Browsing by Subject "CSDP"

The liberal peace paradigm focusing on a top-down approach and implementing Western values in a one-fits-all model dominated the field of peacekeeping and crisis management missions especially from the 1980s onwards. Later, local ownership became a “buzzword” in international interventions after some major failures of peacekeeping missions in the 1990s and early 2000s. Since then highlighting the relevance of the inclusion of local actors and of utilizing local knowledge have become inseparable parts of the major international organizations’ policy documents and strategies dealing with crisis management and peacebuilding. However, the definition of who or where is local has not been adequately addressed. This has led to using the local as a concept referring to almost anything and everything within the borders of a state. The vague conceptualization has been criticized by scholars, as it leaves unanswered many questions about who can represent local interests or which actors should be included in a crisis management process to increase the sustainability of the intervention. This Master’s thesis seeks research on who, what or where the local level is seen to be in the context of the EU’s civilian crisis management. It does it by uncovering and discussing discourses of the local level from a set of the EU’s documents dealing with civilian crisis management or external action more generally. In this thesis the local level is framed as a social construction through the notion of scale and level from human geographical literature. The human geographical literature also highlights the importance of not only looking at the discourses of the local level but also how it relates to other levels to gain a fuller understanding. The thesis also discusses the potential political opportunity structures that follow from these discourses. There are three main discourses found in the documents focusing on who the local level comprises of: authorities and government, civil society and a variety of different actors on different levels within the nation. None of these discourses raises above the others. Instead, they co-exist, leaving the local level vaguely defined. It is argued that this gives the EU an opportunity to pick the local actors to cooperate with case-by-case. This choice can reflect the needs and will of the EU, the host country or both. In addition, two discourses relating to what the local level represents more generally were discovered. These form a dichotomy: the local is seen both as a threat to the security of the EU citizens but simultaneously as a necessity to include in missions to increase the effectiveness of CSDP missions. Overall, the importance of local ownership is highlighted throughout the documents. Considering this, the low level of mentions of local actors is somewhat surprising as well as the vague definition of who or where is local.