Civil–military synergies in EU crisis response and peacebuilding: a framework for analysis

Responding to New Wars, international organizations have faced challenges in increasing synergies between civilian and military instruments. This paper analyses civil-military synergies as a logical framework outcome of coordination and asks to what degree activities of civil-military coordination in EU external action has led to synergies on the ground. It provides a conceptual framework tackling three distinct conceptual challenges; (1) providing a typology of interfaces to articulate civil-military research scope(s), (2) delimiting the “civil-military”, and (3) defining civil-military synergy vis-á-vis coordination. The framework is applied in a case study of EU engagements under the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) focusing on EU’s operational level during the execution phase. It finds that EU’s siloed command structure hampers coordination between instruments to a degree where civil-military synergies are more common with external partners than between CSDP instruments, and that open mandates to coordinate with “relevant actors” are vulnerable to personal interpretations.