Causes of governance breakdown and violent conflict are multi-faceted and not always obvious. To combine in-depth knowledge about the EU’s neighborhood with practical policy experience, EU-LISTCO partners Foresight Intelligence and GPPi invited regional experts and policy makers from European foreign services to pilot a new method for developing strategic policy options.

Over the course of 2019, EU-LISTCO project partners organised three workshops:

• Governance Breakdown and Violent Conflict in the Middle East: From Early Warning to Strategic Policy Options, Sunday, March 24, 2019 – Tuesday, 26 March 2019
• Developing European strategic policy options for mid-term contingencies in Tunisia, Sunday, November 17, 2019 – Tuesday, November 19, 2019
• Developing European strategic policy options towards Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova, Wednesday, December 4, 2019 – Friday, December 6, 2019

In each workshop, a group of experts created robust options for the EU’s engagement with its neighborhood based on scenarios about potential violent conflict and governance breakdown. These scenarios were drafted in another set of EU-LISTCO workshops.

The first strategic policy options workshop in March 2019 was focused on the Middle East. In November 2019, a group of experts approached policy approaches for the European Union’s engagement with Tunisia. A workshop on developing strategic policy options on Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova was hosted by Sciences Po in Paris in early December 2019.

During the three sessions, the experts discussed ways to prevent or mitigate risks related to violent conflict and governance breakdown and threats to Europe’s security. This included fostering regional cohesion and security cooperation in Tunisia, improving relations between Iran, the US and Saudi Arabia, and curbing the influence of powerful oligarchs in Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova. The workshops helped refine EU-LISTCO’s policy development methodology, which can provide policy makers with tools to produce more robust and strategic foreign policy options.

The last workshop of this series will take place in June 2020 and focus on developing policy options for diffuse, technology-related risks such as deep fakes.