EU conflict prevention in the post-Lisbon era

The debate surrounding early warning (EW) and early response (ER) on conflict prevention is understood differently by different people, at different points in time. However, at its core, EW-ER is a mechanism for the prevention, or reduction of the impact, of conflicts. Too often EW has been treated in isolation from ER, which has contributed to confusion about what early warning exactly is, and what it is for. Timely and effective conflict prevention is the goal, and this research cluster aims to ‘better link early warning to effective and timely response to prevent conflict’1 by identifying constraints and opportunities within the European Union’s EW-ER architecture.

This report follows in the wake of renewed activity on EW-ER across European Union (EU) institutions, encompassing the political commitments of the June 2011 Council Conclusions,2 as well as the work being carried out by the new division dedicated to Conflict Prevention, Peacebuilding, and Mediation within the EU External Action Service (EEAS).3 An evaluation of the European Commission’s support to conflict prevention and peacebuilding, published in November 2011, has also flagged up some areas of work for early warning and response capabilities.4 All in all, it appears that early warning and early response to conflict prevention are slowly moving up the EU external action agenda.

The post-Lisbon architecture of EU external action on conflict prevention is by no means established and any number of institutional, organisational and even staffing decisions have yet to be made. Against this backdrop, this mapping of the EU’s institutional capacity for early warning and conflict prevention represents a tentative overview of where we are at the end of the EEAS’s first year, and the general direction that the EU’s early warning-early response architecture is heading towards.