Knowledge and Politics in the Area of EU Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding

The paper’s objective is to unpack the relationship between scientific knowledge and politics in the area of EU conflict prevention and peacebuilding. The focus is on scientific knowledge produced in research projects under the EU Research and Innovation Program Horizon 2020. The political use of scientific knowledge in this politically-sensitive area is an issue of great practical and theoretical importance which has not been sufficiently explored. On the one hand, this is a comparatively new EU ‘high politics’ area, which is framed by the broader EU Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP). On the other hand, the study of EU conflict prevention and peacebuilding is a comparatively new scientific sub-discipline in which the initial accumulation and distribution of scientific capital is underway. Unpacking the relationship between knowledge and politics in this specific EU area can contribute to the wider theoretical debates on the role of knowledge in the policy process. First, the paper presents an overview of the organization and institutionalization of knowledge production and use in the area of EU conflict prevention and peacebuilding at the EU level. The roles of the most important EU institutions in this complex relationship are outlined and critically assessed. More specifically, the paper analyses the role of the European Commission’s Research Executive Agency (REA) as the administrative manager of the knowledge production process and the role of the European External Action Service (EEAS) as the main knowledge end-user. Secondly, the paper presents the results from empirical research on some of the major EU-funded research projects in the area of EU conflict prevention and peacebuilding, such as IECEU, WOSCAP, EU-CIVCAP and EUNPACK. The empirical research evaluates the policy impact of the research projects and the political use of the generated policy knowledge. The empirical findings from this specific EU policy area are in line with the concept of ‘knowledge creep’ in the policy process. Overall, the political use of knowledge at the EU level is limited. This empirical fact reflects a still not fully developed EU conflict prevention and peacebuilding policy as well as the lack of a comprehensive theory of this EU policy at the EU level. Finally, the paper analyses the empirical findings from two different theoretical perspectives: the concept of knowledge as scientific capital and the concept of knowledge as a public good. The concept of knowledge as scientific capital is focused more internally on the scientific field itself; it helps explain why policy knowledge in this area is actually used mostly in the scientific field in terms of scientific struggles and competition. The concept of knowledge as a public good is to greater extent externally oriented to the policy process and could contribute to a normative ideal of enhanced cooperation between the scientific and the political domains and, respectively, to more substantive use of knowledge in the policy process. This conceptual approach could help improve the quality of policy-making and decision-making in the area of EU conflict prevention and peacebuilding in the future.