The EU’s partners in crisis response and peacebuilding: complementarities and synergies with the UN and OSCE

A stated aim in the EU Global Strategy is for the EU to work with partners in addressing crises across the world. This article analyses such potential in the area of crisis response and peacebuilding, with an emphasis on the EU’s interaction with the UN and OSCE. It starts off comparatively by examining where the EU, UN and OSCE add value in crisis response and peacebuilding and reach complementarities. It shows that deployments differ across geographical locations and that the mandates of these organizations vary considerably with the EU focusing on police capacity building, the OSCE on the judiciary and the UN providing monitoring functions. In the second half, the article uses insights from cooperation between these organizations on the ground in Kosovo, Mali and Armenia to determine levels of interaction. Despite relatively few conflicts between these organizations, we find that they continue to work in parallel with each organization focusing on their narrow mandate and competences

All hands on deck: levels of dependence between the EU and other international organizations in peacebuilding

The EU seeks extensive partnership with other international organizations when it comes to security challenges. This is puzzling as the EU relies for its resources mostly on its member states. The relations between the EU and other international organizations have thoroughly been studied, yet scholars rarely question the actual rationale for partnership. We start from resource dependency theory which explains that almost all organizations are dependent on the resources of their partners. Yet we extend this theory by distinguishing between macro, meso and micro-level dependencies. To illustrate resource dependencies between the EU and other international organizations, we analyse EU’s peacebuilding policies in Kosovo, Mali and Armenia. By accounting for macro- and micro-level dependencies we provide a more holistic perspective than conventional meso-level explanations. Our contribution is therefore to expand the scope of the resource dependency theory and provide a framework to analyse dependencies between the EU and other international organizations