The project will deal with the following set of questions in a holistic manner:
a) What is the current state of the EU’s integrated approach?
b) How could an integrated approach to external action that takes advantage of the entire set of available EU policies and instruments be ideally utilised to deal with fragile statehood, crisis and conflict in the Union’s neighbourhoods?
c) Is there a gap between ambition (necessity) and practice? If so, how can this gap be narrowed or closed to improve the EU’s capacity to deal successfully with the manifold crises and conflicts in its neighbourhood?
The project will have four phases:
a) Pilot phase (01-07/2018) to set up the research framework (i.e. definition of research questions & working hypotheses, state-of-the-art (literature review), methodology, outputs, external advice/peer review, timing, budget, etc.);
b) Execution phase (08/2018-08/2020) for conducting the research and publication of interim findings (e.g. policy briefs);
c) Completion phase (09/2020-01/2021) for the research report (incl. final peer review, editing, formatting, printing);
d) Outreach phase (02-09/2021) for dissemination of results.
To start the research cooperation CEPS and the BST agree to contract a pilot phase at latest in December 2017 (January 2018 until end of July 2018) with a view to setting up the cooperation contract on the successive phases in July 2018.
