Paper Titles & Abstracts

The European Union promotes peace and security in the world through peacebuilding, conflict prevention and crisis management, efforts included in the Common Foreign and Security Policy and in the Common Security and Defence Policy. These activities could benefited from the expertise of the global civil society working in conflict management. During the last decades, the growing complexity of the international environment has led to an increasing involvement of civil society members in global politics. Global civil society is implementing different non-violent strategies in areas such as violence prevention, peacemaking, peacekeeping and peacebuilding.The aim of this paper analyses some of those non-violent strategies which are potentially useful for the European Union External Action in the field of conflict prevention and civilian crisis management. In particular, it investigates how civil society is able to prevent violence and contribute to conflict transformation supporting local empowerment processes, especially in the context of socio-environmental conflicts with high degree of violence. It will examine the dynamics and effectiveness of non-violent civil society practices in those contexts. This examination will provide lessons to the European Union to strengthen its external action tools to prevent violence and promote peace.