This paper introduces the new dataset of Political Agreements in Internal Conflicts (PAIC) and presents its first application. PAIC captures the institutional provisions in political agreements concluded between 1989 and 2016. It provides information on 91 variables, along five dimensions: power sharing, transitional justice, cultural institutions, territorial self-governance and international assistance. First, the paper presents the data collection and coding procedures. Then it replicates Hartzell’s and Hoddie’s (2007, Crafting Peace, The Pennsylvania State University Press) seminal study on the relationship between power sharing and negotiated agreements, showing the long-term importance of a previously overlooked realm: commissions.

This paper examines how fragile Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) is and whether it is indeed in danger of collapsing, as significant amount of academic literature often claims. The research finds that BiH is not in an immediate danger of collapse. BiH remains peaceful, despite the numerous challenges it faces. However, it comprises an alarming amount of causes of conflict that have been mitigated because both international actors and local elites benefit from the current status quo. Thus, BiH finds itself in a peaceful stalemate, which is likely to continue until a structural change occurs that triggers the outbreak of violent conflict.

The conflicts in the EU's wider neighbourhood, within and between the "neighbours' neighbours", have been on the EU's foreign and security policy agenda for some time and offer a useful set of cases to examine rival claims in the existing literature about the extent to which the EU's foreign and security policy is driven by human or European security imperatives. In order to understand how and why the EU has responded to these conflicts, we initially present an overview of all conflicts among and between the neighbours' neighbours, broken down first by sub-region and then by conflict type. We then discuss the EU's responses to these conflicts and offer a comparative analysis, with a view to describing and explaining existing variation in terms of the EU's responses and their impact. We find that the Union's response is most in line with a human security approach in relation to those conflicts where it perceives to have the greatest interests at stake.

This article introduces 'blended conflict' as a novel approach for the understanding of the multi-levelled interconnectedness of factors that lead to, and sustain, complex conflicts. It assesses the impact of the European Union's efforts to manage Kosovo's blended conflict, focusing on the EU-facilitated dialogue and the establishment of the Association/Community of Serb Majority Municipalities. It shows that the EU's tactic of constructive ambiguity has produced short-term results at the state level, but it endangers stability in the long term by exacerbating the situation on the ground. Empirically the study draws on data from repeated fieldtrips and semistructured interviews with EU personnel, governmental, nongovernmental and international actors in Kosovo and Serbia. This article contributes theoretically and empirically to the wider conflict management literature.

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