The EU and civilian missions in the neighbourhood

This chapter focuses on the civilian missions that the European Union (EU) has deployed in its neighbourhood as instruments of conflict resolution. The civilian missions operating in the EU's southern and eastern neighbourhoods reflect the Union's efforts at addressing complex and pervasive security challenges stemming from long-simmering conflicts, significant levels of organised crime, trafficking and illegal migration. The European Union Border Assistance Mission (EUBAM) Libya aimed to support the Libyan authorities in improving and developing the security of the country's borders. Contrary to EUBAM Rafah, EUBAM Libya is supposed to be actively involved in land, sea and air borders, offering a more 'inclusive' approach. The European Union Coordinating Office for Palestinian Police Support has two main operational pillars – a Police Advisory and a Rule of Law section since 2008 – and it also consist of five sections: police advisory; programme coordination; rule of law; administration; and gender

Networking with Chinese Characteristics: China’s party-to-party relations in Asia

China recently articulated its ambition to shape the regional and global order and to share the lessons of its own experiences with one-party rule. One of the key actors tasked with implementing this shift in Chinese foreign policy is the International Department of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP-ID). The CCP-ID maintains the kind of collaborative network that is hypothesized to be a channel of policy diffusion and learning. Offering a first exploration of this under-researched aspect of China’s foreign policy, this chapter systematically compares the activities of the CCP-ID in five of China’s close neighbors to better understand the patterns of interaction and, even more importantly, the topics and content of engagement. Party-to-party relations are used for both promoting China’s foreign policy interests as well as diffusing authoritarian practices. Our comparison of the CCP-ID’s activities in Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, Mongolia, and Japan suggests that these objectives and the CCP’s cooperation strategies vary considerably across countries, regime types, and domestic power structures