Conveners
Closed Panels: Defense Cooperation and Military Assistance
- Antonio Calcara (University of Antwerp)
Closed Panels: Private Actors, Armed Conflict and the State
- Juan Masullo (Leiden University)
Closed Panels: Military Interventions
- Silvia D'Amato (Leiden University)
Closed Panels: Military Technology
- Dominika Kunertova (ETH Zurich CSS)
Closed Panels: European Security
- Šárka Kolmašová (Center for Security Studies, Metropolitan University Prague)
Closed Panels: Intelligence
- Kristin Ven Bruusgaard (Norwegian Intelligence School)
Closed Panels: Arms Procurement and Transfers
- Brendan Flynn (University of Galway/Ollscoil na Gaillimhe)
Closed Panels: Weapons of Mass Destruction: Non-Proliferation and Arms Control
- Elisabeth Roehrlich (University of Vienna)
Military exercises are largely overlooked by scholars of international security, despite the fact that their planning, executing and subsequent analysis represents a huge investment of any military’s time. There are, of course, a few exceptions (eg. Caravelli, 1983; Heuser, Heier and Lasconjarias, 2018; Kuo and Blankenship, 2022; Malley and Wirtz, 2022) and a handful of enterprising scholars...
Military alliances routinely conduct military drills to practice interoperability, often unnoticed by the public. At times, however, military maneuvers are highly publicized events. This brings up the question whether these maneuvers are primarily intended for enhancing internal readiness and alliance cohesion or whether they are carried out to convey a sense of resolve to the outside world....
Great Britain during the Second World War is commonly remembered, both by laymen and academics, as having been barely able to defend itself against overwhelming German strength after the fall of France in May 1940 until the entry of the United States into the war decisively swayed the balance of forces. This image is however mistaken as the British war effort was both modern and vigorous while...
The United States has maintained a grand strategy of liberal hegemony since the end of the Cold War. On this matter, such a strategy would consist of maintaining and defending what G. John Ikenberry has called the liberal international order, which was established and promoted in the first place because it advanced US interests around the world. However, the emergence of a series of...
This research aims to investigate the relationship between rebel alliance strategies and the emergence of forms of governance during civil wars. Previous studies on alliance formation during civil conflicts have highlighted the impact of factors such as the balance of power and the likelihood of victory on rebel groups' decision-making. Through an examination of the alliance strategies...
Why do citizens living under the control of powerful organized criminal groups (OCGs) denounce them to state authorities? Since the 1980s, a variety of OCGs have maintained territorial control of hundreds of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas (informal and working-class neighborhoods). Although they have few safe or effective options to collectively resist these groups, some residents have done so by...
One of the crucial questions of the study of military interventions is when and under what conditions tend the leadership change its mind and end the foreign military operation. The recent track record is not exactly encouraging. The French-led operation Barkhane ended with little success after eight years and the same applies for twenty years of the Western military involvement in...
Many countries experience the presence of criminal organizations with different degrees of territorial control. In some cases, these organizations develop governance strategies--de facto controls over different aspects of social, economic, and political life in the territories where they operate. These groups’ presence produces a wide array of coexistence problems, as well as security issues....
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has triggered a contentious debate among policymakers and scholars about whether the external support provided to the Ukrainian armed forces amounts to a proxy war between Russia and the West. Instead of engaging in tedious arguments about whether or not the armed conflict in Ukraine can or should be classified as an instance of proxy war (“proxy...
How has the FARC insurgency sought to legitimise itself? A central endeavour of armed actors in civil war is the legitimation of their authority through engaging with civilian communities, as rebel groups are dependent on popular support to sustain themselves. However, less has been said about rebel's internal self-legitimation: rebel groups need to justify their authoritative role and their...
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 inaugurated a high-intensity conventional war whose duration exceeds most comparable conflicts since the Korean War. Many of the wars scrutinized by Western militaries—such as the 1973 Arab-Israeli War (19 days), 1982 Falklands War (72 days), 1991 Gulf War (42 days) or 1998 Kosovo War (78 days)—pale in their duration to the one currently...
Do low-technology weapons have an underappreciated coercive quality in international relations? Existing theories of coercion (and more specifically compellence) in international security literature, we argue, over-privilege threats from small numbers of exquisite weapons, such as modern ballistic missiles. Because exquisite weapons are difficult to manufacture quickly, scholars judge their...
Does the Ukraine war mark the arrival of novel, disruptive technologies (HIMARS/precision artillery fires, online crowdsourcing of weapons, drone swarms, citizen OSINT, cyber-militias, etc.) which augur an era of democratisation of ‘open source warfare’ (Cronin, 2019, Boyle, 2020, Palavenis, 2022) that challenges the centrality of states in the international system as once monopoly providers...
Although the exact parameters remain debated, it is now undisputed that international law applies to intelligence activities. A more difficult question, and a still unanswered one, is how international law and the intelligence community influence one another. In this paper, I demonstrate that the relationship between international law and the intelligence community is bidirectional and...
High-resolution commercial satellite imagery has become increasingly available in recent years. This has enabled researchers to uncover headline-grabbing facts about states’ nuclear programs, those once reserved for the intelligence agencies of nation-states. Yet, scholars still lack a clear understanding of how open source satellite data may influence the dynamics of nuclear politics. We...
As Sino-American competition becomes a key factor in structuring 21st century international relations, researchers and policymakers are interested in how third states align in relation to China and the US. So far, research on this topic has been qualitative – scholars have speculated as to the alignment of various actors vis-à-vis China and the United States, but no analysis has systematically...
Closed panel paper proposal: paper abstract
This study brings together the literature of intelligence studies and institutional theory to illuminate the conflict between intelligence agencies and their overseeing accountants as rooted in conflicting institutional logics. Public expectations of democratization of intelligence agencies with respect to increased openness and transparency have...
Conflicts are increasingly complex. As a result, much is being written on e.g. the changing character of war, the blurring between peace and war and the weaponization of means outside the conventional military domain. Often these developments are described as grey-zone or hybrid warfare and are examined at the level of war. Very little, however, is known on how military personnel on the ground...
This paper deals with the politics of sympathy in alliance relations: who owes whom sympathy, expectations for displaying sympathy, and the policing of those who do not show sufficient sympathy. Employing the case of NATO, I argue that sympathy displays disaggregate obligations, entitlements, and hierarchies of feeling among its member states. Precisely, I show how in their use of sympathy...
By developing and applying a new typology of policy entrepreneurs that grasp the variety of stakeholders involved in the policy process within EU security policy at both the national and the EU levels (supranational, intergovernmental, collective, and individual, with and without formal powers,etc.), this article contributes to a better understanding of the recent developments in this policy...
The future of Europe's defense industry hinges on greater cooperation between France and Germany. France and Germany agree on the need to integrate the European defense market to effectively compete with the US and other external powers. However, they have different preferences on how to organize the European defense market. Why?
We argue that the distinction between the two faces of market...
In May 2021, a study commissioned by the European Parliament claimed that most Member States in Eastern Europe are reluctant to engage in intra-EU defence industry cooperation and prefer to buy American military hardware as an integral part of their strategic partnership with the US. Less than one year later, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine should thus have widened this purported West-East...
All three Baltic States gained independence in the 1990s and treated Russian Federation with a reservation from early on. The events in Georgia (2008) and Ukraine (2014, 2022) revealed a real Russian mindset and geopolitical aspiration. While being NATO members from 2004 Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania felt safe, but still invested and continue to invest heavily in national security. All three...
The aim of this study is to elucidate how populist beliefs among the German and Dutch publics relate to their attitudes towards nuclear sharing and use. Extant work on the link between populism and nuclear attitudes has primarily focused on nuclear weapons states, as opposed to nuclear sharing states; and primarily on leaders rather than publics. Combining this work with the existing work on...
While arms control is often regarded as an issue that requires international rules, the day-to-day application of arms control is still the field of national legislation. It is therefore necessary that there is national implementation of the international rules for the effectiveness of any international arms control agreement. It is only through the development of an international network of...
The Russian invasion of Ukraine, on February 24, 2022, led to a war between the two former republics of the Soviet Union. Moscow’s aggression marked a critical juncture and a deeply disturbing challenge to the current nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament regime, but it also raised concerns about security in Europe, leading some European Union (EU) member states to reconsider their...
