What are global and diffuse risks? How should we think about their potential to turn into threats that overwhelm societal resilience in areas of limited statehood, precipitating violent conflict and governance breakdown? This working paper explores these questions in two sequential steps. First, it shows that existing explanations at the onset of violent conflict and governance breakdown remain focused on local conditions and immediate “bad neighbourhood” effects, neglecting global and diffuse risks. In a highly interconnected and interdependent world such neglect represents a fundamental omission with substantial theoretical and policymaking costs. Global and diffuse risks must be conceptualized, evaluated, and systematically integrated into predictive models, preparedness-efforts, and resilience-building strategies. Secondly, it articulates and explores a five-cluster typology of global and diffuse risks. It is only by taking global and diffuse risks seriously as explanatory variables at the onset of violent conflict and governance breakdown that the EU can make genuine progress in developing a long-term resilience-building strategy.

In a world of increasingly complex challenges, greater engagement between scholars and practitioners presents both sides with a significant opportunity for acquiring new knowledge. Traditional patterns of theory-practice exchange have mostly revolved around processes of knowledge transfer from scholars to officials. Academics do indeed have much to offer to policymakers; they bring a historical perspective and have extensive knowledge of the underlying causes of political and social trends, which they can also trace to policies carried out—or not carried out—by diplomats. They can thus provide policymakers with broader narratives that policymakers can use to give greater context to their action. But academics can also learn much more from policymakers. The latter do not elaborate on policies from the comfort zone of independent research. They are part of large bureaucratic processes in which multiple factors—political expediency, intra- and inter-agency coordination, number, education, and turnover rate of personnel, organizational structures, and financial resources—contribute to shaping policies. Furthermore, policymakers work within much shorter time horizons. This article takes the case of European policies in support of resilience in the EU’s neighbourhood to explore the potential of a more flexible model of theory-practice engagement based on knowledge exchange rather than transfer.

This working paper capitalizes on EU-LISTCO’s analytical framework to explore the influence of migration and radicalization on risks created by areas of limited statehood (ALS) and contested orders (CO) in the Eastern Neighbourhood (EN). The paper argues that EN is characterized both by ALS and CO and examines the possibility of governance breakdown and violent conflict in the context of migration and radicalization processes. Currently, countries like Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine experience internal and external problems due to unresolved conflicts, corruption, or state capture. On the other hand, such issues often play out in a political arena among different political, economic, and societal actors with frequent involvement by external powers, especially the Russian Federation. Based on this analysis and methodology, we argue that neither migration nor radicalization in the EN will lead to governance breakdown or violent conflict in the EU neighbourhood in short- or medium-term time horizons. Although eventual escalation of radicalism to extremism or massive irregular migration from the EN could bring negative effects for the EU stabilization, countries in the EN region have sufficient components of societal resilience in place to avoid becoming a danger to the EU’s security.

This paper discusses the governance of political economy in areas of limited statehood (ALS) and contested orders (CO) by focusing on the issue of state capture. By linking the notion of state capture to the idea of ALS, the paper investigates how a deterioration of governance can take place when the state fails to mediate the interests of the population vis-à-vis capital, thus favouring the personal gains and rent-seeking activities of the ruling class. Drawing on the cases of Libya and Tunisia, the paper will examine the extent to which processes of state capture dominate the political economy of countries of the EU’s southern neighbourhood (SN). It will place unique attention on the enabling conditions that generate state capture and assess how this process can produce risks or become a source of threat to the EU. In doing so, the paper will also reflect on the implications of the main findings when approaching the question of resilience and how state capture contributes to the wider conceptual discussion on ALS and CO in the SN.

This paper capitalizes on EU-LISTCO’s analytical framework to assess the preparedness of the European Union and Member States in addressing situations of limited statehood and contested orders in Mali. The first part of the working paper contextualizes the risks and challenges in Mali prior to the military coup which occurred in 2012. It identifies the fall of President Amadou Toumani Touré as the tipping point which led to the dramatic deterioration of the situation in Northern Mali. This part also unravels the components of resilience in Mali according to the typology suggested by Thomas Risse and Tanja Börzel (social trust, legitimacy of governance actors and institutional design). The second part focuses on the policies undertaken by the EU and three Member States (France, Germany, Italy). It shows that France, and to a lesser extent Germany, demonstrated a genuine capacity and willingness to engage in the crisis resolution process and foster resilience, even though some divergences have appeared. Other Member States, such as Italy, however, proved to be far less enthusiastic until the 2014 migration crisis which involved their national territory. The third part of the working paper identifies the persistent deficit of policy coordination and the existence of local rent-seeking mechanisms as spoiling factors which affect the efforts shown by EU and selected Member States to foster resilience in Mali.

The EU is increasingly concerned with the diffusion and uncertainty of risks and threats in the neighbourhood, and resilience appears as a useful and pragmatic policy framework to address risks in areas of limited statehood and contested orders. The working paper draws from extensive report analysis and semi-structured interviews with EU officials to examine the diplomatic, economic, and military instruments that the EU mobilizes in a resilience-informed external action. The main contribution is that these instruments are increasingly facilitating resilience through multiple, long-term, and indirect actions. First, instruments have expanded and diversified to undertake as many different actions as possible. Second, they are sustained over long periods of time, even when there are no risks or threats or after peace and stability have been reached. Third, since resilience emerges “from below”, building on societies’ own resources and tools, EU instruments facilitate resilience indirectly, through constant engagement in the neighbourhood.

This paper explores the extent to which global and diffuse risks impact the Eastern Partnership (EaP) countries of the EU’s Eastern neighbourhood and identifies tipping points at which risks can turn into immediate threats for the EaP countries, with implications for the EU. We apply five major risk categories to the EaP area that cover the majority of global and diffuse risks and suggest their prioritization based on temporality, probability of occurrence, and potential multiplication effects. We identify 28 tipping points which may exacerbate the impact of global and diffuse risks in EaP countries and result in governance breakdowns or new violent conflicts. The evidence suggests three global risks ‒ geopolitical rivalry, unconventional security risks and global economic and financial risk ‒ as most probable and with the most destabilizing impact on the EaP area in the short term. Disease outbreaks can be equally destructive, but with less certain probability. In terms of actorness, a majority of global risks seem to be linked to Russia and its assertive agenda, whereas others are diffuse in nature and hard to locate. Finally, in terms of resilience and mitigation of risks, societies in the EaP area seem to possess a basic degree of governance capacity which needs to be further strengthened by the EU to better cope with global and diffuse risks.

This paper discusses both the conditions under which resilience in areas of limited statehood (ALS) and contested orders (CO) can be fostered and the potential contributions by the EU and its member states. Drawing on EULISTCO’s conceptual framework, the paper defines the analytical category of resilience and provides a roadmap to study its characteristics in configurations of ALS and CO. In fact, it applies – and further problematizes – such concepts to the Eastern and Southern neighbourhood. It formulates a number of general hypotheses about how resilience can be fostered in these contexts, highlighting its historically contingent and context-specific nature, discussing how external actors could contribute in fostering resilience. These sets of hypotheses are meant to provide a roadmap for – and be tested in – subsequent EU-LISTCO empirical enquiries.

What are global and diffuse risks? How should we think about their potential to turn into threats that overwhelm societal resilience in areas of limited statehood, precipitating violent conflict and governance breakdown? This working paper explores these questions in two sequential steps. First, it shows that existing explanations at the onset of violent conflict and governance breakdown remain focused on local conditions and immediate “bad neighbourhood” effects, neglecting global and diffuse risks. In a highly interconnected and interdependent world such neglect represents a fundamental omission with substantial theoretical and policymaking costs. Global and diffuse risks must be conceptualized, evaluated, and systematically integrated into predictive models, preparedness-efforts, and resilience-building strategies. Secondly, it articulates and explores a five-cluster typology of global and diffuse risks. It is only by taking global and diffuse risks seriously as explanatory variables at the onset of violent conflict and governance breakdown that the EU can make genuine progress in developing a long-term resilience-building strategy.

This paper explores how the idea of resilience has made its way into the external action of the European Union (EU) and selected member states (Germany, France and Italy) as a means to address areas of limited statehood and contested orders. It examines the debates informing the development of the EU’s external action and current concerns in economic, political, and migration instruments. The main findings are that the EU’s economic and political instruments have become gradually dominated by resilience framings, with an emphasis on multilateralism, adaptation, and long-term and bottom-up responses. Resilience also increasingly drives the humanitarian assistance and development cooperation policies in Germany and to a lesser extent France, which have gradually moved away from top-down administrative and centralized models of governance. The EU and member states like Italy, however, have been more reluctant to foster resilience to address migration issues. Instead, they have prevented flows of irregular migrants into Europe by means of containment strategies such as improving border management, policing, and surveillance and combating smuggling networks.

In this paper, authors Sarah Bressan, Håvard Mokleiv Nygård, and Dominic Seefeldt present the evolution and state of the art of both quantitative forecasting and scenario-based foresight methods that can be applied to help prevent governance breakdown and violent conflict in Europe’s neighbourhood. In the quantitative section, they describe the different phases of conflict forecasting in political science and outline which methodological gaps EU-LISTCO’s quantitative sub-national prediction tool will address to forecast tipping points for violent conflict and governance breakdown. The qualitative section explains EU-LISTCO’s scenario-based foresight methodology for identifying potential tipping points. After comparing both approaches, the authors discuss opportunities for methodological advancements across the boundaries of quantitative forecasting and scenario-based foresight, as well as how they can inform the design of strategic policy options.

Understanding and anticipating violent conflict and the breakdown of governance in the European Union (EU) neighbourhood is complex. However, it is of great value for academia and EU foreign policy. How can the EU know about, prepare for, and possibly help prevent governance breakdown and violent conflict in its neighbourhood? To answer this question, we propose innovative quantitative approaches to capture violent conflict and governance breakdown through survey-based and non-survey-based data at the sub-national level. We assess different theoretical approaches to explaining violent conflict and governance breakdown with a focus on social resilience. Moreover, we discuss numerous methodological tools including random forests, Bayesian methods, and change point analysis. The paper highlights the possibility of measuring and predicting violent conflict and governance breakdown in the EU neighbourhood at the sub-national level. We underline our arguments with initial empirical analyses. Further, we point to several research gaps such as the necessity to develop data collection efforts in order to build analyses and predictions on better data.

EU-LISTCO starts from the assumption that Europe’s internal and external environment is characterized by two risk factors, which represent challenges for the external action of the EU and its member states: - Areas of limited statehood (ALS), in which central government authorities and institutions are too weak to set and enforce rules and/or do not control the monopoly over the means of violence. Such areas of limited statehood are ubiquitous. They characterise large parts of the regions surrounding the EU in the East and in the South. However, areas of limited statehood are neither ungoverned nor ungovernable. Some ALS are reasonably well governed by a whole variety of actors – state and non-state, domestic/local and international, while others are not. The challenge for EU foreign policy is to foster good governance in areas of limited statehood. - Contested orders (CO), in which state and non-state actors challenge the norms, principles, and rules according to which societies and political systems are or should be organised. At the global and regional level, powers such as Russia and – somewhat less aggressive – China call the liberal and law-based order into question. The Trump administration in the United States adds a new dimension to order contestations by appearing to turn away from the liberal international order which the U.S. itself was instrumental in creating. Finally, and domestically, Western and non-Western societies struggle with the rise of actors that question their current political and legal order from the inside as well as from the outside. The challenge for EU foreign policy is to foster conditions in which order contestations remain peaceful and do not contribute to governance breakdowns in areas of limited statehood. Neither limited statehood nor contested orders will go away. They create vulnerabilities and pose risks, but they do not in themselves amount to threats to the EU. Only if and when areas of limited statehood and contested orders deteriorate into governance breakdowns and violent conflict, do the risks turn into threats to the security and stability of the EU, its member states, and citizens. The main research task of EU-LISTCO is to investigate the “tipping points” at which risks of limited statehood and contested orders turn into threats leading to governance breakdowns and violent conflict. Two factors are decisive in affecting such tipping points: - Global, diffuse, and regional risks, such as nuclear proliferation, transnational terrorism, economic crises, aggressive powers, cyber threats, and climate change, are likely to promote governance breakdowns and violent conflict in areas of limited statehood and contested orders. - Resilience is likely to help societies to sustain good and effective governance at the local/domestic as well as regional levels. We understand resilience as the “capacity of societies, communities and individuals to manage opportunities and risks in a peaceful and stable manner, and to build, maintain or restore livelihoods in the face of major pressures.” (European Commission & High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, 2017, 3). In other words, the various risks, on the one hand, and resilience, on the other, affect tipping points in opposite ways. Whether or not risks turn into threats for European security then depends on the extent to which resilient societies can successfully contain these risks through effective and legitimate governance at the local, domestic, and regional levels. Last but not least, we use three indicators to measure degrees of resilience: - Social trust in societies and local communities; - Legitimacy (or social acceptance) of governance actors and institutions at the various levels; - Institutional design of local, domestic, and regional governance arrangements including what is left of central state institutions. Research in EU-LISTCO – particularly Work Packages 2, 3, and 4 – will focus on exploring the relationships between the various factors outlined above which affect the tipping points between risks and threats. The remainder of this paper introduces the various concepts used in the framework in more detail, namely areas of limited statehood, governance, contested orders, threats, resilience, as well as the three factors fostering the latter.