Explores the EU's relations with civil society organizations in an effort to improve the effectiveness and relevance of its conflict and peace policies.

This publication explores violence, conflict and peace. It focuses on the non-governmental component in ethno-policitcal conflicts. Civil society actors, or "conflict society organizations" (CoSOs), are increasingly central in view of the complexity of contemporary ethno-political conflicts. CoSOs are key players in ethno-political conflicts, both as violators and as promoters of human rights. Nevertheless, the precise relationships underpinning the human rights-civil society-conflict nexus have not been fully examined. This volume analyses the impact of civil society on ethno-political conflicts through their human rights-related activities, and identifies the means to strengthen the complementarity between civil society and international governmental actors in promoting peace. These aims are addressed in case studies on Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cyprus, Turkey's Kurdish question, and Israel-Palestine.

This volume provides a novel and relational sociological approach to the study of EU civil society. It focuses on the interactions and interrelations between civil society actors and the forms of capital that structure the fields and sub-fields of EU civil society, through new and important empirical studies on organized EU civil society.

This book analyzes how international organizations and the European Union engage with civil society to pursue their policy goals. Multi-stakeholder initiatives, private-public partnership, sub-contracting, political alliances, hybrid coalitions, multi-sectoral networks, pluralist co-governance, and indeed foreign policy by proxy are all considered. Bringing together the most advanced scholarship, the book examines trade, environment, development, security, and human rights with reference to both EU and global institutional settings such as the WTO, UN Climate Summits, FAO, IFAD, ICC, UNHRC, UNSC, and at the EU level the DG FISMA, TRADE, CLIMA, DEVCO, HOME and ECHO. The book also studies the use of NGOs in the foreign policy of the EU, USA, and Russia. This changing politics and the polarized debate it has generated are explored in detail.

The role of civil society organisations in Brussels is debated. Some view them as representatives of their members and thus as legitimising agents for policy-making in the European Union. Others see them as being elitist and out of touch with their membership bases, therefore ill-suited to promote democracy at the EU level. Taking civil society organisations in the EU’s external relations as an example, Meike Rodekamp submits these controversial views to a reality check. Interviews with representatives of civil society organisations in Brussels and their member organisations in the EU show that the Brussels offices have not lost contact with their members. However, member organisations differ substantially in their participation in internal decision-making processes, which raises doubts about the legitimacy gains through civil society participation in EU policy-making.

Since 2001, the prevention of violent conflicts has been a priority of the European Union's external policy. In addition to new operational competences developed under the Common Foreign and Security Policy, the European Union is particularly suited to combat root-causes of conflicts throughout the world. The current draft Constitution for Europe proposes to insert the prevention of conflicts within the text of the Treaty. This volume explores and scrutinizes the progress achieved by the European Union in the definition of a concrete conflict prevention strategy, as well as the challenges it still faces. The contributors focus on the following issues: definition of and indicators for conflict prevention; institutional and constitutional dimension of conflict prevention; EU's instruments for the prevention of violent conflicts; structural conflict prevention and mainstreaming conflict prevention into EU's policies; and cooperation with other international organisations and civil society.

This edited volume provides new insight into the interplay between governance and conflict. The articles in this volume deal with this problematic dimension from a variety of perspectives, covering different actors and topics as well as a vast array of geographical locations and entities that include both states and de facto or unrecognized states such as Transnistria. Scholars and practitioners have contributed to this worrk to bridge the gap between academia and practice. The volume blends scholarly research with examples of practical application to approach the conundrums of governance in and during conflict in a comprehensive way.