The European Union's third party role in solving conflicts in its periphery

Official URL: https://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b2578317_(Table of contents)

The European Union is a regional organization with a distinct institutional structure. Although conflict resolution is not the most essential policy area for the EU, it is one that has grown in relevance over the past two decades. By integrating two different literatures, namely conflict resolution and European studies, this study investigates whether the EU plays a substantial role as a third party in resolving intransigent conflicts in candidate states with its accession process and conflict resolution tools. To this end, the focus of this thesis is on Turkey’s and Serbia’s accession processes, as well as their separate conflicts in Cyprus and Kosovo respectively. Both states aspire to join the EU, but both have ongoing conflicts, though in different ways: Turkey’s conflict is with a current EU member state and is not about secession, whereas Serbia’s conflict is with Kosovo, a part of Greater Serbia that seceded. Turkey and Serbia have their own path of European integration, and the EU’s impact on the Cyprus and Kosovo conflicts through their accession processes has both similarities and differences. The findings of this research demonstrated that as a result of several distinctions between these two cases, the EU does not have a significant role in Turkey’s accession process regarding the Cyprus issue, whereas there are mixed results in the case of Serbia and Kosovo.