This article analyzes the police restructuring process in Bosnia, and more specifically the role of the European Union in this process, to understand what, and how, different practices, routines and patterns of resistance influenced the timing, direction and outcome of this reform process. It provides a new angle to understand the final outcome of police restructuring by looking at actors' preferences, positions within the field of Security Sector Reform (SSR) and their strategies. The main argument is that a process of 'muddling through' was created by the combination of adaptation and resistance techniques employed by international, European and local actors in the broader police reform dynamics. By empirically demonstrating how and why specific practices of key actors influenced the policy-making process, this article provides a preliminary framework to reassess SSR activities as part of a field of practice, to be analyzed through a sociological lens.

Résumé S’ appuyant sur la notion de culture stratégique, cet article démontre l’existence d’ une tension historique entre européanisme, continentalisme et internationalisme dans la politique étrangère canadienne. Cette tension fondatrice est explorée sur le plan conceptuel, mais également dans les prises de position concrètes des gouvernements et des partis politiques depuis la fin de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale. En s’ alignant plus ouvertement sur Washington, le gouvernement conservateur de Stephen Harper (2006-2009) est le premier à privilégier le continentalisme de manière aussi unidimensionnelle. Même si le déclin de l’ européanisme ne fait aucun doute, la résilience anticipée de la culture stratégique nous amène à relativiser cette tentative de transformation de la politique étrangère canadienne.

This article presents an introduction to the special volume, titled The European Union (EU) and the Security Sector Reform Practices: Challenges of Implementation, by framing the debate on the EU's Security Sector Reform (SSR) activities in a variety of conflict and post-conflict settings. Drawing on the existing body of literature on SSR, the analytical model proposed here allows us to identify, categorize, and group a wide range of factors that are relevant for understanding the performance of the EU as an SSR actor. This article introduces the main themes of this special issue, summarizes each individual contribution briefly, extends the main research findings of this special issue, and concludes with broad commonalities across different cases. It is a conceptual article outlining a discussion of wider theoretical reflections based on the empirical contributions presented in this volume, and provides an explanatory framework for success or failure in the individual case studies that follow.

International relations theory has a disturbing tendency to treat states as though they were homogenous entities. Thus, realists and liberals alike speak of a national interest determined by a state's geopolitical or economic situation. Constructivists, for their part, talk about a relatively stable national identity fashioned by a country's culture, history, and external relations. These labels are never innocuous: although they endow the international order with meaning, it comes at the expense of confining countries and their populations inside a normative cage. Further, they have the effect of obscuring the divisions and conflicts that create problems when a pronouncement must be made in the name of the state.Canada is no exception to this rule. The question of the country's proper place in the global system is at least as old as the Department of Foreign Affairs (going back to its original incarnation a century ago, as the Department of External Affairs), and the national preoccupation with

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