EU Civil-Military Cooperation and the Fight against Organised Crime: Lessons to be Learned from the Bosnian Example

Abstract: Civil-military coordination between missions with the same top end of command and belonging to the same organization should increase the effectiveness of both missions even more than in a traditional interaction between military and civilian organizations. Nevertheless, the two EU missions in Bosnia, EUPM and EUFOR, which were both engaged in the fight against organized crime, had to undergo a difficult process until a decent level of cooperation was achieved. The article tries to describe the problems encountered and to address key factors, such as different concepts of operation, problems in the chain of command, a lack of accountability and, most importantly, the human factor, that hampered this cooperation.