ABSTRACT
How the EU conceptualizes the causes and dynamics of conflict should, in theory, shape its policy responses. The EU’sconceptualization and understanding of the drivers of conflicts and how they should be prevented or managed is elaborated in the European Security Strategy. From this document it is clear that the EU’s conflict management strategy is founded on a linkage between security and development. This document’s understanding of violent conflict is informed by an array of liberal approaches that emphasize the economic causes of conflict, the role of political and economic development in managing conflict, and the importance of addressing the EU’s self-interest in achieving security and other goals through conflict management. There is an implicit acknowledgement of the two dominant paradigms that emerged from the collapse of Communism, the end of the Cold War and the global rise of violent conflicts in the 1990s. First, Democratic (or Liberal) Peace Theory, which holds that democracies do not go to war against each other and that democracy promotion will prevent conflict, for as the EU strategy puts it: ‘The best protection for our security is a world of well-governed democratic states’ (European Council, 2003). Second, the ‘conflict trap’ paradigm that is advocated by the World Bank, which correlates civil wars with economic failures in development policy and proposes an agenda of measures to correct them (Bigombe et al., 2000; Collier et al., 2003).
