EU Global Strategy and Human Security: Rethinking Approaches to Conflict

This volume examines the EU’s Global Strategy in relation to human security approaches to conflict.

Contemporary conflicts are best understood as a social condition in which armed groups mobilise sectarian and fundamentalist sentiments and construct a predatory economy through which they enrich themselves at the expense of ordinary citizens. This volume provides a timely contribution to debates over the role of the EU on the global stage and its contribution to peace and security, at a time when these discussions are reinvigorated by the adoption of the EU Global Strategy. It discusses the significance of the Strategic Review and the Global Strategy for the re-articulation of EU conflict prevention, crisis management, peacebuilding, and development policies in the next few years. It also addresses the key issues facing EU security in the 21st century, including the conflicts in Ukraine, Libya and Syria, border security, cyber-security and the role of the private security sector. The book concludes by proposing that the EU adopts a second-generation human security approach to conflicts, as an alternative to geopolitics or the ‘War on Terror’, taking forward the principles of human security and adapting them to 21st-century realities.

This book will be of interest to students of human security, European foreign and security policy, peace and conflict studies, global governance and IR in general.

Mary Kaldor is Professor of Global Governance and Director of the Conflict and Civil Society Research Unit at the London School of Economics, UK. Her books include Human Security: Reflections on Globalization and Intervention (2007), Global Civil Society: An Answer to War (2003) and New and Old Wars: Organised Violence in a Global Era (1999).

Iavor Rangelov is Assistant Professorial Research Fellow at the Conflict and Civil Society Research Unit, London School of Economics, UK. He is the author of Nationalism and the Rule of Law: Lessons from the Balkans and Beyond (2014) and co-editor of The Handbook of Global Security Policy (2014).

Sabine Selchow is Research Fellow in the ARC-Laureate Program ‘Inventing the International’ at the University of Sydney and Research Associate at the Conflict and Civil Society Research Unit, London School of Economics, UK. She is the author of Negotiations of the ‘New World’: The Omnipresence of Global as a Political Phenomenon (2017) and co-editor of Subterranean Politics in Europe (2015).