Incoherent Peacebuilding: The European Union's Support for the Police Sector in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2002-8

Between 2002 and 2008, the European Union simultaneously applied interventionism and the promotion of local ownership as policy approaches in its peacebuilding efforts in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This article introduces an analytical framework to evaluate the coherence of the EU's policies and applies this framework to two case studies involving the police sector: the EU's support to the fight against organized crime and to negotiations on a police reform. The article concludes that the two policy approaches applied by the EU were incoherent and that this incoherence contributed to the failure to achieve police restructuring in Bosnia.