The European Union and Practices of Governing Space and Population in Contested States: Insights from EUPOL COPPS in Palestine

Abstract

This paper examines the EU Police Mission in the Palestinian Territories (EUPOL COPPS) with a focus on its effects on everyday police work on the ground. The main argument is that the mission illustrates the ways in which its training and advisory activities work to foster logics and practices that feed into and reproduce the borders that have over the years been imposed, primarily through Israeli security practices. Operating under conditions of contested statehood, EUPOL COPPS promotes Palestinian policing activities based on particular spatial logics and actions as to the governance of the Palestinian population. The article presents new empirical material collected through interviews and document analysis. As such, it aims to build bridges between the literature on critical border studies, EU external relations, the EU's role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well as the literature on the EU police missions in conflict and post-conflict missions by emphasising their spatial dimension.

The EU and Contested Statehood in its Near Abroad: Europeanisation, Actorness and State-building

“…declarations of independence, states' recognition, mediation in peace accords, negotiated secessions (see Wydra 2018); the deployment of Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) missions (i.e. Kosovo, North Macedonia, Palestine, Serbia, Ukraine) (see Noutcheva 2018, Maass 2019, Dobrescu and Schumacher 2018, Baracani 2019, and Bouris and İşleyen 2018; the enlargement policy/accession process where the EU can use conditionality-related mechanisms (i.e. Cyprus and Kosovo which are considered potential candidates) (see Wydra 2018, Noutcheva 2018, Kyris 2018and Baracani 2019 as well as the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) framework which induces tailor made conditionalities for the 16 countries in the EU's eastern and southern neighborhood (see Cebeci 2018, Wydra 2018, Noutcheva 2018, Maass 2019, Dobrescu and Schumacher 2018, Baracani 2019, and Bouris and İşleyen 2018) (see also Bouris and Schumacher 2017).…”

“…It is, therefore, important to 'historicise' each instance of state contestation within the context of the EU's foreign policy learning curve. The case studies examined in this Special Issue offer a great deal of empirical diversity ranging from early stages of the CFSP and the disintegration of Yugoslavia (see Wydra 2018, Noutcheva 2018, and Baracani 2019 to the more recent events in Ukraine (see Maass 2019), North Africa (see Noutcheva 2018) and the Middle East (see Bouris and İşleyen 2018).…”

“…Kosovo). It is for these reasons that that we opt for the use of the broader (and normatively less loaded) term 'contested states', as initially coined by Geldenhuys (2009) and subsequently adopted by several other scholars (Papadimitriou and Petrov 2012;Kyris 2013Kyris , 2014Kyris , 2015; Ker-Lindsay 2015; Bouris and Kyris 2017; Bouris and Fernandez-Molina 2018; Bouris and İşleyen 2018).…”

Unintended Consequences of State-building Projects in Contested States: The EU in Palestine

“…At the same time, the EU's involvement left an important precedent and had an unintended consequence. Through its engagement in the state-building project in the Palestinian Territories in general and Security Sector Reform (SSR) in particular, the EU accepted and enforced specific practices or lines of action on which the parties agreed (Bouris and İşleyen 2018). In practice, though, these essentially translated into Israel deciding what kind/form of contribution the EU was 'permitted' to offer with regard to cooperation with the PA in security matters, as well as how and where this would be operationalised (Bouris 2015, 31).…”

Spaces and Institutional Logics in Post-Conflict Settings of Mitrovica

“…A characteristic feature of post-conflict contexts is a certain degree of ambivalence between, on the one hand, continuing divisions and tensions, and, on the other hand, persistent attempts to achieve normalcy and peace in daily lives of people through various practices of 'everyday peace' (Mac Ginty 2014. This dynamic is particularly visible around physical boundaries separating communities in post-conflict settings (Ejdus 2017;Bouris and Isleyen 2018;Duclos and Jouhanneau 2019). In and around such spaces, 'perceptual identity boundaries' become taken for granted and translate into various forms of local resistance to return to normalcy and peaceful co-existence, often thereby generating various kinds of new physical boundaries (Mac Ginty 2017, 8; see also Visoka 2018).…”