I just presented a paper on EU police missions at the BISA / ISA Joint Conference in Edinburgh in June 2012. The paper traces the causal beliefs behind EU police assistance from the formative years of the EU's CSDP in the late 1990s and early 2000s all the way to 2011. Based on a theoretical framework drawing heavily on discursive institutionalism, the paper argues that from the beginning two diverging sets of ideas persisted over the objectives and operational aspects of EU police missions: one set of ideas perceived police assistance as a way to help other countries attain European best practices of democratic, civilian policing, while the other set of ideas perceived police assistance in a more robust sense as a way to stabilize state institutions and quell disorder.
