EU as an actor in the resolution of the ethnic conflicts on the Post-Soviet space

Abstract: The focus of this study is the frozen ethnic conflicts emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union. These conflicts have been long disregarded by the EU and popped into European foreign policy agenda relatively recently. Thus the study tries to understand, first the security concerns that the unresolved state of these conflicts bear also for the EU security and what policy instruments the Union has managed to deploy for impacting the settlement process and how we can understand the factors hindering this engagement? The study utilises theoretical insights from ‘regional security complex theory’ for understanding the role of the EU in the resolution of these conflicts. Given the theoretical considerations the main argument of the study can be understood as following: The frozen ethnic conflicts are part of a security complex other than EU, which determines the degree of actorness that EU can exert across the security complex boundaries over the settlement process of these conflicts. The argument will be tested by means of case study method having four frozen ethnic conflicts in focus: Conflicts of Transnistria; Abkhazia; South Ossetia; Nagorno Karabakh.