Toward a More Inclusive Europe? Comparing European Progress in Decolonializing Peacebuilding in European and Middle Eastern Conflicts

A diverse and growing cadre of peacebuilding perspectives from the donor, policy, practice, and research fields have championed “the local turn” in peacebuilding in recent years. Brought together by shared goals of war prevention and mitigation, these voices across Track I, Track II, and Track II processes have advocated for more meaningful incorporation of local expertise and expanded local ownership in solving complex crises. Within Global North research and technocratic spaces, the production of peacebuilding knowledge and determination of what meets sufficient evidentiary standards are increasingly targeted for decolonial reforms. Of particular note, prevailing epistemological understandings of “best evidence” are now interrogated for embedded power dynamics and unconscious cultural biases. As global leaders in funding peacebuilding, cooperative security, humanitarian aid, and development programs, European institutions have both led this process and been subject to critique. This paper evaluates European participation in bolstering norms of inclusion and decolonializing peacebuilding research and practice. By comparing a representative sample of major European organizational discourse and action related to conflict resolution in the Middle East (primarily Syria) versus Eastern Europe (primarily Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and Donbas region, as well as Georgia’s South Ossetia and Abkhazia regions and Nagorno-Karabakh dispute involving Armenia and Azerbaijan), this paper examines European successes on inclusivity and local ownership in contexts closer and farther from Western European policy nodes. How have influential European actors and institutions fostered the inclusion of local expertise on the continent’s edges as opposed to other geographic locations? Europe has experiences major military armed conflicts “closer to home” over the past fifteen years in Eastern Europe and Eurasia, while geopolitical shifts induce domestic European policy consequences and vociferous debates. This paper navigates these changes and strains—including the impacts of COVID-19—to examine the present challenges and opportunities for expanding inclusivity and transitioning peacebuilding ownership from Western capitals into local contexts.