Member

The EU as International Mediator (EUaIM) collaborative research network seeks to create a platform to launch research into new knowledge on the EU’s role in international crisis through mediation. Whereas mediation plays an important role in conflict analysis theory, its study remains nascent in scholarship on European Union’s international role.

A research gap exists between the established studies on conflict mediation (based in Conflict Studies) and the EU’s foreign and security policy (based in Security Studies). While the EU often uses the language of mediation as a key component of its external commitments to political dialogue, there is a dearth of systematic engagement on the issue of EU mediation. This network seeks to bring together the wider corpus of understanding on mediation as an initial step to the study of the EU’s developing role as mediator and as a component of its wider foreign and security policy.

Fundamentally, we hope that through a series of meetings and dissemination events this network will provide the basis for developing and refining a research agenda that aims to assess the place of mediation within the EU’s crisis management approach and theorise on the EU’s capacity to broker peace.

The network, further, aims to integrate the established research on conflict analysis into EU foreign and security policy studies. The network will allow for dialogue and collaboration between colleagues with a background in conflict studies seeking to understand mediation and its dynamics, and those seeking to account for actions conducted by the EU. A key task of this network is to establish conceptual clarity and develop theoretical sophistication on the EU’s mediation roles through our research meetings. The network is jointly coordinated by Toni Haastrup and Richard Whitman (University of Kent) and Arne Niemann and Julian Bergmann (University of Mainz).