Evaluating the Africa-EU Partnership on Peace and Security

“This important new book explains variation in the effectiveness of the EU’s interregional partnership with Africa in the realm of peace and security. It is a brilliant piece of academic work, which masters a huge task and sets a new standard of excellence in this domain. Plank deserves to be seriously engaged by both practitioners and scholars in fields such as EU foreign policy, African studies, peace and conflict research, and comparative regionalism.”

— Fredrik Söderbaum, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
 “For researchers and practitioners of interregional cooperation alike, this book is a must-read. It offers a novel perspective on the effectiveness of interregional partnerships with respect to peace and security challenges on the African continent. Covering the Central African Republic, Mali and Somalia, it provides important lessons on conditions under which cooperation between the EU and African partners (the AU and ECOWAS) is successfully contributingto the effectiveness of peace operations.”
 — Diana Panke, University of Freiburg, Germany

“This fine book makes a critical contribution to the study of effectiveness of peacekeeping operations in the context of interregional studies. It fills an important gap in the thriving literature on inter-organizational relations and their effects not only for involved institutions but also in the field.”

 — Malte Brosig, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

Interregional cooperation in peace and security as key feature of the EU external relations is particularly relevant in Africa-EU relations. However, these efforts have not been systematically evaluated to date. Focusing specifically on interregional peace operations, this volume provides the first comprehensive evaluation of the Africa-EU Partnership on Peace and Security. It explains the effectiveness of interregional security cooperation across three cases: (1) the AU-EUresponse in the Central African Republic (2013) and (2) in Somalia (2007–2017), (3) and the ECOWAS-EU efforts in Mali (2012). The book makes a valuable empirical, theoretical, and methodological contribution to EU foreign policy, comparative regionalism, and conflict studies.

Friedrich Plank is Lecturer at Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany.