This article treats conflict prevention and conflict transformation as foreign policy tools that are available to international actors alongside classical security-based foreign policy measures. It investigates the conflict resolution role of the EU on the Cyprus conflict in the context of EU accession negotiations. For this purpose, the article: (a) depicts the changes in the roles the EU has played on the island within the context of the accession negotiations, (b) illustrates the nature of structural prevention measures that the EU has taken, and (c) describes the consequences of the EU involvement on UN-led negotiation efforts. The results suggest that the EU has treated the enlargement process as a structural prevention mechanism to change the incentive systems of the conflicting parties – neglecting the conflict-transformation aspects of foreign policymaking. Thus far, this has produced inefficient policies and resulted in the EU bringing an aged conflict into its own jurisdiction. Vision-building, ...