasons of national security, particularly in regard
to data protection and right to privacy.
In many countries, obsession with security often tends to remove limits of
what is acceptable in a democracy. A typical case is the US, where after the 11
September 2001 attacks, the Administration set up a legal framework that pro-
vided the basis for mass surveillance programs. The Patriot Act, in particular,
tremendously increased the powers of US security agencies, which soon
expended their activities, in a total opacity, from fighting terrorist networks to
widespread surveillance of both the American and the world population.
The EU, by contrast, officially set up rules offering higher standards of guaran-
tees and preservation in terms of data protection and respect of privacy. This is all
the more remarkable as not all Member States follow that line. As we know from
Edward Snowden’s revelations, a number of EU Member States (in particular the
UK and Sweden) were complicit in mass data surveillance of European citizens, in
contravention of EU laws on privacy/data protection and codes of conduct among
Member States. Such activities, incidentally, existed long before the ‘War on
Terror’ launched under the Bush administration. During the Cold War, for
instance, the revelation of a secret Anglo-American global electronic surveillance
system of international communication networks8 pushed the European Parliament
to publish in July 2001 a first critical report on the subject (Schmid, 2001).
Within Member States, the battle against cybercrime and terrorism is also a
serious source of concern about privacy and freedom protection. Most national
politicians, for electoral reasons, systematically call for more surveillance and
biometrics, and a number of national laws and practices in EU Member States
appear to be non-compliant with the respect of democratic rights. In France, for
instance, after the terrorist attacks of 2015, the government took advantage of
the emotional context to impose an extensive domestic surveillance program on
the model of the US Patriot Act, with the argument that it is impossible to ensure
both people’s security and full respect of their privacy, as if security and freedom
were part of a zero-sum game strategy.
The Safe Harbour case

Promoted by the EU Commission, the so-called Safe Harbour Agreement, signed
in 2000 between the US and the EU, enabled American companies to compile data
generated by their European clients online. During its long negotiation, two
different approaches to online data protection clearly emerged: that of the United
States, viewing privacy mainly as a consumer protection issue; that of the EU,
seeing it as a fundamental right, of the same rank as freedom of expression. In
spite of repeated calls for the repeal of Safe Harbour from the European Parliament
and legal experts, the Commission sustained Safe Harbour.
After the Agreement was signed, the gap between the European and the Amer
ican approaches on the topic widened, due partly to the evolution of the US law
enforcement and national security policy towards a more interventionist approach
after the US PATRIOT Act of 2001 and the amendments of the Foreign Intelli-
gence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 2008, and partly to the entry into force in 2009
of the Lisbon Treaty, the European Charter of Fundamental Rights, which acquired
the status of primary law, meaning that all the EU legislation, including the Com-
mission’s decision on Safe Harbour, was now subject to the principles and the
rights laid down in the Charter (in particular art. 7, 8, and 47, which respectively
state the principles of respect for private and family life, protection of personal
data and right to an effective remedy and to a fair trial).
It was in that context that in 2013 Edward Snowden revealed how American and
British intelligence agencies had unfettered access to people’s online activities.
By so doing the NSA whistle-blower provided a ticket to courts both to Amer
ican and European citizens. In the US, while a federal court of appeal declared
the telephone surveillance program outlawed, the US Senate demanded clear
limits to this phone surveillance program. The adoption of the US Freedom Act
was for the US legislator a first step in the reform of US surveillance programs.
In the EU, in October 2015, the European Court of Justice invoked the supreme
nature of the fundamental rights and freedoms laid down in the Charter to
disavow the EU Commission and declared Safe Harbour invalid.
The European Commission itself has not always been exemplary in arbitrat-
ing between security and fundamental rights. In several cases, it was disapproved
by the Parliament or the European Court of Justice (ECJ), bastions for the pro-
tection of European values, particularly in partnership with the EU and the rest
of the world. An example is the Safe Harbour case, in which the Commission
was disavowed by the ECJ (see box above). The sentence was a great victory of
fundamental rights over not only profit and business, but also mass surveillance
programs. As a European MP declared, however: “We cannot always expect
judges to repair sloppy legislative work by politicians looking for easy and
popular measures” (quoted in Levy-Abegnoli, 2015).
So far, to a large extent, the EU cybersecurity policy has been a reactive
rather than a proactive policy. Normative texts set up by the EU in the field of
cybersecurity have often appeared as reactions to external circumstances. They
reflect tensions between two aspirations – security and freedom – between which
arbitration is influenced partly by emotional reactions after terrorist attacks,
partly by the tumultuous relationship in the field between the US and Europe.
The successive revelations of the US surveillance activities of European citizens,
for instance, had an obvious norm-productive effect. It brought the issue of
rights and democracy under closer scrutiny, and increased pressure within the
EU to ensure the respect of European citizens’ rights online, both domestically
and abroad.
In the other direction, an illustrative example is the hesitancy of the European
Union in its approach to terrorism. While it is officially refractory to the US
military logic of the ‘war against terror’ and it claims a different and more
balanced approach to the question, the recent development of anti-terrorism
strategies and tools shows a worrying convergence with US practices and
visions. In the cyber domain, this alignment has been formalised by several
agreements between the US and the EU, such as the processing and transfer of
PNR (Passenger Name Records or PNR data), which had previously been
rejected by the European Parliament.
Conclusion
The digitalisation of our societies creates new forms of vulnerability and new
potential threats, as ill-intentioned people can relatively easily gain access both
to sensitive information and to the operation of crucial services. Critical infra-
structure systems are complex and therefore bound to contain weaknesses that
might be exploited. Malevolent actors – which include states as well as criminals
and terrorists – can, at least in theory, approach targets that would otherwise be
utterly unassailable, such as power grids, air traffic control systems, or public
services, in order to inflict human or material destruction. So far such cyber-
attacks have not killed people, but this could come in a relatively near future.
Such threats are addressed by cybersecurity policies, the effective implemen-
tation of which depends not only on state actions, but also on cooperation across
the public–private divide and on coordination between policy areas and interna-
tional institutions, especially the EU.
The state-centric approach on cybersecurity, according to which the state pro-
vides its citizens with security, largely ignores the reality of cyberspace, in
which states either lack capacity to react or are not themselves at the origin of
threats. First, cyberspace is a transnational domain, different from the traditional
land, sea and air physical domains that states have to defend, and thus its security
cannot be provided by a reinforcement of national sovereignty. In the digital
world, security is more provided by encryption than by geographical borders.
Second and more importantly, the worst perpetrators of cyber abuse are actually
states, which do not hesitate to violate human rights under the guise of the
responsibility to protect.
Rather than on this top-down approach, which aims at empowering states
rather than the people, the cybersecurity model needs to be based on the right to
be protected, a bottom-up approach. As for terrorist threats, the solutions for
protecting people against cyber-attacks are neither found in increased spending
on cyber weapons nor in the development of new forms of surveillance and
control over civil society, but in approaches bringing together bottom-up
and top-down perspectives. A genuine cybersecurity strategy implies resistance
and resilience at all levels: global and local, institutional and in civil society.
At the global level, efforts to clarify the grey area in cyberspace must go on,
particularly in global bodies, like the G20 or the UN sponsored group of govern-
mental experts, and coercive rules must be created and applied. The world needs
common principles to be followed, and perhaps a new, independent organisation
equivalent to the International Atomic Energy Agency, that has both an inter-
national credibility and the power to observe what is happening, identify and call
into question the attackers when nation states attacks happen. Adopting regula-
tions and enforcing them is the only way that governments will come to recog-
nise that such cyber actions will not continue to pay off.
As the pace of cyber assaults, however, is outpacing the legal and policy
process, bottom-up actions have also to be implemented. Though their most
active enemies in cyberspace are states (and their potential hackers and cyber-
criminals associates), civil societies are not defenceless. It is their role to
increase their pressure both on governments – which are trampling people’s
rights to privacy through collaboration with (or coercion of ) companies – and on
Internet companies – to force them to be more active in stopping abuses. The
best support of civil societies in cyberspace is certainly coming from a certain
form of consensus – at least in democratic countries – on their legitimate right to
organise, to use appropriate technologies (even if they are also used by various
villains) to defend an ‘open’ organisation and to promote governance of
cyberspace.
In functional and technological terms, the minimum requirements are: protec-
tion of identities (i.e. masking their real IP network address), protection of com-
munications content (e.g. using encryption). In most countries, governments and
government agencies systematically attempt to delegitimise the right to use those
technologies, supposedly because this would undermine the state’s security cap-
abilities. After terrorist attacks in Paris, for instance, some officials in the French
Ministry of Interior have proposed to ban the usage of the TOR network in
France (something Iran and China have tried), causing a surge of negative reac-
tions from civil society and forcing the French PM to officially announce this
was not an option. This is surely not the last attempt.
In an open letter in the Guardian, Tim Berners-Lee, the main inventor of the
World Wide Web, wrote that:
even in countries where we believe governments have citizens’ best inter-

ests at heart, watching everyone all the time is simply going too far. It
creates a chilling effect on free speech and stops the web from being used as
a space to explore important topics, such as sensitive health issues, sexual-
ity, or religion. (…) Creating backdoors in products as a knee-jerk response
would be a “huge mistake” and would put personal data at risk and leave
companies open to intrusion.
(Guardian 2017)
The EU has an important role to play in the field, which goes well beyond
coordination and harmonisation of national policies. In recent years, it has been
working to implement a consistent, balanced and overarching cybersecurity stra-
tegy, built on internal resilience and EU core values. The EU-declared ambition
is to make the EU’s digital environment not only the most secure, but also the
most respectful of the citizens’ fundamental rights in the world. This is a real
challenge, given the difficulty to find a satisfactory and sustainable balance
between security, freedom and protection of citizens’ fundamental rights.
The EU objective to develop a cyber ‘soft’ power privileging defence, resi-
lience and civil society sharply contrasts with national cybersecurity policies that
are developed both inside and outside Europe. In Europe, where governments
tend to play on emotional reactions to terrorist threats to support traditional
national security approaches, some uncertainty still remains over Member States’
buy-in for such a common EU approach. In the rest of the world, major cyber
players (particularly the USA, Russia and China) have different concepts, cul-
tures and logics on these matters, particularly regarding norms for cybersecurity
behaviour. In spite of some common features, the EU and US approaches to
cybersecurity, for instance, present important differences, since the ‘war on
terror’ launched by the Bush administration led to war doctrines and preventive
police guided by technological determinism, but also to the set-up of a legal
framework that today is accused to have furnished the base for mass surveillance
programs.
Yet, an important aspect of the EU ‘cyber diplomacy’ is the support of inter-
national discussions on definitions of behaviour norms in cyberspace, which if
they were agreed upon internationally would help to improve global security and
state behaviours’ transparency and predictability. The EU’s poor record in terms
of projecting its normative vision for the governance of the Internet and cyber-
space in the global arena is problematic, since it hampers its efforts to promote a
consistent and comprehensive governance model, characterised by integrity and
dedication to genuine freedom in cyberspace.
How to find a compromise capable to satisfy exigencies – security and rights
protection – which constitute complementary rather than opposite imperatives
laying at the root basis of democratic systems? If it is certainly wrong to disre-
gard the negative impact of supposedly uncontrollable communication technolo-
gies, it is also wrong to imagine that one can bring them completely under
control. Too much security kills security, and some policy responses to cyber
threats are just as worrying in the long term as the evils to which they pretend to
remedy.
Notes
1 A frequent method is known as the “man-in-the-middle” attack, i.e. an attack where:
a third party attacker inserts himself between two participants in a conversation and
automatically relays messages between them, without either participants realizing it.
This third party acts like an invisible intermediary, having tricked each participant
into believing that the attacker is actually the other party of the conversation.
(Schmidt and Cohen, 2013, chapter 2)
2 One of the most striking was the hacking of the personal AOL email account of the
then head of CIA.
3 According to The Economist (2008), Russian nationalists who wished to take part in
the attack on Georgia could do so from anywhere with an Internet connection, simply
by visiting one of the several pro-Russia websites and downloading the software and
instructions needed to perform a Distributed Denial of Service attack. Interestingly, as
Russian officials underlined, NATO and the experts of the European Commission
could never prove the official participation of the Russian government.
4 The sender, likely based in Syria, used a fake account sent through a web mail based in
the US. No words were used in the message that could trigger the watchdogs of intelli-
gence services.
5 In May 2017, 56 states had ratified it. Several non-European countries – such as Brazil,
India, China and Russia – declined to adopt it on the grounds that they did not parti-
cipate in its drafting, it was inconsistent with their security culture and it would under-
mine their sovereignty. In 2011, the head of data protection and the cybercrime division
of the Council of Europe said it would be impossible to negotiate a treaty such as the
Budapest Convention today (see Kirk, 2011).
6 For the EU, access to Internet is a fundamental right whereas for the UN, it is not a
right but a means to exercise other rights.
7 See The US National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace (2003), published in 2003 as a
part of the overall National Strategy for Homeland Security.
8 The so-called Echelon espionage program, also known as the ‘Five Eyes’, was a global
system for the interception of private and commercial communications that operated on
behalf of the five signatory nations (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the
US) to the UKUSA Security Agreement.
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11 Private partnerships, public peace
The role of the private sector in
second-generation human security
Mary Martin
Introduction: the policy problem

In February 2017, the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude
Juncker received what can only be described as a stinging letter of criticism from
Harvard Professor John Ruggie over the EU’s record on implementing govern-
ance reforms on business and human rights. Ruggie had been the UN Secretary-
General’s Special Representative on this issue, and was the author of the highly
influential UN Guiding Principles adopted by the Human Rights council in 2011.
The UNGPs have become the cornerstone of a framework of soft law and prac-
tice guidance which seeks to integrate responsible behaviour by business into
not only management, but also security, development and governance discourse.
Ruggie’s letter accused the Commission of failing to support responsible
business conduct, of stalling and setting aside the agenda of business and human
rights. He included in his criticism Commission policy papers on the UN’s Sus-
tainable Development Goals (SDGs) which he claimed were ‘divorced of any
understanding of the central role that respect of human rights lay in the private
sector’s contribution to that agenda’. The Commission’s draft guidance to com-
panies on their non-financial (i.e. social responsibility) reporting ‘dilutes and
undermines the language of the UN guiding principles … provides negligible
guidance … and fails to reference the UN Guiding Principles Reporting Frame-
work’ (Ruggie 2017).
By any measure the letter was an unprecedented rebuke to an international
organisation which should have been among the leading proponents of a norm-
ative discourse which encompasses human rights, good governance and corpo-
rate power. As the ‘home state’ of some of the world’s leading companies, the
EU has natural advantages and experience as a corporate and economic regu-
lator. Nearly a quarter of the global top 100 companies are in the UK and Euro-
zone, out of the Fortune 500 list, 145 are in Europe and thus subject to EU
regulatory supervision (Bloomberg 2015; Fortune 500 2016) .The Ruggie letter
drew attention to a deficit in EU policy to address the corporate dimension of
human rights, but it also highlighted the failure of EU policy to grasp the wider
implications of the private sector in relation to global security and how it links to
crisis management, conflict prevention and sustainable development.
196 M. Martin
The absence of business in systematic efforts to address global security is a
missing link in European policy-making, with EU capabilities developed and
deployed in isolation from initiatives on business and human rights, regulatory
dialogues with European companies or aid and development policies, with no
coherent agenda for mainstreaming business relations within European external
actions.
In this chapter, I look at the ‘corporate problem’ in EU foreign policy, point-
ing to conceptual and practice gaps which characterise the EU’s failure to treat
the private sector as a salient component of peace and security agendas. The first
section addresses conceptualisations of the private sector’s role in security within
scholarly literature, indicating that current understandings of business inhibit
constructive engagement between policymakers and companies.
The second section looks at business responsibility from a policy and practice
perspective within EU and UN policy agendas. Piecemeal attempts to address
private sector impacts as part of compliance and regulatory initiatives fail to
encourage public–private engagement around agendas on human rights, conflict
and development.
The final section suggests a reframing of the private sector’s role in conflict pre-
vention and peacebuilding in terms of human security. By focusing on how busi-
ness interacts with individuals and communities, the chapter argues that a human
security perspective provides an analytical lens to better understand the kind of
(in)security produced by the presence of global corporations in fragile environment,
while an emphasis on human security needs and the adoption of human security as
a ‘practical strategy’ (Chinkin and Kaldor 2017) could lead to a different kind of
engagement between business, local society, government and the international com-
munity which takes account of highly specific but also variable local contexts,
acknowledges the hybrid nature of responses to insecurity and could enhance efforts
to improve the sustainability and long-term outcomes of peacebuilding.
The most prolific private sector actors in conflict societies are small- and
medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), as well as artisanal activity by individuals.
However, global businesses – so called transnational corporations (TNCs) –
exercise a disproportionate influence because of the scale of their resources,
visibility and multilevel presence, locally nationally and internationally. Because
investment cycles tend to be longer than external civil or military interventions,
so they are an enduring presence in post-conflict settings, with implications for
long-term peace and development. This chapter focuses on mainstream legiti-
mate commercial enterprises, as distinct from illicit corporate actors which are
conceptualised in work on war economies, organised crime and illiberal net-
works (Collier and Hoeffler 2004; Pugh, Cooper and Goodhand 2004; Lewis
2004, Cockayne 2013), or private military and security companies (McFate
2014; Singer 2008). Large global corporations are important interlocutors in the
conflict landscape, creating a multiplier effect, mobilising small local firms and
generating a ‘sphere of influence’ (McKenna 2002), which includes not just an
extended supply chain of small- and medium-sized enterprises, but also engen-
ders actions among diverse categories of private and public stakeholders.
Private partnerships, public peace 197
What (and where) is the private sector?
The foundations of the European Community in the Franco-German coal and
steel industries illustrate how economics, business and industry have been bound
up with debates about security, with production and profit seen both as drivers of
conflict, but also as potential mechanisms for peace (Nelson 2000; Kobrak and
Hansen 2004; Gourvish 2003). Yet, beyond this generalised assertion there
remain significant gaps in knowledge and practical application of this nexus
between public peace and private profit, particularly in terms of analysing the
role of individual companies in specific contexts of insecurity.
Within the liberal peace, the traditional view of the private sector places it
within the ambit of macro-economic reform and the development of free
markets, seen as intrinsic to cementing peace processes (Duffield 2007,
pp. 11–12; Neocleous 2008, pp. 146–147; Paris and Sisk 2009, p. 2) but as an
unarticulated and silent partner in the actual enterprise of reconstruction and
statebuilding. Foreign corporations in particular are assumed to be vectors for
the transition from conflict to peace, bringing growth through foreign direct
investment (FDI), and acting as transmission mechanisms for the transfer of
skills, technology and international norms (Flohr et al. 2010). This political
economy view, with its emphasis on the macro-economic components of reform
and reconstruction, conflates many of the attributes and effects of TNCs within
transitions into a generic process of change to reboot key economic indicators
such as investment, income, currency and GDP. It assumes that companies are
neutral or passive vessels in the achievement of economic transformation. The
business contribution is rendered either bland or unduly sanitised, subsumed
within a preoccupation with markets and national economic institutions (Ganson
and Wennmann 2016, p. 77).
Where corporations are accorded specific attention, it is as predominantly
financial actors whose motives are geared to commercial interests and profit gen-
eration. Host states are the dominant level of analysis for assessing empirically
the contribution of corporate actors, within a framework of national economic
policy. Disaggregated analyses see private business in terms of industrial sectors;
more rarely it problematises groups of enterprises within a sector (Brooks 2005;
Henisz, Mansfield and Von Glinow 2010). This leaves the local level of business
operations and how they interact community resilience and grass roots peace-
building initiatives an under-explored terrain, where questions about the quality
of development, how reform processes play out, and the unexpected effects of
foreign direct investment, might present a different picture to that at the macro-
economic level.
Human security debates and examinations of the security development nexus
lead towards a more bottom-up perspective, which expands conventional economics
and security to encompass a broader view, and one more geared to individual needs
(Tadjbakhsh and Chenoy 2007; Tschirgi, Mancini and Lund 2010, p. 2; Alkire
2010), but this shift in security discourse has failed to elaborate how companies fit
into this change of emphasis, or how the circle of security programming might be
198 M. Martin
expanded in ways which integrate the corporate dimension (World Bank 2011;
UNDP 2008).
Critical security studies literature is more explicit in moving away from the
private sector as an unspecified component of post-conflict processes, question-
ing the internal structure of liberal peace and identifying business as a member
of strategic complexes which represent new – and potentially problematic ways
of projecting liberal power (Duffield 2007, p. 17; Richmond 2006, p. 292). This
begins to place the private sector within an agency perspective which frames
corporations as distinct political and social actors, capable of influencing security
through enacting distinct practices and norms, as well as bringing a discreet set
of motivations and causal linkages to the peace and conflict landscape.
Ethnographic studies of extractive companies which offer detailed descrip-
tions of management processes (Welker 2014) in fragile states have also con-
tributed to understanding how companies exercise agency and illustrate the
benefits of disaggregation and developing more nuanced empirical accounts of
the private sector within specific settings. These accounts begin to reveal
important dynamics such as different forms of interpenetration between business
governments and communities, and how business itself instrumentalises forms
of power and resources (Millar 2014; Fuchs 2005, p. 773).
A separate category of business literature provides a management view of
the challenges of the private sector in conflict environments where its role is
framed by a trope of the ‘responsible corporation’, capable of mitigating risks
and seizing opportunities associated with operating in unstable or hazardous
locations, but where the commercial upsides and first mover advantages of
opening up new markets are also powerful drivers of management decisions.
The definition of corporate responsibility is part of a wider effort to elaborate
forms of ‘sustainable capitalism’ (Grayson and Nelson 2013), which in turn
relies on processes such as ethical investing, stakeholder engagement and the
development of ‘shared value’ (Porter and Kramer 2011) which are not
restricted to the conflict aspects of business operation. The responsibility turn
in corporate strategy in terms of practice has played out in terms of new asso-
ciative arrangements and formal partnerships between leading companies, such
as Shell, Diageo, BP and Unilever, governments and international NGOs
(Business Fights Poverty (n.d); Corporate NGO Partnerships Barometer 2015).
At the same time the discourse of responsible business behaviour and corpo-
rate citizenship (Aßländer and Curbach 2014) allows global companies to be
brought into dialogues and programming of security issues from poverty to
slavery, women’s rights, and health. A convergence between the business and
peace literature and studies from management science and law, which focus on
business ethics, corporate social agendas, sustainability, and corporate citizen-
ship provide the ground for investigating the motives and mechanisms of cor-
porate engagement in peace and security, and help to strengthen previously
missing links – conceptual and methodological – between business behaviour
and policy-making in the areas of development and security (Rettberg 2016;
Oetzel and Getz 2012).
Yet as we shall see in the next section, the expansion of academic analysis
and practice evidence in this field has not translated smoothly into policy
agendas. Policy towards the private sector, for example on business regulation,
corporate governance and public–private partnership is weakly connected to
initiatives on peace and security by international organisations, including and
especially the European Union. The absence of a coherent agenda which links
security and justice, sustainable development and existing mechanisms of over-
sight and collaboration involving global companies is the consequence of this
disconnect. One reason I suggest is a fundamental conceptual dilemma under-
lying current discourse about the private sector role on foreign and security
agendas. A second reason is the institutional problem of where initiatives on
business and peace should be located within international organisations. Beyond
this, grey areas remain in terms of understanding exactly how the private sector
impacts local, individual and community security and therefore what kind of
mechanisms are required to capture business inputs for achieving sustainable
peace and development.
The conceptual dilemma and the institutional gap are linked by a lack of
clarity over how to treat global corporations as political and social actors. There
is a dichotomy between viewing them on the one hand as ‘positive’, capable of
delivering investment, infrastructure, and contributions to governance building
(Haufler 2001; Banfield, Haufler and Lilly 2003), and on the other as sites of
predation and abuse generating ‘negative externalities’ from their operations in
conflict spaces. This root of this dichotomy is a presumed tension between
private interests and public goods, and an assumed incompatibility between
profit-making and wider collective goals of stability, justice and good govern-
ance (Feil 2012 p. 34). Against this conceptual bifurcation, policy challenges
have been presented as an either/or of harnessing corporate power to maximise
its productive potential (Wenger and Möeckli 2003), or curbing it to minimise
collateral risk. By extension, notions of corporate responsibility, and how to
encourage/enforce it at the policy level, have become confused over whether to
pursue a minimalist vision in which the aim is to ensure that business behaviour
does not disrupt the fabric of conflict-affected societies, or a more expansive
idea in which companies are viewed as liable for the burdens of development,
peacebuilding and even transitional justice (Scherer and Palazzo 2011; Deitel-
hoff and Wolff 2010) or exciting new partners (Bray 2009; Banks 2016). While
the Ruggie agenda on business and human rights exemplifies the former, with its
focus on corporate responsibility as a governance issue with an overriding
objective to provide a framework for ‘do no harm’, the sustainability agenda, for
example the UN 2030 goals, are an example of wooing companies with an invi-
tation at the global and national level to offer their resources to achieve a broad
set of social goals, while playing down considerations of how some companies
might actually undermine these goals (SRSG 2011b; UN 2015).
This confusion between apparently alternative paths to follow – a difference
which could be termed in shorthand as compliance versus co-optation – coupled
with uncertain policy pathways for capturing business engagement has contributed
200 M. Martin
to inhibit discussions about how the private sector could become a systematic
part of security dialogues and policy-making.
Empirical evidence of corporate impacts in conflict settings is growing
although still heavily orientated towards a few sectors, particularly extractive
industries, and not consistently connected to prescriptive frameworks and
guiding principles which seek to shape the growing power of global business in
conflict and post-conflict spaces (Rasche and Waddock 2014; Baumann-Pauly
and Scherer 2013; Sethi and Schepers 2013; Scherer and Palazzo 2011). Impacts
also need to be set within a relational perspective of how multiple stakeholders,
including companies, shape the behaviour of other actors in conflict-affected set-
tings. The complexity of business-society-community relationships and inter-
actions in environments where there is a weak state and weak civil society
constitutes a ‘play within a play’ in the transformation of conflict and post-
conflict spaces. TNCs have been seen to enjoy ‘exceptional’ freedom of action,
including dispensations from normal rules and creating sovereign spaces (Ong
2006, p. 6) in fragile societies, with consequences for the rule of law and the
development of robust institutions as part of transitions to peace. Informal labour
practices, special deals with local and national government and the priority given
to global business norms rather than embedding good governance, combine to
reduce the leverage of local and international authorities, and increase the risk of
ineffective or ‘empty shell’ reforms (Dimitrova 2010, p. 146; in Bojicic-
Dzelilovic and Kostovicova 2013) as well as questioning the value of formal
benchmarks and assessment criteria (ibid., p. 30).
Global companies may not only be less susceptible to international and local
government regulation in conflict contexts but by reacting contextually and often
spontaneously to risks and opportunities, they may combine a mixture of motives
from profit-seeking to ethical–normative. Highly differentiated types of corpo-
rate behaviour as business adapts practice on the basis of ‘what works’ also
mean that generic conceptualisations and prescriptions may be of limited value
to constructing policy. Even where the private sector is regarded as necessary
and useful, it cannot be regarded as a homogenous or unproblematic partner in
peacebuilding (Rettberg 2016, p. 486; McKenna 2014). Empirical studies
suggest that how local actors respond to foreign business strategies is also a
highly variable element, with consequences for multi-stakeholder co-operation
and attempts to achieve security-with-development (Crilly et al. 2016, p. 1316).
In terms of methodology and practice, there are also significant gaps in devel-
oping tools such as metrics for assessing corporate behaviour (Cunningham
2014), and ways of connecting corporate commitments at the global level with
their noisy rhetoric of ideals on responsibility, sustainability, community engage-
ment and human rights, with concrete practices at the operational level.
The private sector in European security strategy

EU foreign and security policy is underpinned by principles which mandate it to act
alongside state and non-state actors. Concepts such as ‘effective multilateralism’,
‘subsidiarity’ and the ‘multistakeholder approach’ mandate co-operation as well
as a requirement to operate at the most appropriate level (international, national,
local) to ensure the legitimacy of EU external actions, and address insecurity in
a holistic fashion which recognises the complexity of threats and challenges
(Pirozzi 2013; Lucarelli and Menotti 2006; Zoellick 2008; Martin 2009).
The Comprehensive Approach (CA) as presented in the 2003 European
Security Strategy is both a general working method and a set of concrete meas-
ures and processes for joined-up deployment of EU instruments and resources.
Together with partnerships and burden-sharing (European Union 2013, p. 3) this
places co-operation as part of the ‘DNA’ of European external action (Benraïs
and Simon 2016). The 2009 Concept on Strengthening EU Mediation and Dia-
logue Capacities (Council of the EU 2009) provided incentives for dialogue with
local stakeholders, and commitment to a participatory approach in development
was set out in the 2002 Communication on the Participation of non-state actors
in EC Development Policy (EC 2002). In concrete terms, co-operation includes
information sharing, dialogue and mutual support, while the CSDP emphasis on
coherence and comprehensiveness, encourages new ways of co-ordinating mul-
tiple actors in the field (EPLO 2008, pp. 7–8), thus broadening the spectrum of
action downwards to the local and outwards towards new constituencies.
However, it was not until the EU Global Security Strategy of 2016 that these
principles of comprehensiveness and inclusivity were applied to the private
sector. In the EUGS, the private sector is framed primarily as a partner for the
EU within multi-stakeholder responses to humanitarian crises and ongoing risks,
but also in terms of a counter-party for exchanges of information, human
resources and sharing of facilities. The Strategy commits the EU to ‘deepen our
partnerships with civil society and the private sector as key players in a net-
worked world’ (European Union 2016, p. 18). The private sector is also viewed
as integral to the quest for coherence between EU policies: ‘A more prosperous
Union calls for greater coordination between the EU and Member States, the
EIB (European Investment Bank) and the private sector. We must become more
joined up across internal and external policies’ (ibid p. 49). Beyond the declara-
tory rhetoric of the EUGS, concrete measures to engage the private sector are
sparse and fragmented. For example, standards on Corporate Social Responsib-
ility (CSR) in 2006, a (‘renewed’) strategy 2011–2014 for Corporate Social
Responsibility’, a commitment to implement the UNGPs on business and human
rights, and a draft law on conflict minerals which includes incentives to com-
panies to introduce due diligence suggest a patchwork implementation of inter-
national norms – as the letter from John Ruggie pointed out; no consistency in
the definition of the private sector as a salient actor in EU external policy: for
example the European Consensus on Development (European Union 2006)
included private sector actors as part of civil society, but the 2012 EU Commu-
nication on Europe’s engagement with civil society does not mention business
(Benraïs and Simon 2016). Above all the policy discourse does not elaborate in
any detail how the private sector is to be involved in overarching policy goals or
normative ambitions. This is reflected in the absence of initiatives in the field to
202 M. Martin
incorporate the private sector in processes from multi-track diplomacy, gov-
ernance reform and security sector reform even where the participation of
business leaders could enhance conflict analysis and intelligence on the ground
and contribute to EU goals of external action such as inclusivity, local owner-
ship and coherence (Martin and Bojicic-Dzelilovic 2016, p. 12; Benraïs and
Simon 2016, p. 17).
In replying to Ruggie’s letter criticising its response to the global business
and human rights agenda, the European Commission listed directives on disclo-
sure, investment incentives and the use of development co-operation, political
dialogue and trade instruments to promote compliance in non-Member States
(European Commission 2017). The variety of these directives demonstrated that
the EU private sector agenda is piecemeal, and impeded by the difficulties of
navigating multiple institutional hurdles across the Commission Council, Parlia-
ment as well as transposition into Member State legislation which slow the
momentum of action. The reticence of EU policy may also reflect a tension
between peace and security objectives and policies guaranteeing European eco-
nomic and corporate interests. For example, the Raw Materials Initiative (RMI)
which ensures adequate inputs for European business and food security for Euro-
pean consumers could be seen as incompatible with guidelines limiting resource
exploitation in fragile societies. Another example is that anti-cartel measures by
DG Competition, which are designed to promote European market competit-
iveness, inhibit companies from co-operating on security issues and also remove
any competitive advantage from firms unilaterally applying ethical standards
(Martin 2011).
Yet the European Commission is also facing pressure from the European Par-
liament and coalitions of NGOs to be more pro-active, particularly in adopting a
‘smart mix’ of voluntary and regulatory tools which would broaden its oversight
of the private sector in terms of human rights, and peace and security issues.
Although specific legal obligations on European companies are currently sparse,
there is a sense that the EU and Member States ‘do not always make full use of
opportunities to constrain […] companies’ operations beyond the EU (Augen-
stein 2012).
The UN, while declaring private companies to be ‘indispensable’ to the 2030
development agenda and Sustainable Development Goals (Ban Ki Moon 2015),
has also been criticised for being institutionally and programmatically ‘blind’ to
business as a relevant actor despite a rhetoric of multi-stakeholder engagement
(Utting and Zammit 2009). The UN’s business and human rights agenda adopted
in 2011, crafted by John Ruggie in a participatory process with governments and
companies, created a universal discourse of responsibility and shared obligations
The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights provided a policy
framework for states and organisations such as the EU to implement a tripartite
formula (Protect, Respect and Remedy) in which businesses and states assume a
joint role in protecting individuals against human rights violations, and work
with civil society to provide redress for victims (SRSG 2011a, 2011b). In the
specific example of business and human rights in conflict zones, Ruggie based
his recommendations – including a heightened need for due diligence by com-
panies – on the observation that there is a ‘negative symbiosis’ between the
private sector and human rights abuses in conflict environments (SRSG 2011c).
In addition to the emerging system of national action plans to implement the
UNGPS, an extensive architecture of ‘focal points’ and contacts, as well as prac-
tice guidance has developed around two principal institutions, the UN Global
Compact and the UN Office for Partnership. Mandates to agencies across the
UN system demonstrate a willingness to work with business to encourage ‘good
corporate citizenship’ and compliance, but also allow the UN to access corporate
financial and technical resources and reinforce agendas such as the Millennium
Development Goals (described as a ‘beacon for UN-business engagement’
(United Nations n.d.), and the post 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (United
Nations 2004, 2015; UNIDO 2013).
The UN’s approach to bringing the private sector into security and development
agendas, has been criticised for being too favourable to business, creating a new
global elite, which serves commercial interests rather than providing public goods,
for shifting the texture of international development co-operation into a technical
frame which ignores its fundamental political aspects (Thérien and Pouliot 2006;
Bull 2010), and for negating the core values of the UN paradigm (Paine 2000;
Agazzi 2011). Such critiques suggest that the UN experience counts more as a
warning light than a beacon to EU policy-makers attempting to implement the
ambitions of the EUGS in regard to partnership with the private sector.
The private sector, hybridity and human security

In this section, I elaborate an alternative view of the private sector within strat-
egies for conflict management and post-conflict reconstruction, beginning with
disaggregating the traditional macro-economic perspective, and ‘unbundling’
corporate behaviour to understand how TNCs act in local and highly specific
contexts of conflict, fragility and transition.
Looking at the private sector through a lens of human security departs from
classic understandings in that it shows first how business behaviour is not con-
fined to generating economic effects, but may have wide ranging and often unex-
pected consequences for transitions to peace in diverse dimensions including
governance, justice and social reconciliation. Second, a human security lens
enables us to capture a landscape beyond human rights where variegated types
of interactions between local societies and the private sector suggest terrains of
engagement between public, private and civil society stakeholders which are
more extensive than due diligence and accountability. Third, and more challeng-
ing in terms of policy programming, a focus on fine-grained dimensions of busi-
ness–society interactions suggests that the private sector creates ambiguous and
often paradoxical effects on security, and that hybridity is an important but
poorly understood characteristic of private sector interventions in difficult crisis
and conflict prone environments The fact that corporate impacts may not be
straightforward and indeed unpredictable has consequences for efforts by both
204 M. Martin
business leaders and policy-makers attempting to manage business-security
relations.
Human security provides an explicit focus on individual experiences and
manifestations of vulnerability. Rather than emphasising causal links between
business and society at the national level, expressed in terms of economic indi-
cators such as the volume of external investment, employment, output and trade,
human security looks at how threats to security are not only embedded within
different aspects of business operations but how different dimensions of personal
insecurity are themselves connected through individuals’ exposure to global
business operations.
Moving from a pre-occupation with national macro-economic policy and top-
down, generic prescriptions for economic reform, the human security lens
reveals a broad pattern of insecurity at the grass roots in which business activ-
ities by specific corporations’ impact on multiple dimensions of daily life. Peo-
ple’s sense of their own material and psychological wellbeing, alongside notions
of dignity and empowerment which are at the heart of human security conceptu-
alisations (CHS 2003; HSSG 2004), are bound up with corporate activities,
through employment, dependency on corporate resources in environments with
restricted public goods and promises of a better future through capacity-building
and skill-transfer.
Companies also occupy positions within dense networks of social actors on
the ground, and are implicated in multiple relationships between insider locals
and outside interveners. It is often the interactions between business and par-
ticular groups of local actors such as certain communities or constituencies
within communities, rather than – as much traditional literature suggests –
between companies and conflict actors (such as armed groups, warlords and
political leaders) where significant – and potentially productive relationships in
terms of peacebuilding exist. Companies may influence these sub-groups rather
than affecting conflict dynamics as a whole (Miklian 2017, p. 10). Moreover, the
insertion of companies in local social fabric unleashes complex forms of actor-
ness among workers, communities, within the company itself, its local supply
chain, civil society and public authorities, as different groups reposition them-
selves in relation to the business presence. Thus, the consequences of corporate
activity in conflict spaces are not reducible to a set of threats to personal security
and human rights. They require a bottom-up, context-specific and disaggregated
approach to private sector engagement, where not only individual experiences
are problematised, but individual companies and corporate employees are also
regarded as important sites of agency. Corporate impacts cannot be adequately
defined in terms of a company’s ability to provide material forms of protection
such as jobs and income. In contributing to and reworking social relations, com-
panies shape security dynamics and the ways in which different groups of actors
react to the security situation, with consequences for individual emancipation/
empowerment, good governance, legitimate political authority and justice.
Some empirical examples serve to illustrate the significance of these local level
interactions. In the Balkans, in a context of fragile and incomplete post-conflict
market reform, the intervention of the global private sector in an unquestioned
process of modernisation and privatisation, not only entailed job losses and the
replacement of guaranteed employment with less secure short-term contracts. It
also resulted in the marginalisation of older workers, a loss of social status and the
disruption of traditional social and community ties in a country which was still
struggling to reconcile ethnic divisions and build community resilience. The much-
vaunted gains from foreign direct investment (FDI) had to be seen – and were
mitigated – in terms of how they played out for individuals and communities, with
differential economic and non-economic impacts for different people and groups
(SECONS 2014; Martin and Bojicic-Dzelilovic 2017, p. 16).
In the case of FDI or international contracts in fragile states, global companies
are able to disrupt the political status quo and configure new formations of political
authority, particularly where there are already governance gaps in protective legis-
lation and institutional architecture. For example in Kosovo, a Turkish–American
consortium awarded a contract to build a new motorway was widely portrayed as
the facilitator of an infrastructure project of national significance. The narrative of
a patriotic highway, adopted by the government and the international community
effectively silenced criticism of a raft of practices associated with the construction,
which not only violated human rights, but created a parallel form of authority by
the contracting companies in a context of weak statehood. Invoking a commercial
imperative, they adopted a bespoke set of labour practices and attitudes to public
information which not only defied government regulation in these areas, but went
against the reconstruction and reform agenda being promoted by international
organisations in Kosovo. Here the corporate impact had to be assessed in terms of
not only the economic benefits of the motorway, jobs in Kosovo and skill trans-
fers, but how the companies contributed to aggravate imbalances of power and
structural inequalities (CRDP 2014).
Studies in the agricultural sector in Latin America and Africa show how
corporates intervene in the absence of a government-managed peace process at
local level. Miklian’s study of the Footprints for Peace initiative by the Colom-
bian coffee growers association found that it was effective precisely because it
focused on family and village-level violence, and geared its peace trainings in
communities to local social, economic and cultural specifics. Analysis of the
coffee growers’ peacebuilding efforts also concluded that considerations such
as the gender of implementing agents of the programme (women were more
effective) were also important in understanding ‘what works, how and why’
(Miklian 2017, p. 20). Kolk and Lenfant’s study of African coffee growers
suggested that in terms of both motive and relationships with civil society, the
‘human element’ was critical in shaping company interventions while the
diversity and ‘hybridity’ of mechanisms of interaction with communities
which enriched the engagement for all stakeholders (Kolk and Lenfant 2016,
p. 509). Building on Battalina et al., Kolk identified and categorised forms of
hybrid action, meaning that companies adapted business models in conflict
spaces in order to promote peace, producing ‘fundamental convergence and
reconfiguration of the social and commercial sectors, from completely separate
206 M. Martin
fields to a common space’ (Battalina 2012, p. 55, quoted in Kolk and Lenfant
2016, p. 514).
Examining not only how companies influence material and non-material vul-
nerability but also how they represent and foster complex forms of agency, and
new types of association and organisation within conflict settings is helpful in
not only rethinking how to engage companies, mobilise productive relationships
between the private sector and communities and build community resilience. A
human security perspective focuses on profound processes of local social trans-
formation around sites of business operations, and provides a picture of a two-(or
more)-way dynamic interaction between the private, public and community
sectors in which business itself does not remain static or locked into pre-
configured practices and roles (Esteves and Barclay 2011).
Yet this is still an opaque landscape. TNC impacts on security at the local
level are often unclear and ambiguous: delivering job guarantees for a few at the
cost of mass redundancies, short-term income boosts but more precarious long-
term economic health; benefits and a private welfare system for those employed
but at the expense of a developing system of public goods. Impacts on security
are also partly determined by how individuals respond to corporate strategies.
Faced with challenges such as holding onto a scarce job, trying to win promotion
over expatriate management, or forcing companies locally to honour commit-
ments on investment or environmental protection made as part of national or
international bargains, individuals and communities make compromises and
accept trade-offs: better to have a job than challenge management practices;
better to have foreign investment at the cost of pollution. Such calculations may
lower thresholds of security and alter the level of vulnerability. Within a context
of dense relationships with companies, where there is deep personal and com-
munity dependency on foreign investment, low levels of trust, asymmetric power
balances, and absent institutional frameworks, ambiguity assumes greater signifi-
cance in the assessment of how companies shape the conflict /post-conflict
environment. It makes it hard to delineate the effects of corporate behaviour as
either positive or negative, but argues for policy and practice approaches which
remain particularly sensitive to context and able to adapt to perpetually shifting
constellations of local power groupings and conditions of conflict.
Conclusion
Global corporations have become visible in the landscape of conflict and security
in the last twenty years, not only in terms of a rights agenda for vulnerable com-
munities, but as an increasingly indispensable component of security and develop-
ment initiatives. While some global companies have become privileged partners of
the international community, addressing a broad range of ‘new’ security issues
such as health, environment as well as economic development, bringing together
commercial interests and social objectives, and reshaping global governance
agendas, many more are implicated in processes of peacebuilding, reconstruction
and resilience building as a matter of everyday business practice.
The private sector, unpacked from its role as a passive component of the
economics of the liberal peace, can be seen as an increasingly meaningful
social and political actor in conflict-affected societies at the local level. The
private sector cannot be assumed to be a mechanism for top-down transforma-
tion. It has been shown to affect post-conflict environments in often contra-
dictory ways, which require mitigation at the micro-level in terms of policy
which encourages constructive business behaviour and mechanisms for
positive collaborations between companies and local society. The presence of
global business is a site for perpetual power negotiations between multiple
local and external actors, with diverse opportunities to undermine governance
and socio-economic reform and perpetuate perverse behaviour. The challenge
for the EU is to understand how these dynamics work, and seek entry points
through which to produce positive outcomes for improving security and
development.
As the brief review of EU policy in this chapter suggests, and as reflected in
criticism of EU actions, policy agendas to mainstream private sector engagement
lack consistency, depth and purpose. Inherent problems include scepticism and
mistrust towards companies, where historic corporate abuse is often part of the
pattern of local violence, which make it difficult to reset public–private engage-
ment. The marginalisation of business in peacebuilding also reflects a historic
reluctance by companies themselves to become involved in social issues with
unclear benefits for profitability, a tendency reinforced by corporate silos, in
which business is often decoupled from other companies and civil society,
undermining broad sectoral alliances.
Against a background of weak EU policy towards the private sector, human
security offers one way out of the conceptual and practice blockages which have
handicapped the limited efforts to date. A human security perspective with its
pragmatic focus on the everyday, reveals more about individual and community
level experiences of the private sector than a discourse of human rights. Human
security may also do more to break down binary understandings of the corporate
role and create new spaces for co-constitutive efforts based on the presence of
complex hybrid interactions between business and local societies.
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Conclusion
The EU Global Strategy and contemporary
conflicts – how much second-generation
human security is possible?
Mary Kaldor and Sabine Selchow
Introduction
On 17 October 2016, the Council of the European Union adopted the Global
Strategy for the European Union’s Foreign and Security Policy (EUGS). The
document is the product of a consultative process to which the studies in this
book have contributed. A starting point for this process was the strategic paper
The European Union in a Changing Global Environment: A Systematic Analysis
presented to the June European Union summit of 2014 by Federica Mogherini,
the High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy (see
Chapter 1).
In this concluding chapter, we take a look at the EUGS and ask: How much
of the second-generation human security approach to violent conflicts that we
develop in this book does the EUGS make possible? This question is based on
our understanding of the EUGS as a document that (together with other texts and
practices) is part of the social negotiation of the world, i.e. of a web of meanings
that makes some things possible, in the sense of imaginable, and others not.
Indeed, the EUGS is a particularly interesting, hence, research worthy part of
this social negotiation of the world. This is not only because of the political text
type (Girnth 2002, p. 72) the document belongs to, which – in tandem with the
label ‘strategy’ – ensures heightened public and scholarly attention, but also
because it focusses on ‘security’, a discourse that is central to the production of
the collective self, the EU. Furthermore, the document has been explicitly estab-
lished as the textual point of reference in a newly launched initiative of annual
reflection “on the state of the play of the Strategy” (EUGS 2016, p. 51); this
cements the ongoing relevance of the document and accounts for its analytical
value.
Second-generation human security in a nutshell

As elaborated in detail in the Report From Hybrid Peace to Human Security:
Rethinking EU Strategy towards Conflict, the second-generation human security
approach to violent conflicts, which is introduced and discussed in this book, is
based on the adaption of the principles of human security (Kaldor 2007; Kaldor,
214 M. Kaldor and S. Selchow
Martin and Selchow 2007) to contemporary realities and an idea of the EU as a
distinct type of twenty-first century political institution (see Kaldor 2012). A
central premise that shapes the idea of second-generation human security is that
many of the instruments that are applied to deal with violent conflicts today are
products of an anachronistic inside/outside-dichotomy that naturalises
approaches that are not only ineffective in achieving their policy goals but actu-
ally ‘backfire’ and re-create the very reality that they set out to deal with. Break-
ing down this dichotomy, a second-generation human security approach favours
instruments for the ‘outside’ that have usually been associated with the genera-
tion of social order ‘inside’ national ‘containers’, such as the rule of law, pol-
itics, and policing. Human security is what we take for granted in rights based
law governed societies where emergency services (police, fire fighters or medical
personnel) are on hand in case of emergencies. Human security, as the basis
for external policy, is a strategy for extending this state of affairs outwards.
Thus it requires, above all, the development and application of instruments
that foster legitimate political authority and legitimate livelihoods; these
involve multi-layer, incremental and inclusive peace processes with particular
emphasis on support for local ceasefires and civil society, and a focus on security
assistance in establishing safe areas and safe corridors, which includes the pro-
tection of individuals and their communities; it also requires economic measures,
as well as justice to undercut the illegal economy. In general, it implies the
necessity of continuous engagement so as to effectively combine prevention,
early warning, crisis response and reconstruction as intertwined activities, and
places emphasis on gender so as to oppose the extreme gender relations that are
constructed in contemporary violent conflicts. A second-generation human
security approach draws on an understanding of the nature of contemporary
violent conflicts as a sort of predatory social condition, in which networks of
armed groups instrumentalise extremist identities and enrich themselves through
violence. This contrasts with the tendency for top-down approaches, based on
the assumption that violence is an expression of deep-seated political contesta-
tion, that is drawn from and reproduces twentieth-century thinking about peace-
making.
Assessing the EUGS
This concluding chapter asks the question: ‘How much of such a second-
generation human security approach to violent conflicts does the EUGS make
possible?’ To engage with a document like the EUGS requires an understanding
of the nature of such a document. We follow a text theory, according to which
the document of the EUGS is not a written manifestation of its authors’ view of
the world, of what the EU thinks or an act of rhetorical propaganda, different
from real action; nor is the text a straightforward blueprint for action. Rather, for
us, the document of the EUGS constitutes a distinct moment in the social negoti-
ation of the world. With that we not only acknowledge the commonplace that
“social reality does not fall from heaven but that human agents construct and
Conclusion 215
reproduce it through their daily practices” (Risse 2007, p. 128) and through lan-
guage, but go further and assume that webs of meanings discipline what is think-
able, sayable and doable in a distinct historical moment. In this sense, we start
from the premise that “the relationship between human beings and the world are
mediated by means of collectively created symbolic meaning systems or orders
of knowledge”, as Keller (2013, p. 2) puts it. These meaning systems do not
mirror a social reality that exists outside of themselves but “systematically form
the objects of which they speak” (Foucault 1972, p. 49) by making them mean-
ingful. “[I]nterpretive dispositions” are then reproduced, which “create certain
possibilities and preclude others” (Doty 1993, p. 298). It is in this sense, then,
that these meaning systems are not just about rhetoric and language but have
“concrete and significant, material effects” as “[t]hey allocate social capacities
and resources and make practices possible” (Weldes et al. 1999, p. 16).
For our analysis, this means that we investigate the world that is produced
through the text and assess the ‘compatibility’ of this world with a second-
generation human security approach to violent conflicts. In this sense, we follow
a method of assessing the possibilities for human security that takes us beyond
what is explicitly said in the text. For instance, it takes us beyond looking for
explicit mention of the term human security because the observation that a par-
ticular word is used in a text, such as human security, cannot easily be translated
into meaningful insights that go beyond the observation that a particular word is
used in a text (see further Selchow 2016). In other words, even if it is mentioned,
it might have a very different significance depending on how it is placed within
the text.
In order to reconstruct the world that is produced through the document of the
EUGS, we analyse the document in a process of open and circular coding, in
which we pay particular attention to what kinds of global actors, what kind of
political geography and, more broadly, what kind of (modern) world are pro-
duced. However, in a first step, and in order to get an initial sense of the docu-
ment and find a path into the field, we look at what the document says about the
EU’s approach to violent conflicts. In a second step, we then move beyond the
textual focus and reconstruct the world that is so produced.
The document
Before summarising what the EUGS says about the EU’s engagement in violent
conflicts it is worth highlighting a few general characteristics of the document.
The EUGS is divided into four main parts. The first part sets out four interests
that underpin the Global Strategy: (1) peace and security, (2) prosperity, (3) demo-
cracy, and (4) a rules-based global order. Notably, these are the interests of EU
citizens; the EUGS is “A Global Strategy to Promote our Citizens’ Interests”
(EUGS 2016: 13).
In the second part of the document, four principles are presented that are to
guide the EU’s external action: (a) unity, (b) engagement, (c) responsibility and
(d) partnership. This part also introduces the notion of “principled pragmatism”
as the guiding principle for the EU’s external action. The term supplants
“effective multilateralism”, which was so important in the document of the
ESS 2003.
The third part of the document presents the EU’s five priorities; these are
(a) the security of the EU, (b) “state and social resilience” to the EU’s “East and
South”, (c) “an integrated approach to conflicts and crises”, (d) “cooperative
regional orders”, and e) “global governance for the 21st century”.
Table 12.1 Content of the ESS 2003 and EUGS 2016
EU 2003 EUGS 2016
Introduction [Introductory paragraph]

The security environment: global
challenges and key threats
• Global challenges
• Key threats
• Terrorism
• Proliferation of WMD
• Regional conflicts
• State failure
• Organised crime
A global strategy to promote our citizens’
interests
• Peace and security
• Prosperity
• Democracy
• A rules-based global order
The principles guiding our external action
• Unity
• Engagement
• Responsibility
• Partnership
Strategic objectives The priorities of our external action
• Addressing threats • The security of our union
• Building security in our neighbourhood • State and societal resilience to our east
• An international order based on effective and south
multilateralism • An integrated approach to conflicts and
crises
• Cooperative regional orders
• Global governance for the twenty-first
century
Policy implications for Europe From vision to action
• More active • A credible union
• More capable • A responsive union
• More coherent • A joined-up union
• Working with partners • The way ahead
Conclusion Conclusion
Conclusion 217
In the fourth part of the document, recommendations are put forward as to
how the strategy could be put into action: through “a credible union”, “a respons-
ible union” and “a joined-up union”.
The document concludes with a brief outline of the “way ahead”. This
includes the proposal to revise existing sectoral strategies and develop “new
thematic or geographic strategies”. Furthermore, it includes the suggestion for an
ongoing process of regular re-assessment and, when needed, revision of the
strategy itself.
In comparison with the ESS 2003, three things are notable about the docu-
ment of the EUGS. First, with almost 11,000 words, the document of the EUGS
is a comprehensive text that is almost three times as long as the ESS (around
4,000 words). Second, the EUGS 2016 does not start with an explicit assessment
of the strategic environment. In this respect, the document differs not only from
the ESS 2003 but also from national security reviews, such as the US national
security strategy. Instead of including an assessment of the strategic environment
in the document of the EUSG itself, the document The European Union in a
Changing Global Environment: A Systematic Analysis (2015), which Mogherini
published as a guiding reference for the consultative process, serves this purpose
(see the discussion in Chapter 1).
Finally, in the EUGS the EU’s interests as well as the guiding principles that
are to underpin the EU’s external action are clearly set out; these aspects did not
explicitly feature in the ESS 2003 (see Table 12.1).
What does the EUGS say about the EU’s approach to violent
conflicts?
The EU’s approach to violent conflicts is included in the third part of the docu-
ment. As mentioned above, “an integrated approach to conflicts and crises” is
the third of five priorities of EU external action. The EU’s concern for violent
conflicts is shaped by the conviction that they involve the breakdown of “fragile
states”; this is presented as an objective fact (“We increasingly observe fragile
states breaking down in violent conflict”, EUGS 2016, p. 28; emphasis added).
State failure, in turn, is seen as a “crisis” that gives rise to “unspeakable violence
and human suffering”. Together, these crises and the violence and suffering they
bring along are what “threatens” European “shared vital interests” (EUGS 2016,
p. 28). As such, they demand prioritised attention. The EU’s overall engagement
with crises is labelled with the term “peacebuilding”. “Peacebuilding” is to be
approached in a “practical and principled way” (EUGS 2016, p. 28). The EU’s
external engagement is focused on its ‘surrounding regions to the east and south’
(ibid.). Crises in other parts of the world are to be addressed “on a case by case
basis”. The express goal of the EU’s engagement with conflicts and crises is to
“foster human security”. An “integrated approach” is the means to do this.
The “integrated approach” that the EUGS proposes embraces the premises of
the “comprehensive approach”, as outlined in the Joint Communication to the
European Parliament and the Council from 11 December 2013 (EC 2013), but
extends it in three respects. In addition to being multi-dimensional, i.e. “compre-
hensive” in terms of the policies that are used, it is “multi-phased”, “multi-level”
and “multi-lateral”.
The term “multi-phased” takes into account that violent conflicts unfold in
stages and distinguishes between “prevention, resolution and stabilisation”
(EUGS 2016, p. 28). In particular, the EUGS (ibid., p. 29) stresses that a “pre-
mature disengagement”, a premature focus away from one to another crisis, is to
be avoided. “Multi-level” means that all levels of governance are to be taken
into account, from the local, via the national and the regional to the global.
“Multi-lateral” captures the EU’s commitment to partner in a more systematic
way with various actors on the ground – regional and international institutions
are mentioned as well as “bilateral donors and civil society” (ibid., p. 29) – and
on the “regional and international levels”. “Sustainable peace can only be
achieved through comprehensive agreements rooted in broad, deep and durable
regional and international partnerships”, explains the document (ibid.).
The EUGS sets four priorities for the EU’s engagement with violent conflicts
and crises: (1) “pre-emptive peace”, (2) “security and stabilisation”, (3) “conflict
settlement” and (4) “political economy of peace”. Each of these priorities come
with a set of distinct strategies.
Pre-emptive peace: In regard to “pre-emptive peace” the EUGS refers to the
EU’s existing capabilities and experiences and proposes to ‘redouble’ efforts to
prevent conflicts and to monitor their root causes. It identifies four root causes of
conflicts: (1) human rights violations, (2) inequality, (3) resource stress and (4)
climate change. The latter is seen as a “threat multiplier that catalyses water and
food scarcity, pandemics and displacement”. Of particular importance is the
combination of monitoring efforts with “early action”. On the one side, this is to
be achieved through “regular reporting and proposals to the Council”, as well as
diplomacy and mediation “by mobilising EU Delegations and Special Repre-
sentatives”. On the other side, this is to be achieved through the “deepening” of
“partnerships with civil society”. The goal of these efforts is to bring out a dis-
tinct “political culture of acting sooner in response to the risk of violent
conflict”.1
Security and stability: The second priority for the EU’s engagement with
violent conflicts and crises is “security and stabilisation”. The EUGS (2016,
p. 30) stresses that the “EU will engage more systematically with the security
dimension of […] conflicts”; this implies being “better equipped to build peace,
guarantee of security and protect human lives, notably civilians” (ibid.). The
document refers to past experiences by proposing a “more systematic” engage-
ment with this “security dimension”. Being “more systematic” means to enhance
capabilities that bring the EU into a position “to respond rapidly, responsibly
and decisively to crises”; “helping” to fight terrorism is expressly highlighted. It
also means enhancing capabilities that enable the EU to “provide security when
peace agreements are reached and transition governments established or in the
making”. Finally, being “more systematic” means getting the EU into a position
from which it can support and consolidate local ceasefires (where needed); these
Conclusion 219
are presented as something that paves “the way for capacity building”. Parallel
to these engagements, the EUGS stresses the necessity to focus on countering
“spill-over of insecurity that may stem from such conflicts, ranging from traf-
ficking and smuggling to terrorism”. To deal with this “spill-over” demands “a
coherent use of internal and external policies”. For situations in which stabilisa-
tion is possible, the EUGS proposes an engagement that moves seamlessly
between the “end of violence and long-term recovery” and combines security
and development. The central task for the EU is to “enable legitimate institutions
to rapidly deliver basic services and security to local populations”. The express
rationale that motivates this focus is to avoid further violence and allow
“displaced persons to return”.2
Conflict settlement: The third priority in dealing with violent conflicts and
crises relates to “conflict settlement”. The EU builds on the premise that “each
country will need to rebuild its own social contract between the state and its
citizens” and that sustainable statehood needs to be “rooted in local agency”.
This premise underpins the EU’s strategy to foster “inclusive governance at all
levels” by “blend[ing] top-down and bottom-up efforts” in support of the devel-
opment of sustainable statehood and inclusive political settlement. There are two
interlinked strategies to achieve this goal. First, the engagement with local
authorities and municipalities is highlighted as a way to enable an environment
in which “basic services” are delivered to citizens, as well as, to engage with
“rooted civil society” in a “deeper” way. This engagement with “rooted civil
society”, in turn, is seen as a way to generate knowledge that helps “to distin-
guish between those groups we will talk to without supporting, and those we will
actively support as champions of human security and reconciliation”. The second
strategy in facilitating “inclusive governance at all levels” is through mediation
and the development of “more creative approaches to diplomacy”. This implies
two things. First, it implies the promotion of the “role of women in peace
efforts”. This is done in a comprehensive approach that stretches from “imple-
menting the UNSC Resolution on Women, Peace and Security to improving the
EU’s internal gender balance”. Second, and more broadly, it is about relying
more systematically on “cultural, inter-faith, scientific and economic diplomacy
in conflict settings”.3
Political economy of peace: The fourth and final priority in dealing with
violent conflicts and crises relates to the “political economy of peace”. The
EUGS proposes three strategies. First, the EU is to “foster the space in which the
legitimate economy can take root and consolidate”. This requires the assurance
that humanitarian aid is accessible. Second, the political economy of war is to be
dismantled and pathways for legitimate sustenance are to be opened. This
requires “greater synergies between humanitarian and development assistance,
channelling our support to provide health, education, protection, basic goods and
legitimate employment”. Once stabilisation is an issue, it is the synergies
between trade and development that “underpin long-term peacebuilding”. The
third strategy proposed in regard to the “political economy of peace” is the
application of “restrictive measures”. These are “smart sanctions”, as well as
“export control for dual-use goods”, and the fight against “illegal trafficking of
cultural goods and natural resources”. In general, these measures are to be
coupled with diplomacy. In particular, “smart sanctions” are to be designed in
accordance with international and EU law and “carefully calibrated and moni-
tored to support the legitimate economy and avoid harming local societies”. In
terms of the last two measures, the EU is to “modernise” existing policies.4
The world that the EUGS produces

The above summarises what the document of the EUGS says about violent con-
flicts. The following section turns to a different dimension of the text. It recon-
structs the world that emerges out of the EUGS document. Our findings can be
summarised in eleven points.
The primacy of geography: Geography plays a central role in the world of the
EUGS. In this world, Europe, the ‘home’, constitutes the centre of the world.
“Regions” stretch around this centre and surround Europe like concentric rings.
There are two different kinds of regions: those that are naturally relevant for the
EU and those that are not. The naturally relevant regions are those that are in the
EU’s neighbourhood, surrounding it in the East and in the South. In this sense,
the relevance of a region is determined by its spatial proximity to the European
centre. This spatial proximity accounts for the degree to which the EU engages
with the respective region. As a consequence, “peace in […] neighbouring and
surrounding regions” is of unquestioned interest for the EU, while the state and
development of regions “further afield” are not the natural focus of attention.
Crises in parts of the world beyond the immediate neighbourhood of the Euro-
pean centre are not automatically of concern to the EU. They are addressed “on
a case by case basis” (EUGS 2016, p. 39). In this sense, it is a world in which
geography is the guiding principle for political action. In fact, nothing less but
the EU’s (world) political responsibility arises from geographical criteria. “We
will take responsibility foremost in Europe and its surrounding regions, while
pursuing targeted engagement further afield” (EUGS 2016, p. 17).
“Region” as the central organisational unit: The “region” is the natural and
central organisational unit in the world. As the EUGS (2016, p. 32) explains:
In a world caught between global pressures and local pushback, regional

dynamics come to the fore. As complex webs of power, interaction and
identity, regions represent critical spaces of governance in a de-centred
world. Voluntary forms of regional governance offer states and peoples the
opportunity to better manage security concerns, reap the economic gains of
globalisation, express more fully cultures and identities, and project influ-
ence in world affairs.
A world shaped by three different kinds of crises: There are three different
kinds of crises that shape the world in which the EU finds itself. First, there is a
crisis “within and outside” of the EU. This crisis threatens the very existence of
Conclusion 221
the EU. Second, there are crises in the EU’s neighbourhood; and, third, there are
crises “afar”.
In contrast to the world constructed in the document of the ESS, which was
shaped by concrete threats, the EU is confronted with a situation of ongoing
crises that requires the EU’s and its member states’ constant attention. Concrete
‘threats’ and ‘dangers’ only play a marginal role.
A world of unique contexts: The world is essentially heterogeneous. While
“region” is the central and preferred political unit in the world, there is nothing
universal about how exactly the various regions in the world could and should
look like. The EU represents just one possible way of organising regionally. It is
not a model that is to be “exported” (EUGS 2016, p. 32), let alone a universal
way of doing things.
Like regions, violent conflicts, too, are heterogeneous. Every conflict looks
different, depending on its context.
Violent conflict as a confined social phenomenon: While each violent conflict
is unique in how it plays out and manifests itself, ‘conflict’ as such is a confined
social phenomenon. It is a phenomenon that unfolds in clear and distinct phases,
has a beginning and an ending, and springs of ‘root causes’. There is causality to
violent conflicts in the world of the EUGS.
Diverse range of political actors: The world of the EUGS is populated by a
number of different political actors. There are international institutions,
regional institutions, nation states, individuals, “European citizens”, citizens,
civil society organisations, the private sector, women and “rooted civil society”
(EUGS 2016, p. 29).
Political institutions and organisations as systems within a global network:
Political institutions and national and regional organisations are systems that are
embedded and interlinked in a global network. As systems, they have the capa-
city to be resilient (EUGS 2016, pp. 23), that is, they are able to bounce back to
their original state after crises and/or adjust to changing environments.
A twofold nature of the EU: The EU constitutes two different things in the
world of the EUGS. First, it is a tool through which national security is secured.
It is the union between member states that ensures their national security. “[O]ur
Union has enabled citizens to enjoy unprecedented security, democracy and
prosperity” (EUGS 2016, p. 32; emphasis added). The union between member
states is the ingredient that makes the EU a national security tool. As such, it is
essential and non-negotiable. Beyond that, the EU’s shape and organisation is
flexible and open to adjustments and change drawing on “reciprocal inspiration
from different regional experiences” (ibid.). Second, besides being a security
tool, the EU is an autonomous political actor in its own terms. Yet, despite the
fact that the EU is an actor that requires an extended defence industry (ibid.,
p. 21) and in contrast to its nature in the world of the ESS 2003 it is not a global
actor that comes into being through the (security) capabilities it has. It does not
constitute a state-like actor but a conglomerate of (member) states.
The union between European nation states is the central focus of security:
Given that the union between member states is the tool that secures national
securities, it is this union that constitutes one of the central foci of the EU’s
security efforts. It is “[o]ur Union [that] is under threat” (EUGS 2016, foreword)
and that is to be defended; “we will stand united in building a stronger Union”
(ibid., p. 13).
European citizenry: The world of the EUGS is a world of European (as
opposed to national) citizenry. It is European citizens who are to be secured
through the union of the EU’s member states.
Pivotal role of European nation states: European nation-states play a pivotal
role in the world of the EUGS. It is their “common action” grounded in a “shared
vision” that brings out Europe (EUGS 2016, p. 1). It is their effort to invest in
their union that ensures the very existence of the EU, which, in turn, ensures
their own national security. In this sense, European nation-states are autonomous
actors and the EU is the product of their union. Member states act through the
EU, i.e. in union, as well as on their own.
The possibilities for second-generation human security

In the previous two sections, we looked at what the document of the EUGS says
about violent conflicts and reconstructed the world that the EUGS produces. This
brings us to the question: what possibilities for second-generation human
security do the EUGS and its world hold? We find a complex picture which
includes important openings for the possibility of second-generation human
security as well as significant obstacles. In order to capture these tensions three
aspects of the world described above are of particular relevance.
The first aspect is the nature of violent conflicts in the EUGS’ world. On the
one hand, conflicts in the world of the EUGS are highly contextualised. They are
the product and manifestation of historical contexts. This demands tailor-made
approaches and opens possibilities for second-generation human security as an
approach to violent conflicts that builds on the necessity for a wide range of global
and local knowledge, including knowledge grounded in the lived reality of women.
Particularly note-worthy is the existence of “rooted civil society”. “Rooted civil
society” is a political actor and partner in the world of the EUGS rather than a
well-meaning add-on. Moreover “rooted civil society” differs from “civil society”,
understood as (global) non-governmental organisations. The existence of “rooted
civil society” in contextualised violent conflicts opens up important possibilities
for second-generation human security because it is an actor that offers the possib-
ility of engaging in an inclusive form of politics beyond ahistorical and managerial
‘best practice’-approaches. Violent conflicts in the world of the EUGS are complex
social conditions, which require a flexible and comprehensive approach that is spe-
cific to each situation and that represents a serious, responsible and long-term
engagement with violent-ridden societies, rather than short-term involvements that
are detached from the political reality on the ground.
On the other hand, the document is ambiguous about how to interpret violent
conflict. In some places, the EUGS document appears to assume a rather tradi-
tional view of conflict as deep-seated political contestation that consists of
Conclusion 223
c oncrete phases and unfolds in a linear way. This contestation stems from identi-
fiable ‘root causes’, that that can be discovered and tackled. This type of tradi-
tional understanding tends to be associated with top-down stabilisation efforts
rather than human security. To be sure, deep-seated grievances can be identified
in conflict zones but these do not necessarily translate into violence; violence is
often a way of closing down discussion about grievances such as inequality or
environmental degradation or channelling such grievances into polarisation
around identity and extremist ideologies and indeed violence tends to worsen the
sources of grievance. Moreover, if we understand what we call conflict as a
social condition in which violence is a tool for predation and for mobilising
around exclusive political ideologies, it is difficult to make sense of phases since
such conflicts have no clear beginnings and endings and tend to persistence. A
second-generation human security approach is similar to the “integrated
approach” that is multi-dimensional, multi-phased, multi-level and multi-lateral.
Yet, such an approach is only possible in a world in which conflicts are (under-
stood to be) complex social conditions. Particularly marked is the absence of any
emphasis on justice in the world of the EUGS. In traditional conflicts, comprom-
ises between the warring parties come before justice mechanisms. But if we
understand violent conflict as a social condition in which armed groups benefit
from violence then addressing the issues of war crimes and economic crimes are
central if the social condition is to be reversed. Moreover, justice is usually the
first demand of “rooted civil society”.
The second tension to be observed in the EUGS’ world has to do with the
conception of the nation-state. Nation-states, more precisely European member
states, play a critical role in the EUGS world. The EU is a tool for securing the
nation-state. In other words, the EU, the union between these states, is the
national security strategy for member states. Thus, despite the fact that ‘regions’
are a central organisational unit, the world of the EUGS re-produces nation-
states as key global actors. In fact, the world of the EUGS is shaped by a ‘nation-
alisation’ of the EU, as a ‘tool’ to secure its member states. Rather than being a
normative goal to be achieved and facilitated, the EU presents itself as a prag-
matic, security strategic choice for its member states. On the one hand, it could
be argued that this limits the opportunity for second-generation human security
as it appears to favour a national perspective and the associated measures that
are shaped by it. There is a risk of producing security capabilities, technologies
and tools, most notably an extended defence sector, that are grounded in national
security thinking and that entrench a security outlook that is at odds with a
human security strategy. But this does not necessarily follow from the privileg-
ing of the nation-state and, by implication the strengthening of the national
outlook in the world of the EUGS. This is because of the kind of national that
exists in this world. It is a national, in which the European is fundamentally
inscribed. Despite being accredited with a central position in the world of the
EUGS, which suggests a ‘nationalisation’ of the EU, European member states
are essentially ‘Europeanised’. In other words, it can be argued that the EUGS is
a process through which the very meaning of the nation-state is being rewritten.
By becoming a national security strategy, the EU both preserves the nation-states
of Europe and, at the same time, restrains their worst aspects that arise from
unfettered sovereignty. One consequence of this essential Europeanisation of
member states is the centrality of European citizens in security efforts. Thus, the
other side of the coin of the national focus in the world of the EUGS is a
different kind of national and a natural focus on individuals beyond the nation
that is not only consistent but actually necessary for a second-generation human
security strategy.
The picture becomes even more complex if we look at the third relevant aspect
of the EUGS’ world, namely the dominance of geography and the distinct way of
othering that follows from the geographical focus, thereby producing a tension
between a geo-political outlook and a human security approach. The world of the
EUGS is strictly divided into a European core that is surrounded by relevant and
less relevant regions. The EU’s external action is determined by the proximity of
violent conflicts to the European core. As discussed above, each region and context
is distinct. This opens possibilities for second-generation human security
approaches to violent conflicts as it necessitates contextualised knowledge and
local co-operation, such as with “rooted civil society”. At the same time, however,
it closes the space for second-generation human security as it favours pragmatic,
EU-centred decisions. Second-generation human security, however, is not just a
distinct security strategy but a normative stance on the world that is value-driven
and grounded in a distinct idea of global responsibility. The geopolitical necessi-
ties that are implied in the world of the EUGS, with its European core and relevant
and less relevant regions around it, represents an obstacle in the implementation of
second-generation human security as they determine the EU’s responsibility in
geopolitical, rather than normative terms. Above and beyond the importance of
territory to be defended, geo-politics tends to favour security technologies and cap-
abilities more in tune with traditional national security approaches than approaches
grounded in the premises of second-generation human security.
Conclusion
In June 2015, Federica Mogherini initiated a process of rethinking the EU’s
global strategy on foreign and security policy. This process started with Mogh-
erini’s strategic assessment of the EU’s security environment, presented to the
European Council in 2015, took shape in an inclusive, consultative phase and
culminated in the publication of the EU Global Strategy (EUGS) in October
2016. Since then, the EUGS has served as the point of reference for far-reaching
discussions about future steps in shaping EU security policies, capabilities and
strategies. The dedicated website of the European Commission (URL) captures
this ongoing discussion.
In this chapter, we studied the EUGS document and asked what possibilities
it contains for second-generation human security in the context of violent con-
flicts. In asking this question, we began from the premise that the document does
not represent what Mogherini, the EU or member states think but constitutes an
Conclusion 225
important part of the symbolic negotiation of the world. As such, the document
of the EUGS brings out a world that makes certain things thinkable and others
not. It is exactly this world that we were interested in and the spaces it opens or
closes for second-generation human security.
Our analysis brings out a fascinating and complex picture. To begin with and
most obviously, if we look at the textual level, the document of the EUGS con-
stitutes a discursive moment that brings the language of human security into the
EU security discourse, into the reinvention of the EU through its security
strategy. The document normalises the language of second-generation human
security which runs through the text. It describes the EU’s approach to be “multi-
dimensional”, “multi-phased”, “multi-level” and “multi-lateral”. It speaks of the
importance of “civil society” and “local agency”, and the necessity for “inclu-
sive governance at all levels”. It stresses “prevention” and “creative diplomacy”,
and speaks of long-term commitments. The important role of women is acknow-
ledged, the necessity to support local ceasefires is stressed and the importance of
protecting individuals is highlighted. The EUGS stresses the salience of “legiti-
mate institutions” and speaks of measures to undermine the criminalised war
economy. In fact, the EUGS explicitly uses “human security”, a term which was
not used in the ESS 2003. Furthermore, the document proposes to “act promptly
to prevent violent conflict, be able and ready to respond responsibly yet
decisively to crises, facilitate locally owned agreements, and commit long-term”
(EUGS 2016, p. 18). It stresses that:
[t]he EU will therefore promote human rights through dialogue and support,
including in the most difficult cases. Through long-term engagement, we
will persistently seek to advance human rights protection. We will pursue
locally owned rights-based approaches to the reform of the justice, security
and defence sectors.
(Ibid., p. 26)
The use of the language of human security is a noteworthy character of the

EUGS as it helps naturalising this language in an important way and establishing
it at the heart of the EU security discourse. The picture becomes more interest-
ing, however, once we move beyond the language that is used in the text and
focus on meanings and the world it brings out. This is an intriguing, variegated
world that differs in many respects from the one produced in the ESS in 2003.
Particularly interesting is that this world opens important possibilities for a
second-generation human security approach to violent conflicts, as it is discussed
in this volume. Especially the contextualised nature of violent conflicts, the
existence of “rooted civil society” as a significant political actor and the neces-
sity for grounding engagements in a diversity of knowledges makes possible a
second-generation human security approach that acknowledges the complexity of
contemporary violent conflicts as historical social conditions. This is promising for
engagements with violent conflicts that go beyond short–term, ‘best practice’
approaches and take into account the political nature of contemporary violent
conflicts. And, yet, at the same time, there are tensions in the world of the EUGS
that impose obstacles for the implementation of second-generation human
security. One is the traditional concern with stabilisation that is manifest in an
implicit linear view of conflict and the lack of discussion about justice mecha-
nisms. An even more noteworthy and problematic aspect of the world that the
EUGS produces is the privileged role that geography plays in it. This gives rise
to a geopolitical outlook on EU external engagements that runs counter to the
normative basis of second-generation human security. It produces a distinct EU
self and the risk of imbricating this outlook in the collective identity of the EU.
Notes
1 For the above see EUGS (2016, pp. 29–30).
2 For the above see EUGS (2016, p. 30).
3 For the above see EUGS (2016, p. 31).
4 For the above see EUGS (2016, pp. 31–32).
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Appendix
From hybrid peace to human security –
rethinking EU strategy towards conflict
The Berlin Report of the Human Security Study Group

Presented to High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security
Policy Federica Mogherini, 24 February 2016, Brussels
Executive Summary
The Berlin Report of the Human Security Study Group ‘From Hybrid Peace to
Human Security: Rethinking EU Strategy towards Conflict’ proposes that the
European Union adopts a second generation human security approach to con-
flicts, as an alternative to Geo-Politics or the War on Terror. Second generation
human security takes forward the principles of human security and adapts them
to twenty-first-century realities.
The report argues that the EU is a new type of twenty-first-century political
institution in contrast to twentieth-century nation-states. Twentieth-century
nation states were based on a clear distinction between inside and outside.
Typical outside instruments were state-to-state diplomacy or economic and
military coercion. Typical inside instruments are the rule of law, politics, and
policing. In today’s complex, contested and connected world, outside instru-
ments do not work; they backfire and make things worse. Human security is
about extending the inside beyond the EU.
Hybrid Peace is what happens when twentieth-century peace-making is
applied in contemporary conflicts. Contemporary conflicts have to be understood
not as Clausewitzean contests of will between two sides with legitimate goals
but as a sort of predatory social condition in which networks of armed groups
instrumentalise extremists’ identities and enrich themselves through violence.
Up to now, the EU has focussed on top-down peace-making, humanitarian
assistance and post-conflict reconstruction. These policies can easily be sub-
verted because they can end up entrenching criminalised extremist networks.
Second generation human security is about establishing legitimate political
authority and legitimate livelihoods to counter this predatory social condition. It
encompasses multi-layer, incremental and inclusive peace processes with particular
emphasis on support for local ceasefires and civil society; security assistance in
228 Appendix
establishing safe areas and safe corridors and protecting individuals and their com-
munities; economic measures including justice to undercut the illegal economy.
Second generation human security involves continuous engagement so as to
combine prevention, early warning, crisis response and reconstruction as inter-
twined activities, and places emphasis on gender so as to oppose the extreme gender
relations that are constructed in contemporary wars.
The instruments of second generation human security include:
• Creative diplomacy at all levels including smart multilateralism

• An emphasis on justice across the entire spectrum of abuse and criminality
prevalent in today’s conflicts
• The use of smart sanctions where they involve engagement with civil
society, impact monitoring, and compliance with international law
• Conditionality aimed at countering predation, corruption, sectarianism and
impunity rather than introducing neo-liberal reforms
• Civilian-led missions that include some combination of humanitarian
workers, human rights monitors, legal experts, police and where needed
military forces, and that involve both men and women.
The full text of the Report is available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/84978/

Index
Page numbers in bold denote tables, those in italics denote figures.
Afghanistan 148–9 security 222; in Syria 69, 70–3, 79; in

African Union (AU) 105, 111, 113–14, Ukraine 43, 44; in Western Balkans 55,
115, 116, 117 56, 57, 151–3
agency 23 climate change 108
Algeria 128, 132, 133 Clinton, Hillary 67
amnesties 153 CNDP (Congrès national pour la défense
Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic du people) 88
of the Congo (FARDC) 88 Colombia 205
arms embargoes 74, 161 Common Security and Defence Policy
Artemis, Operation (DRC) 90, 91, 92 (CSDP): and cybersecurity 184–5; in
Assad, President 67, 74 DR Congo 85, 90–2, 97, 98; and justice
Astana process 72, 78 143; and private sector 201
Australia 134 Computer Emergency Response Team
(CERT) 182
Barcelona Report 2, 90–1, 146, 149, 150, Concept on Strengthening EU Mediation
159 and Dialogue Capacities 201
Bartlett, W. 51 Congrès national pour la défense du
Battalina 205–6 people (CNDP) 88
Beck, U. 15–16, 25, 138 Convention on Cybercrime 182
Berlin Report 227–8 corporate responsibility 198, 199
Berners-Lee, Tim 191–2 corporations see private sector
border security see migration Court of Justice of the European Union
Börzel, T.A. 46 (CJEU) 164, 169
Bosnia and Herzegovina 4, 51, 54 Crimea 32, 38–9
Budapest Convention 182 Croatia 147, 153
Budapest Memorandum 33–4, 38–9 CSDP see Common Security and Defence
business see private sector Policy
Cyber Defence Policy Framework 184–5
CERT (Computer Emergency Response cyber diplomacy 183–4, 192
Team) 182 cyber-terrorism 179
Chinkin, C. 145 cybersecurity 175–93; actors and
civil society: and cybersecurity 181, 191; motivations 178–81; bottom-up
EU Global Strategy (EUGS) 219; in approach 190–1; case law 189; and
Horn of Africa 105, 115–16, 118; and civil society 181, 191; and conception
justice 150–4, 155; rooted civil society of cyber power 185–6; cybercrime as
219, 222, 225; and sanctions 165–7, an industry 178–9; enabling factors
169, 171; and second-generation human 176–7; EU approach to 181–5, 192;
230 Index
cybersecurity continued 14; and EU’s approach to violent
and external EU missions 184–5; at conflict 217–20; and justice 223; and
global level 191, 192; governance kinds of crisis 220–1; and nature of
models 186–8, 192; motivations of conflict 222–3; and political economy of
attackers 176–7, 178–9; nature of threats peace 219–20; and possibilities for
175–7; and protection of fundamental second-generation human security
rights 188–90, 191–2; reality of threats 222–6; and pre-emptive peace 218; and
177–8; roles of states 179–81; primacy of geography 220, 224;
specificities of EU policy 185–90; and priorities for EU engagement 218–20;
terrorism 179, 188, 190 and security and stability 218–19;
strategy 201; and twofold nature of EU
Davis, L. 143 221; world the EUGS produces 220–2,
Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) 225–6; see also European Union in a
85–100; background to crisis 86–9; Changing Global Environment
constraints and challenges 94–8; and assessment
context analysis 99; elections in 88, EU Security Strategy (ESS) 17, 201, 216,
89–90; EU funding 85; flawed human 217
security approach 91; and human rights EUGS see EU Global Strategy (EUGS)
protection 91–3; institution-building EUPOL (European Union Police Mission)
94–6, 99; lessons learnt 99–100; 90, 92, 98, 149
overview of EU policies 89–91; political European Court of Justice (ECJ) 137, 187,
legitimacy 99; and resistance to change 189
97–8, 100; restoration of law and order European Cyber Crime Centre (EC3)
93–4; role as diplomatic actor 96–7; 183
sanctions 93; shortcomings of EU European Cybersecurity Strategy 182–4
policies 92–3, 94 European Defence Agency (EDA) 183,
Djibouti 109, 111, 114 184, 185
Donetsk (People Republic) 32, 34, 36, 37 European Directive on Network and
Doty, R.L. 14, 215 Information Security (NIS Directive)
DRC see Democratic Republic of Congo 184
(DRC) European External Action Service (EEAS)
Duffield, M. 4 167, 171
Dzankic, J. 57 European external border surveillance
system (EUROSUR) 126, 130
EDA (European Defence Agency) 183, European Instrument for Democracy and
184, 185 Human Rights (EIDHR) 143
Egypt 103, 108, 109, 110, 111, 114 European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP)
EIDHR (European Instrument for 65–6
Democracy and Human Rights) 143 European Network and Information
ENISA (European Network and Security Agency (ENISA) 183
Information Security Agency) 183 European Union in a Changing Global
Eritrea 103, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, Environment assessment 13–27; and
113 agency 23; and challenges and
ESS (EU Security Strategy) 17, 201, 216, opportunities 19–21, 24; and complexity
217 of the world 17–19, 22, 24–5;
Ethiopia 103, 104, 105, 106–9, 111, 112, development of 14; and EU Global
113–14, 116 Strategy 13, 14; and European security
EU Action Plan on Human Rights and 17–23; European security in reflexive
Democracy 2015–2019 143 modern world 13–16; historical
EU Global Strategy (EUGS) 213–26; positioning of 17; and human mobility
assessing 214–15; characteristics of the 19, 25; interpretive dispositions 23–6;
document 215–17; and civil society 222; and IT 22; and nation-states 22–3;
and concept of nation-state 223–4; and politicisation 25; and power shift 18, 19;
conflict settlement 219; development of purposes of document 13, 14; and
Index 231
radical discursive opening 24–6; ICISS (International Commission on
regional focus 20–1; and security actors Intervention and State Sovereignty) 104
19; and webs 21–2; see also EU Global ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for
Strategy (EUGS) former Yugoslavia) 46, 54–5, 147, 153
European Union Police Mission (EUPOL) IGAD (Inter-Governmental Authority on
90, 92, 98, 149 Development) 106, 112, 113–14, 115,
EUROSUR 126, 130 117
EU’s Policy Framework on Support to IMF (International Monetary Fund) 41–2,
Transitional Justice 143, 153 43
EUSEC DR Congo 90, 92 Instrument for Stability (IfS) 143
International Commission on Intervention
FARDC (Armed Forces of the Democratic and State Sovereignty (ICISS) 104
Republic of the Congo) 88 International Criminal Court (ICC) 143
Footprints for Peace 205 International Criminal Tribunal for former
Foucault, M. 14 Yugoslavia (ICTY) 46, 54–5, 147, 153
France 188, 191 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 41–2,
Froitzheim, M.F. 95 43
Frontex 126, 128, 136 International Syria Support Group (ISSG)
FYR Macedonia 53–4 73
Iran 76, 159–60, 162, 164
Gallez, E. 94 Iraq 69, 159
Gegout, C. 96 Israel 134
Gerasimov, General 180 Italy 131, 133
‘global risk’ 15–16 Ivan, P. 74
Grande, E. 15–16
Greenhill, K.M. 132 justice 142–55; and amnesties 153;
bottom-up approach 149–50, 151,
Hague conditionality 46, 55 153–4, 155; and civil society 150–4,
Horn of Africa 103–18; and civil society 155; and conflict-resolution approaches
105, 115–16, 118; complexity of 145; in CSDP missions 143; in DR
situation 103–4; contested Congo 93–4; in EU Global Strategy
multilateralism 112–14, 117; defining (EUGS) 223; EU instruments for 142–3;
the challenge 104–5; diversity of region EU policy frameworks 142, 143, 153–4;
106, 107; and empowerment 117–18; EU Special Representatives (EUSR)
EU strategic framework 104–5, 110; 143; hybrid justice 54–6; importance of
geo-strategic concerns 108–10; 144–6, 154; lack of coherence in EU
geographical and historical background 143; Liberal Peace approach 145, 146,
105–6; human security agenda 114–18; 147–8, 150; and past abuse and injustice
lack of security community 112–14; 147, 155; and primacy of human rights
local conflicts 110–12; proposed EU 146–9, 154; recommendations for
strategy 117–18; turbulent political change 154–5; regional approach 150–3,
marketplace 110–12; vulnerabilities of 155; second-generation human security
106–8 approach 145, 153–4, 155; in Syria 73;
human mobility, concept of 19, 25; see top-down approach 150; War on Terror
also migration approach 148–9, 150; in Western
human security, concept of 2–3, 159 Balkans 54–6
hybridity: Berlin Report 227–8; hybrid
development 50–2; hybrid justice 54–6; Kaldor, M. 145
hybrid peace 3–4, 48–50, 57–8, 86, 145, Keller, R. 215
146, 147–8, 150, 197, 227; hybrid Kenya 111
security 52–4; and networks 57–8; and Kharkiv, Ukraine 39
private sector 203–6 Knutsen, B.O. 85
Kolk, A. 205–6
ICC (International Criminal Court) 143 Kosovo 51, 53, 54, 205
232 Index
Lau, C. 25 Portela, C. 74
Lenfant, F. 205–6 power shifts 19
Liberal Peace approach 3–4, 48–50, 145, pre-emptive peace 218
146, 147–8, 150, 197 private sector 195–207; challenges of for
Libya 131, 132, 133 EU 207; compliance vs co-optation
Lugansk/Luhansk (People Republic) 32, 199–200; corporate responsibility 198,
34, 36, 37 199; and critical security studies 198;
and ethnographic studies 198; EU policy
M23 rebel movement 88 deficit 195–6, 199–200; in European
Mac Ginty, R. 3, 54 security strategy 200–3; hybridity and
Macedonia 53–4 human security 203–6; management
Madrid Report 2–3, 159 view of 198; role of 197–200; in
Mahony, H. 75 Western Balkans 50–1, 204–5
Mauritania 132 Pugh, M. 51
migration 123–40; breaking the vicious Putin, V. 35
cycle 135–9; context of 124–7;
development-security nexus 131; and RECOM initiative 55–6, 151–3
distribution of risk 138–9; emergency Red Sea 108–9
framing of 128; enforcement/ reflexive modernisation 15–16
displacement dynamic 130; EU Richmond, O.P. 3
spending on 126; and Euro-African Rikir, Jean-Paul 98
policing 130–3; failure of border Risse, T. 214–15
security 127–35; global model for rooted civil society 219, 222, 225
mobility 137–9; harm reduction Rosenberg, E. 76
approach 135–7; and legal pathways Rubbers, B. 94
136; and market in border security Ruggie, J. 195, 202–3
129–33; numbers of people 125–6; Russia: and Crimea 38–9; sanctions 163;
recommendations for change 135–9; and and Ukraine 32, 33–4, 35–7, 38–9,
risk discourse 128; routes 125; security 39–40
model of 127–9; and tragedy of global Rwanda 86, 87, 88, 109
commons 133–5
Miklian, J. 205 Safe Harbour Agreement 189
Minsk I agreement 32 sanctions 158–72; areas of application
Minsk II agreement 32, 33–4, 43 162; Article 29 of TEU 161;
Mitchell, A. 3 bottom-up approach 160, 165–7,
Mogherini, Federica 13–27 169–70; and civil society 165–7,
Moldova 39 169–70, 171; combined with other
Morocco 131–2, 133 instruments 168; in DR Congo 93; EU
Morsut, C. 92 Global Strategy (EUGS) 219–20;
exemptions 164; and human rights
National Coalition for Syrian 162–5; human security perspective
Revolutionary and Opposition Forces 159–60, 162–71; impact assessments
(SNC) 68–9 168; impact on civilians 159–60, 162–5,
National Security Strategy (NSS), US 167–71; in Iran 162; legal issues 160,
19–20, 21–2 164, 165, 169; monitoring of 168;
Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons overview of EU policies 160–2;
(NPT) 38–9 problems and challenges 167–70;
recommendations for change 171;
Odessa, Ukraine 39 in Russia 163; in Syria 74–7, 162–3;
Ogata, Sadaka 104 types of 161
Operation Artemis (DRC) 90, 91, 92 SAP (Stabilisation and Association
Owen, T. 3 Process for South East Europe) 46, 50,
52, 147
Piccolino, G. 87 Saudi Arabia 109, 110, 114
Index 233
second-generation human security: Berlin Tunisia 131, 132, 133
Report 227–8; concept of 3–5, 213–14; Turkey 132
in DR Congo 99–100; and EU Global Tutsis 87–8
Strategy (EUGS) 222–4; and importance
of justice 144–6, 153–4; and private Uganda 86, 111, 113
sector 203–6; in Syria 78–80 Ukraine, and EU policy 31–44;
Selassie, Haile 113 background to conflict 31–3, 32; causes
Sen, Amartya 104 of conflict in the East 34–8; and civil
Serbia 147, 153 society 43, 44; and competition for
smugglers 128–9 financial assistance 43–4; and
SNC (National Coalition for Syrian conditionality of IMF program 41–2, 43;
Revolutionary and Opposition Forces) and corruption 41, 43; and Crimea 32,
68–9 38–9; and economics 35–8, 37, 40–1,
Snowden, Edward 189 42–3; and ethnicity 35, 37–8, 37; EU
Somalia 105, 106–7, 109, 110, 111, 112, role 33; indirect support from EU 39;
113, 114 and inflation 40; and legitimacy 42–3;
Somaliland 111, 112 Minsk II agreement 32, 33–4, 43; and
South Sudan 110, 111, 112, 113 public involvement 43, 44;
Spain 126, 131–2, 133 recommendations for EU 42–4; and
Stabilisation and Association Process for Russia 32, 33–4, 35–7, 38–9, 39–40;
South East Europe (SAP) 46, 50, 52, and risks in other regions 39–40; and
147 social hardship 40–1
Sudan 106, 107, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, United Nations: definition of human
114 security 159; in DR Congo 87–9, 91; in
Syria 64–80; arms embargo 74–5; and civil Horn of Africa 103; and migration 127,
society 69, 70–3, 79; condemnations of 138; and private sector 195, 202–3
human rights 66; conditionality of United States: in Afghanistan 148–9; and
re-engagement 77–8, 79–80; EU actions cybersecurity 181, 186–7, 188, 189,
against government 67; and EU strategy 190; in Horn of Africa 109, 110;
framework 65–6; and humanitarian National Security Strategy (NSS) 19–20,
relief 72–3; impact of human security 21–2
interventions 70; and institutional
reform 79; and justice 73; lack of EU Vendrell, Francesc 148–9
strategy 66–7; and legitimacy of regime
67–70; and legitimate economy 79; and War on Terror approach 148–9, 150
Local Administrative Councils (LACs) Weldes, J. 215
70–3; local agreements 71–2; money Western Balkans 46–58; and accession to
from EU 66, 71; new EU strategy EU 46–7, 55, 56–7; challenges of 46;
69–70; and political legitimacy 78–9; and civil society 55, 56, 57, 151–3; and
pre-conflict 65–6; refugees 72–3; corruption 52; critique of EU approach
sanctions against 74–7, 162–3; and 56–8; fragility of region 56–7; and
second-generation human security hybrid development 50–2; and hybrid
78–80; and terrorism 69 justice 54–6; and hybrid security 52–4;
and justice 54–6, 147, 151–3; outcomes
terrorism: and cybercrime 179, 188, 190; of EU policy 50–6; and private sector
in Syria and Iraq 69; War on Terror 50–1, 204–5; relational peace-building
approach 148–9, 150 48–50; and resistance 48–9
Tocci, N. 14
Transdnistria 39 Yanukovich, Viktor 31–2, 34
travel bans 161 Yemen 109, 110

Mary Kaldor EU Global Strategy and Human Security - Rethinking Approaches To Conflict-Routledge (2018)

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Mary Kaldor EU Global Strategy and Human Security - Rethinking Approaches To Conflict-Routledge (2018)

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EU Global Strategy and Human

National, European and Human Security

State Responses to Human Security

Human Security, Changing States and Global Responses

Gendering Human Security in Afghanistan

EU Global Strategy and Human Security

Climate Change, Policy and Security

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/

Edited by Mary Kaldor, Iavor Rangelov

ISBN: 978-1-138-09896-1 (hbk)

List of illustrations vii

1 Assessing Mogherini’s ‘The European Union in a Changing

2 Review of the EU policy for Ukraine 31

3 EU in the Western Balkans: hybrid development, hybrid

4 EU Syria engagement from a human security perspective 64

6 A human security strategy for the European Union in the

7 Europe’s failed ‘fight’ against irregular migration 123

8 EU approaches to justice in conflict and transition 142

9 Human security and sanctions, from security to governance:

10 Cybersecurity: a case for a European approach 175

11 Private partnerships, public peace: the role of the private

Conclusion: the EU Global Strategy and contemporary

Appendix: from hybrid peace to human security – rethinking EU

Ruben Andersson is an anthropologist and Associate Professor of Migration

Mac Ginty talks about the

interaction of already hybridised actors and structures. Although these actors

European security in a ‘reflexive modern’ world

As one of Mogherini’s advisors put it, “the primary purpose of an ‘external’

While the UN remains the principal guarantor of the sovereign equality

Second, there are shortcomings, if not failures in existing concepts, such as

Finally, in this “complex” world, networks of meaning, which used to be conven-

Finally, agency plays an important role in the world of “21st century

As we have seen above, in the world of ‘The European Union in a changing

Radical openings and a conservation of EU institutions that

Conclusion and outlook

Background of the conflict

Sustainability and legitimacy of the Minsk II agreement

Understanding causes of the conflict in the East of Ukraine1

Rebel violence Rebel control

Kramators’k Luhansk Kramators’k Luhansk

Rebel violence (3/2014 – 2/2015) Rebel control (3/2014 – 2/2015)

Figure 2.2 Rebel violence and rebel control of the territory.

Russian language Prewar employment

Kramators’k Luhansk Kramators’k Luhansk

Russian language (2001 census) Employment by industry

Internal security conflicts and risks of separatism in

Success of conditionality of the IMF program with the new

Conclusions: recommendations for the EU

The outcomes of EU policy in the Western Balkans

Hybrid development: subversion of the formal institutional process

Hybrid security: unintended consequences of institutional reform

Hybrid justice:10 a qualified success of a policy change

There is mutual benefit in a closer relationship between the EU and Syria.

Prior to the conflict, the 1977 EU-­Syria Co-­operation Agreement governed

Moving on: without a strategy

The question of legitimacy

Contribution to human security

Support to civil society and LACs

Local and integrated processes

The EU is concerned with cases of forced surrender, labelled as local cease-

Contributing to humanitarian relief and refugee crisis

As soon as President Assad steps aside and a genuine democratic transition

will be ready to assist in the reconstruction of Syria only when a compre-

List of illustrations vii

2 Review of the EU policy for Ukraine 31

4 EU Syria engagement from a human security perspective 64

7 Europe’s failed ‘fight’ against irregular migration 123

8 EU approaches to justice in conflict and transition 142

10 Cybersecurity: a case for a European approach 175

Prior to the conflict, the 1977 EU-Syria Co-operation Agreement governed

A region defined by geo-strategic concerns

The conference was the first stage in a step-by-step process to mobilize

Short-term goals: a harm reduction approach

Long-term goals: towards a global model for mobility

A post-Liberal Peace approach would presuppose war as a mutual enterprise

Bottom-up and regional approaches

Bottom-up approach and sanctions

Second-generation human security in a nutshell