On November 8th, over a hundred participants will attend the conference ‘Effectiveness and Inclusivity of EU Peacebuilding and Conflict Prevention' at the Scotland House in Brussels. During the conference, policy makers, academics and civil society practitioners will present the findings of two EU-funded Horizon 2020 projects IECEU - Improving the Effectiveness of Capabilities in EU Conflict Prevention and WOSCAP - Whole-of-Society Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding.

Aiming to improve peacebuilding through sustainable, comprehensive and innovative means, the projects will present recommendations around the cases of Ukraine, Mali, Yemen, Kosovo, Georgia, Afghanistan, Palestinian Territories and Bosnia and Herzegovina through a series of panel discussions. The panels will address the EU effectiveness in conflict prevention through discussions around Security Sector Reform, Multi-Track Diplomacy, EU integrated approach, inclusivity and local ownership.

"Peacebuilding and conflict prevention need to involve a whole range of different actors in society. It is relevant because much of the discussion around intervention, state building, peacebuilding, conflict prevention, talks about issues like local ownership of policies, the legitimacy of interventions and the need for societal resilience. A whole of society approach speaks to that need to include the people dimension in peacebuilding, it is not just politics and policies, it is policies, politics and people", said dr. Mary Martin, Senior Research Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Stefano Tomat, Head of Division of PRISM (Prevention of conflicts, Rule of law, SSR, Integrated approach, Stabilisation and Mediation) from the European External Action Service, will provide the official opening of the conference. After this, different panels will give insights in the results and recommendations of the WOSCAP and IECEU projects.

Dr. Rok Zupančič, University of Ljubljana, described IECEU project as a unique research, with nobody before analysing the CSDP missions and operations that extensively, while he is also looking forward hearing the results at the final conference.

WOSCAP project focused on three types of existing EU interventions, namely Multi‐Track Diplomacy, Security Sector Reform, and governance reform through a combination of desk and field research in Mali, Yemen, Georgia, Ukraine, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Guatemala and Honduras and produced a tailored set of recommendations to improve the EU's civilian means for conflict prevention and peacebuilding.

IECEU analysed best practices and lessons learned of eight on-going and past European Union CSDP missions and operations in the Western Balkans (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo), Africa (Congo, Libya, South Sudan and Central African Republic), Palestinian Territories as well as Afghanistan with the aim of providing a catalogue of practices, new solutions and approaches for the EU to guarantee long-term stability through conflict prevention and peacebuilding with special focus on pooling and sharing as well as civil-military cooperation.

 

CONTACT DETAILS

Contact person WOSCAP project:

Victoria Lloveras Carreras

WOSCAP Communications

v.carreras@gppac.net

www.woscap.eu

 

Contact person IECEU project:

Ivana Boštjančič Pulko

Project Manager

Ivana.bostjancic-pulko@cep.si

http://www.ieceu-project.com/