ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter discusses some of the strategic, institutional but also the implementation challenges highlighted in the individual contributions to this book. In the process it also offers some avenues for further exploration. The chapter is structured around a set of common themes that have been raised more or less explicitly by the contributing authors so as to facilitate the assessment of the evolution but also the likely future trajectory of EU conflict prevention and crisis management policies. The development of these policies over the past decade has been rapid, but their success, and the quality of policy implementation uneven. Although the EU can claim by virtue of the geographic spread of its policies to be a global actor in the management of conflicts, its performance in the field has been impacted by institutional, but also political constraints. Emanating from EU member states but also the EU’s partners, these constraints suggest a number of conceptual but also empirical avenues for future research, both within EU studies as well as International Relations and the fields of conflict and peace studies.
