This project identifies security-governance paradoxes resulting from the European Union’s (EU) security practices in the Great Lakes region. Although this region has been declared of strategic importance for the EU, several practices could undermine both the EU’s security and normative foreign policy goals. Firstly, military and security measures, to which the EU has contributed extensively, have militarised the region, creating new sources of violence. Secondly, the aim to support military and security self-regulation could imply that the EU is transferring the attainment of security goals to the target states, thus losing some control and autonomy. Thirdly, though the EU has aimed to balance security and normative goals, scholars have questioned the extent to which a military and security-driven agenda is effective and whether it represents an abandonment of the good-governance agenda. Three questions follow from here: Is the practice of supporting military and security capacity undermining the good governance agenda? What implications does this have for EU’s normative commitments? And, how effective is this practice for achieving EU’s security goals? The research addresses and connects these debates through two specific innovations. It advances the concept of the ‘military capable’ state, and it proposes an innovative practice-based methodology to explore the implications of this concept by linking it to patterns of security practices in processes of intervention. Highlighting these paradoxes will offer important insights into the interconnection of security and normative goals in policy and implementation.