From Russia’s aggression in Eastern Europe to the aftermath of the Arab Spring in the Southern Mediterranean, conflicts and violence highlight a range of new challenges to the EU’s external policy. There were six territorial disputes among the EU’s neighbours when the European Neighbourhood Policy was launched 12 years ago. None of these has been resolved, and both the Eastern and the Southern neighbours are more unstable and insecure today than they were when the Policy was launched. The EU seems unprepared to deal with these conflicts, as they now exist. This article analyses the European Neighborhood Policy as a framework for EU involvement in conflict prevention, management and resolution. The focus is twofold: first, on the principle of good neighborliness and the pitfalls preventing its effective implementation and, second, on the wider policy and political context of EU actorness in conflict and security matters.

Africa is transiting through a trying phase in the history of its evolution as a major world civilization. These trying challenges are characterized by the extremes of hunger, the conditions of massive refugee flow and internally displaced persons occasioned by the gruesome phenomenon of violent conflicts and wars. The paper sets out essentially to establish the connection between the massive flow of small arms and light weapons (SALW) since the end of the Cold War and the equally catastrophic revolutionary ferment that characterized the Arab Spring across the fertile crescent and the Maghreb and the increasing incidences of contemporary intra state conflicts on the continent. The paper is sustainably driven by core normative paradigms covering the vast area of illicit armaments and their orchestrating influence in igniting violence. To weave the perspectives captured herein, the paper depended almost exclusively on the content analysis of existing literary materials in the humanist and social science traditions. Findings confirm that indeed small arms and light weapons abound within our case studies (Nigeria and the CAR), a phenomenon that both ignites and sustains violent conflicts within these previously peaceful national territorial entities. By way of recommendation the paper advocates the strengthening of existing legal and political protocols and the fortification of the borders of these countries if they are to remain virile and relevant in the international socio-economic and political order.