The European Union's Role in the Palestinian Territory: State-building through Security Sector Reform?

The aim of this paper is to shed light on the distinctive role of the EU as a state-builder in the case of the Palestinian Territory and examine how state-building can be conducted in a still on conflict society. Following the Oslo Accords, the EU engaged actively in the state-building project in the Palestinian Territory taking a number of initiatives on the ground. Ever since, security has been at the centre of Israeli-Palestinian relations as well as at the international community‟s effort to build a state called “Palestine”. Security has been a key issue in all Israeli-Palestinian agreements concluded during the interim period up to 1999 and then, during the second intifada (2000), security became a cornerstone of all internationally-sponsored diplomatic initiatives and peace plans. Security also became synonymous with Palestinian statehood and it topped the diplomatic agenda in the recent re-launch of direct talks between Israelis and Palestinians on October 2, 2010. To this end, the central aim of this paper is to examine the distinctive initiatives that the EU has taken in order to help the Palestinian Authority reform both its security and judiciary sectors as part of its broader state-building strategy towards the Palestinian Territory, as well as provide explanations on why these policies had so little impact. In doing so, the paper seeks to provide answers to the following questions: what conclusions can we gather from a detailed study of EU initiatives on the ground? Has the EU been an effective and coherent actor in the Palestinian Territory as far as security and judiciary sector reform is concerned? How are all these initiatives on the ground linked to the “high politics” of this conflict

Contested States, Hybrid Diplomatic Practices and the Everyday Quest for Recognition

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from OUP via the DOI in this record.This article examines contested state diplomatic practices with the aim to challenge structural legal-institutional accounts of these actors’ international engagement, which are unsatisfactory in explaining change and acknowledging their agency. Considering contested states as liminal international actors, their diplomatic practices stand out for their hybridity in transcending the state vs. non-state diplomacy dichotomy as well as their structure-generating properties in enabling social forms of international recognition – absent legal recognition. The concept is empirically applied to examine the everyday interaction between the representatives of Palestine and Western Sahara and the EU institutions in Brussels. It is argued that there has been a renewal and expansion of the Palestinian and Sahrawi repertoires of diplomatic practices vis-à-vis the EU, which has entailed growing hybridisation. Innovation originated in more “transformative” diplomatic practices capitalising on the contested states’ own political inbetweenness, which established relations that contributed to constituting and endogenously empowering them in the Brussels milieu. The way was thus paved for more “reproductive” diplomatic practices that mimic traditional state diplomacy to gain prominence. The impact achieved on “high politics” demonstrates how bottom-up practice-led change may allow contested states to compensate for their meagre material capabilities and punch above their structural weight in international politics