The European Union was established as a peace project to reconcile France and Germany, but over the last three decades the EU has also worked on creating peace and prosperity abroad. It has mediated between conflicting parties, deployed peacekeepers and provided aid and peace-building support. Yet, in the last couple of years the EU has found it more difficult to implement such policies. What are the main challenges the EU faces in formulating and implementing foreign and security policy?

This JOINT podcast discusses three of them: within the EU, various countries and groups increasingly block the consensus on peace-building policies; conflicts in Europe’s neighbourhood have become more protracted and fragmented and therefore more difficult to solve; the EU faces increasing competition from other major actors such as Russia and China, when attempting to establish peace.

The podcast is hosted by Hylke Dijkstra, Associate Professor at Maastricht University, who discusses challenges to EUFSP with Gergana Noutcheva, Associate professor at Maastricht University, Agnès Levallois, Senior Research Fellow at the Foundation for Strategic Research, and Assem Dandashly, Assistant Professor at Maastricht University.