The EU, State-Building, Contested Statehood and Unintended Consequences: The Case of the Occupied Palestinian Territories

The aim of this paper is to shed light on the EU’s role as a state-builder through the deployment of civilian missions as a tool for tackling governance issues and building security. Although the literature on state-building has mainly focused on post-conflict cases and has been preoccupied by ‘conventional’ examples of statehood, little scholarly attention has been paid to state-building projects carried out in states that remain internally and externally contested. Moreover, while most of the literature focuses on questions of effectiveness and compliance, issues of unintended consequences of state-building interventions have largely been neglected. To this end, this paper analyses the EU’s involvement in the Palestinian state-building by focusing on two civilian missions that the EU has deployed in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. By using EUPOL COPPS (police and rule of law mission) and EUBAM Rafah (border assistance mission) as case studies, the paper seeks to explain how contested statehood has affected their role on the ground as well as offer insights on how their operationalization has caused unintended consequences with regard to the broader EU-Israel-Palestine triangle.