Institutionalising the integrated approach to external conflict

The European Union (EU) aspires to play a part in conflict prevention, crisis management and post-conflict peacebuilding through civil and/or military operations, through stabilisation efforts and by building resilience at home and abroad. To bring this ambition to fruition, EU institutions have gradually expanded their “comprehensive approach to external conflict and crisis” to become a full-fledged “integrated approach to conflict and crisis”. But has the EU’s commitment to an “integrated approach” truly become a working methodology? This contribution traces the conceptual development of the EU’s whole-of-governance approach to external conflict and crisis, and the way it has been institutionalised at the level of the EU’s headquarters.