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This book represents the first ever comprehensive study of the EU's foreign and security policy in Bosnia. It also sheds new light on the role that intergovernmental, bureaucratic and local political contestation have played in the formulation and implementation of a European foreign and security policy

Attempts to explain the failure to reform the security sectors in post-conflict countries have often resorted to two sets of explanatory factors: international and local factors. This article seeks to move from that unhelpful dichotomy to an explanation linking both factors. Drawing on a Foucauldian approach and the concept of 'counter-conduct', it examines the rationality and practices of European Union governmentality and how governing technologies are resisted and reversed by local elites involved in security sector reform. Instead of understanding power and resistance as binary opposites, this article argues that counter-conduct can be conceived as implicated in the very relations of power that it seeks to resist. To tease out these relations, the article analyses the European Union's efforts in security sector reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where it identifies four forms of counter-conduct: upholding European standards, using the local ownership trap, simulating reforms, and lowering the bar.

With the failure of liberal peace strategies in the Global South, resilience has recently become the risk management strategy par excellence in peacebuilding. Since it is not possible to predict when the next crisis will take place, peacebuilders must invest in bottom-up adaptive capacities to cope with external shocks. This article moves away from governmentality accounts of resilience which are overtly deterministic and depoliticizing. Instead, it posits that the uncertainty, ambiguity, and complexity associated with resilience mean that we should expect opportunities for contestation and institutional agency. This argument will be illustrated by drawing upon the European Union's adoption of the resilience approach in its peacebuilding and security policies. The article argues that while uncertainty, ambiguity, and complexity constitute the ontological conditions that underpin the rise of resilience in peacebuilding, they are also likely to lead to its potential demise.

This paper examines the rise of resilience discourses in EU foreign policy. The European Union Global Strategy (EUGS) refers to building state and societal resilience in its neighbourhood as one of the key strategic priorities of the EU. This paper argues that the discourse of resilience that permeates the EUGS chimes well with a pragmatist turn in social sciences and global governance. The EUGS introduces resilience building alongside an emphasis on flexibility, tailor-made approaches, and the need for local ownership, capacity-building and comprehensiveness. More importantly, the new EUGS proposes 'principled pragmatism' as a new operating principle in its foreign policy. While this might suggest a more pragmatic EU foreign policy, a closer examination of the EUGS discourse reveals significant tensions between a pragmatic and a principled foreign policy, which undermine the added value of resilience-building as a new foreign policy paradigm