As Advisor to Deus Pinheiro, one of Luís de Almeida Sampaio's main tasks was to participate in the set up of the first European Commission Conflict Prevention guidelines. Specifically on this subject matter, he had the occasion, at the European Congress on Conflict Prevention in Amsterdam, Netherlands, in 1997, to publicly outline his thinking, namely the idea of political stability as essential to security in the sense that, whereas at the time stability was an idea intrinsically linked with social and economic development, political stability as well as sustainability were paramount to an environment of security and an essential condition both for development as well as for conflict prevention : “Sampaio stressed that stability (a core concept of security policy) embraced the notion of dynamism” . This was during a time when the discussion around the EU’s capacity as a provider of security in military and humanitarian interventions was at a high, driven mainly by the events of the 1990s in Rwanda.