We choose different world regions for our project in order to trace the effects of different policies of the EU towards those regions. We look at cases in which we already find regional integration happening. Our main focus lies hence on accounting for the role of the EU in strengthening or weakening these regional developments, and thus on the role of the EU in fostering conflict transformation by applying its strategy of regional integration.

These cases show either positive or negative outcomes resulting out of the EU´s strategy of regional integration. By comparing the different cases, we may in the end of the project be able to sort out certain conditions which lead to a positive impact on regional conflict transformation by the EU strategy.

The four regions we choose are:

The Mediterranean region with rather negative results in terms of conflict transformation. The focus lies here on the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Western Sahara conflict (Mediterranean). While research literature on both cases is concurring on the ineffectiveness of regional cooperation initiatives, none of these studies have joined the dots connecting the EU’s impact on the two regional conflicts and its regional cooperation initiatives.

The African region: West Africa: the crisis in the Sahel region. The Sahel has long been one of the poorest areas of the world and a particularly fragile political and social environment. From a geographical point of view, Sahel is the geo-climatic area of transition between the Sahara desert and the savannahs of tropical Africa. It encompasses portions of Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Algeria, Niger, Chad, Sudan, South Sudan and Eritrea. This particular geography and the porosity of borders have facilitated the diffusion of illegal traffic and the establishment of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQMI) in the area. Instability has led to attacks against foreign citizens and companies and has recently culminated in the occupation of Northern Mali by Ansar Dine, an insurgent Islamist organization allegedly associated with AQMI. ECOWAS has been the first African Regional Economic Community to establish conflict management capabilities and is deeply involved in efforts to resolve the crisis in Mali and to reduce the threat of terrorism and illegal traffics in Sahel. The EU’s involvement in conflict management in West Africa crisis has been up to today less direct than in other regions of Africa. Nevertheless, the EU has played an important role in supporting regional cooperation in West Africa and Sahel, acting both as a model for ECOWAS (some ECOWAS institutions are inspired by their European counterparts) and a cooperation partner.

The Great Lakes region: The Great Lakes region has been one of the most unstable and violent parts of Africa for more than twenty years. As in the case of Sahel, the exact delimitation of the region is somehow blurred, although it is generally thought to include Burundi, Rwanda, the north-eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Uganda and north-western Kenya and Tanzania. Regional cooperation has been often invoked as a way out of the Great Lakes regional crisis, especially in so far as it can ease the enduring tension between the DRC and Rwanda. However, formal regional integration in the area is extremely complicated, due to the overlapping memberships of the countries most involved in the conflict complex – DRC, Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi – in many different regional organizations. The EU is deeply involved in conflict resolution in the Great Lakes region. Its engagement has been considerably more important and direct than in West Africa. The DRC was notably the location of the first out-of-area European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) mission (Artemis) in 2003 and the country is a major recipient of the EU development and humanitarian aid. The EU has insisted on a regional approach to the resolution of the crisis (Piccolino 2010; Frotzeim, Söderbaum and Taylor 2011) and has promoted the creation of the the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region (ICGLR).

Central and South America with a focus of the EU sponsoring of regional integration and the effects of conflict transformation in disputes between Ecuador, Venezuela and Colombia, and the coup d’état in Honduras in 2009 and its regional implications: The literature on the EU’s involvement in regional integration processes in these conflicts is both sparse and heavily tilted towards the economic aspects of this involvement, be it in its multilateral or bilateral form (see, for instance, Martins and Saraiva 2009). Within this broad context, several studies have tried to use the EU as a template for assessing the various processes of regional integration in South America, especially the creation of a common market within the framework of MERCOSUR (See, for instance, Porto and Flores, 2006). Yet, there is virtual silence on the impact of regional integration on the resolution of regional conflict in general and on the EU’s role in sponsoring and supporting such processes in particular. As such, there is a definite gap in the literature with regards to the role of the EU in solving regional conflicts through regional integration which the proposed project intends to fill.

The East Asian region, especially concentrating on the tensions on the Korean peninsula as well as in the South China Sea. A focus lies here on the EU´s successful experience of ‘region-to-region dialogue’ with the ASEAN (Börzel and Risse 2009; Camroux 2008). While the literature so far has had a tendency to focus more on the comparison of regionalism between Europe and Asia (Loder et al. 2011) as well as on the possibility of further institutionalization of regional cooperation in Asia (e.g. Börzel and Risse 2009; Callahan 2011), there has not been a serious academic attempt to grasp the actual influence of the EU on such institutionalization in East Asia. Furthermore, the reason why the EU has turned so active in encouraging Asian integration has not been wholly explored. Lastly, there is a need to take the policies and attitudes of the US and China into account in order for the EU to contribute to the peaceful solution of territorial disputes and to promote regional integration in Asia.