Several studies have tried to analyse what is specific about the EU’s actorness in its foreign and security policy, ranging from a civilian to ethical or normative power, to explain how the EU acts and what its impact is in world politics. This paper builds on these previous efforts, but takes a different perspective in trying to assess how the EU deals with peace/state building efforts in the aftermath of civil wars? More specifically, this paper argues that to understand what drives the processes of EU peace/state building there is a need to look at the meso-level of organisational practices. In other words, this paper proposes an analytical perspective that tries to understand how the organisational units that characterize EU actorness, and how individual actors in different parts of the EU. produce policies to reconstruct the security system in post-conflict countries. Theoretically, this paper is based on sociological institutionalism to analyse the routines, organisational frames and worldviews in which the practices of EU officials are embedded. By unpacking the ways individuals within the EU bureaucracy think from/about statebuilding, this paper complements previous studies on EU’s actorness in world politics by providing both an innovative theoretical perspective and ground this analysis in a comparative empirical case study of EU’s practices and actions in the field of post-conflict reconstruction. This comparative case study analyses the way in which different conceptions of how to best achieve security reconstruction in the aftermath of civil war were developed, and sometimes clashed, in the creation of EU policies towards police and rule of law reform in Bosnia and DR Congo. This is then used to assess the EU’s repertoires of action and put into perspective the way in which the EU has developed a specific logic of security building in the aftermath of civil wars.
