Eleventh Global Studies Conference

Abstract

Relations between the European Union and developing countries underwent profound changes in the 1990s, when political criteria for assistance were introduced linked to cooperation policies, reflecting a set of normative motivations. Changes and clauses of political conditionality were reinforced from 2001 to the mid-2000s. They were shaped by the increasing influence of security policies in the area of development policy. This brought clear problems of consistency deriving from conditionalities reflecting donor states’ interests, as well as other problems of asymmetry in the North-South relations. Sudan was the first country where the EU put into practice its new political orientation, when it reacted to the coup d’état of 1989 and to violations of human rights in the context of the Second Sudanese Civil War. In this paper we analyse how Sudan served as the testing ground for the new orientation of European policies during the decade of the 1990s and the new millennium (namely, the politisation and securitisation of aid), but equally showed the way the EU adapted to a complex conflict scenario and to the lack of interest and cooperation on the part of elites belonging to the Sudanese government.