KFG Working Paper No. 58 "Mission Impossible - Why Crisis Management Missions Do Not Increase the Visibility of the European Union" by Stephanie B. Anderson has been published.

During the last decade, the European Union (EU) has deployed more than 25 crisis management missions to countries as diverse as Kongo, Kosovo or Afghanistan. Carrying the flag of the EU all over the globe, such missions might be able to  increase the international profile of the EU.

However, Stephanie B. Anderson, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Wyoming and a KFG fellow in 2011/2012, finds that crisis management missions can hardly increase the EU's visibility. In her working paper, a content analysis based on database research reveals positive, but very limited media coverage of the EU's crisis management missions.

Anderson argues that the limited public attention for the EU's missions abroad is due to their very nature. In some cases, extensive news coverage could endanger the success of the politically sensitive missions. Moreover, reporting on EU missions in remote parts of  the world is challenging for journalists and coverage of the intergovernmental missions is often controlled by EU member states.

While the EU's conflict management missions might be valuable for many reasons, they will therefore hardly ever raise the EU's international profile.

All KFG Working Papers are available online or can be ordered in print via transform-europe@fu-berlin.de