Chapter 7 Unintended Consequences of State-building Projects in Contested States

The existing literature on state-building has focused mainly on
post-conflict cases and ‘conventional’ examples of statehood,
without taking into consideration the particularities of states that
remain internally and/or externally contested. The EU’s engagement
in Palestinian state-building through the deployment of
EUPOL COPPS and EUBAM Rafah has generated various types of
unintended consequences: anticipated and unanticipated, positive
and negative, desirable and undesirable, some of which fulfill and
some of which frustrate the initial intention. These have important
reverberations for the EU’s conflict resolution strategies in Israel
and Palestine, the most important being the strengthening of
power imbalances and the enforcement of the status quo.