Discussing issues of peace and conflict nowadays is not possible without making reference to regional conflict dynamics which pose a major challenge for global peace in our times. The smoldering conflict dynamics in Syria, Mali or Libya have been recent lamentable instances of this development.

While at times of the Cold War we could observe one global conflict showing regional manifestations, now the contrary is the case. The post-Cold War era has been characterized by a bottom up dynamic whereby regional conflicts have increasingly had the potential of translating into global tensions (see Buzan and Wæver 2005). One central feature of those conflicts is that they bear the risk of spill-over effects, since they draw in a variety of actors from different states. In particular, therefore, regional conflicts represent global challenges to be tackled because of their inbuilt potential to spill over into the global arena.

Spill-over effects are for example seen responsible for conflicts in the African Great Lakes region, especially in the case of the civil war in Congo (Buhaug 2008: 217). Other examples are the sequence of conflicts shattering the Balkans in the past (Buhaug 2008: 217) and the possibility of spill-over effects stemming from the Syrian conflict today. Regional integration is often seen as one central way to approach these kinds of conflict dynamics (Stefanova 2006; Swanström 2002; Khan 2009).

In the case of the EU, the promotion of regionalism has been characterized as a ‘distinct European idea’ (Börzel and Risse 2009: 5; see also Bicchi 2006; Grugel 2004). Within the literature, the EU is thus referred to as the example par excellence, and ‘the gold standard’ of regional integration (Börzel and Risse 2009: 5). However, it might be questioned if this is still valid in times of an internal EU crisis, in which the EU itself seems to show tendencies of disintegration (Webber 2012; Schmidt 2012) and the success of its concept of internal integration is currently contested (Chiti et al. 2012).