The Emerging EU Peacebuilding Framework: Confirming or Transcending Liberal Peacebuilding

The EU is now emerging as a major actor in regional and global peacebuilding. The EU does not perceive conflict as endemic, and develops its policy on the basis that conflict is eminently resolvable if structural issues, needs, social injustice, and inequality are addressed. Yet its peacebuilding project is subject to some significant and familiar contradictions. We identify the basis for what may become a ‘EU peacebuilding framework’ (EUPF), and argue that while it aspires to a ‘just and durable peace’ including practical tools and a normative framework, these need to be set in critical relief. Recent research on developing a more sophisticated form of locally relevant peacebuilding (in contradistinction to the evolving, global ‘peacebuilding consensus’ and statebuilding project) indicates significant issues with the EU’s emerging approach