The reform of a fragmented police system according to three European Union (EU) principles, which foresee a centralized and unified police force, was set as a condition by the EU to sign the Stabilization and Association Agreement with Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). However, as the police in the different EU Member States are not always centralized, local actors have used the argument of divergent standards to justify their resistance to the envisaged reform. This Master’s thesis effects of the absence of a common normative framework within an international organization on the norm diffusion to a third country. The research is based on the convergence of theories dealing with security sector reform and norm transfer. Through such a lens, I analyse the EU approach to security sector reform and contextualise it via the study of police reform in BiH. The Foucault’s approach to norm transfer understands the process of conditionality as a dynamic and complex power relation between the EU and local actors. Findings show that genuine resistance from local actors can seriously undermine the EU's normative power when the latter is not based on strong normative foundations. In the case of police reform in BiH, the author of the three EU principles – the High Representative for BiH – neglected the EU’s role of normative power in its external action. The absence of a normative framework, in this case, the absence of harmonized standards regarding policing undermined the power of the EU and resulted in the failure of police reform in BiH.
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