EU-IANUS researcher Martijn Vlaskamp has presented his paper “Trying to stop a bloody business: The EU’s policies to curtail the trade in natural resources that fund armed conflicts” at Yale University. The talk was part of the Program on Order, Conflict and Violence Speaker Series.
In his paper, Vlaskamp discusses why the EU has chosen different policies for seemingly similar cases in which natural resources have funded armed conflicts. He argues that these differences can be explained with a combination of endogenous and exogenous factors. On the EU level, a complex policy-making process takes place in which the EU’s identity, interests and institutions play a role. At the same time, the EU’s room of manoeuvre is considerably limited by global political and economic developments. As a reaction to an adverse environment the EU turns increasingly to unilateral steps to end the trade in conflict resources,
Martijn Vlaskamp is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global at the Institut de Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals (IBEI) and the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University. He is currently working on his project GLONEXACO (The Global-Local Nexus of Armed Conflicts: The interlinkages between natural resource-fuelled armed conflicts and the EU’s raw materials supply). Furthermore, he is also involved in the EU-IANUS project and is a member of the research group European Foreign Policy Observatory.