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ABSTRACT
From a peacebuilding perspective, EU support for civil society organizations (CSOs) in conflict-ridden countries can be criticized for artificially boosting a liberal, ‘bourgeois’ civil society at the expense of more representative initiatives at the grassroots level. Seen from a governance perspective, however, this criticism is lacking in nuance and conceals the actual rationale and effects of the support. To advance a realistic debate on international peacebuilding as a form of governance, this article investigates what the character and effects of EU support for CSOs in conflict-ridden countries actually are: how does it affect the relations between the supported organizations and (1) the wider society, (2) the state and (3) between the recipient country and the EU? We consider four ideal types of EU conflict governance: ‘liberal peace’, ‘hollow hegemony’, ‘vibrant hegemony’ and ‘post-liberal peace’ and compare them to empirical data from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus and Georgia. We find that while the objectives of promoting peace and democracy through CSO support tend to fail, the strategic interests of the EU are still maintained.
Acknowledgements
We have presented earlier drafts of this article in September 2013 at the International Association for Peace and Conflict Studies’ Peacebuilding conference in Manchester and at the ISA convention 2014 in Toronto. We would like to thank all participants for their constructive feedback and comments.
About the authors
Birte Vogel is a post-doctoral researcher at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute, University of Manchester, UK. She is Assistant Editor of the Taylor and Francis journal Peacebuilding. Her PhD research was funded through the EU FP7 project ‘Cultures of Governance and Conflict Resolution in Europe and India’, and focused on spatial dimensions of peace in Cyprus.
Kristoffer Lidén is a Senior Researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), working on topics of peacebuilding, security and humanitarianism within the disciplines of Philosophy and International Relations.
Nona Mikhelidze is a Senior Fellow at the IAI, Italy, and holds a M.A. in Regionalism: Central Asia and Caucasian Studies from the Humboldt University Berlin (HU) and was awarded with the Volkswagen Foundation Scholarship as a Research Fellow at HU. She holds also M.A. and B.A. degrees in International Relations from the Tbilisi State University.
Elena B. Stavrevska is a PhD candidate in International Relations at the Central European University. Her work focuses on conceptualisation of agency, in particular local agency, in (post-)conflict societies.