EU’s Footprint in the DR Congo- CSDP missions and the mixed achievements (original) (raw)
Related papers
The European Union’s Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP) which is used as an instrument for crisis management, peace, development and more, has not only been active in crisis management in Asia, Middle East, Europe ,Horn of Africa but very prominently in Central Africa. This papers sets out to analyze the CSDP’s mission to Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) with particular focus on: Why the CSDP went on a mission to DRC, its legacy, some lessons learnt from this mission, formulation of specific policy recommendation or some major guidelines to be considered by EU/CSDP for future military or civilian actions.
‘Building peace from the outside’: The role of the EU in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
in Arne Bigsten (ed) Globalization and Development. Rethinking Interventions and governance. London: Routledge, pp, 171-192., 2013
The purpose of this chapter is to analyse the impact of the European Union’s (EU’s) peace-building and state-building interventions in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) since the early 2000s. The case of the EU in the DRC is relevant both in its own right and for the purposes of this book. For a long time, the EU has been described as an economic giant, but a political dwarf, with the conclusion that its security policy has been weak. Since around the turn of the century, the EU nevertheless has begun to demonstrate a considerable amount of activity in the security field, and the EU is increasingly aspiring to be a global security actor and peace-builder. According to the European Security Strategy (ESS) from 2003, “Europe should be ready to share in the responsibility for global security and in building a better world” (European Union 2003:1). The DRC is a country where the EU ostensibly has sought to play a role in ‘building a better world’. For this purpose, the EU has not only developed a strong relationship with the DRC in terms of development cooperation and humanitarian assistance, but it has also designed five civil and military missions in the country since 2003. Along with the Balkans, the DRC is the largest “laboratory” for EU state-building and crisis management (Grevi 2007: 114).
The Limits of the EU as a Peace and Security Actor in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
Afrika Spectrum, 46(3):45-70, 2011
The European Union (EU) is increasingly aspiring to be a global peace and security actor. Using the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) as a test case to analyse such ambitions, this article reveals that the EU’s attempts to build peace and security are severely compromised by its bureaucratic and organizational complexity as well as by its ineffective policies. In fact, the EU’s state-centred approach in the DRC has resulted in the EU’s inability to deal with 1) the realities of governance in the DRC and 2) the strong transborder dimensions of the conflict. As a result, the EU continues to lack a coherent strategy for the DRC, despite a large budget. The analysis concludes that the EU is more concerned with establishing a symbolic presence and a form of representation than with achieving specific goals.
"The extension of the European Union into the realm of defence and security policy has signalled the EU’s ambition to become a fully fledged security actor. The EU’s supranational nature combined with its long history of mitigating conflict on the European continent has been argued to have made the EU a unique security actor capable of bringing together civilian and military components for conflict resolution. Entrenched in the discourse on multifaceted peacekeeping, the EU’s security policy documents have echoed the calls for peacekeeping operations that tackle the root causes of conflict through socio-economic and political reform. The EU’s foray into peacekeeping in Africa has however been marked by a divergence from stated policy. This paper seeks to explain the divergence from stated policy by assessing EU security documents against the backdrop of the peacekeeping literature. The paper will then assess the interventions in the Democratic Republic of Congo to determine the relationship between EU security policy and the conduct of operations. This paper concludes that the EU’s divergence from stated policies is a result of loosely defined concepts which have been transformed by the political realities of peacekeeping. "