AbstractsPolitical Science

The Israel-Palestine conflict and the settlement problematic has recently received a lot of attention from the international community including the EU. The actorness of the EU on the international scene has further been widely criticised by scholars and its effectiveness analysed in various aspects. This particular research is an account of EU actorness in relation to the issue of Israeli settlements and the Middle East Peace Process. With a social constructivist outlook, the research has applied a contextualised version of the concepts of ‘opportunity’, ‘presence’ and ‘capability’ onto a vast amount of data relating EU with Israel, the peace process and the settlement issue. This is done to gain knowledge on important events that either enable or constrain the actorness of the EU, and whether the European approach to the settlement problematic can be argued to be cohesive. The research finds that the close relation between the EU and Israel pose as a constraint for EU actorness towards the settlements. It further detects a gap between how the EU intends to act and its actual actorness, which seem to be embedded in an incohesive relation between policy areas, the Member States and the EU.