During the first working package several online surveys and interviews were conducted as well as five workshops: one two-day internal methodological workshop of the IECEU consortium members in Finland, three internal expert panels and one panel open to public and held under the Chatham House Rule 21 October in Slovenia.
17 participants from more than 10 different countries took part, representatives of defence ministries, universities, think-tanks, research institutions, EU and UN missions, OSCE missions, defence colleges, police academy, training institutions, etc. The meeting addressed several issues that the EU is facing in the field of conflict prevention. Participants agreed that the EU instruments are being impeded mostly by political will, lack of coordination and sometimes poor information flow in terms of lessons learnt. Comprehensive approach seems not to be too effective in practice and civilian missions do not have a planning cell compared to the military operations. Pooling of the resources from Member States takes a lot of time and money, whereas competing national interests play an important role in this process. The workshop conclusion was that the EU is a very young organisation in terms of the researched topic; the IECEU-project therefore seems to be an important tool in creating new conceptual approaches through co-creative methods, which integrate civil, military, practitioner and academic perspectives.
