EISS 2023 - Annual ConferenceAnnual Conference

29 Jun 2023, 05:00 → 30 Jun 2023, 21:35 Europe/Madrid

Campus de la Ciutadella C/ de Ramon Trias Fargas, 25 (Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals (IBEI), Barcelona)

Hugo Meijer (Sciences Po CERI), Nicolas Blarel (Leiden University), Silvia D'Amato (Leiden University)

Welcome to the EISS Annual Conference! This is our largest event, bringing together hundreds of academics, graduate students, and policy-makers.

This year, we are bringing EISS to Barcelona, with the kind support of IBEI.

The Annual Conference is structured around two categories of panels. Closed panels are recurring year-over-year and are pre-established by the EISS. Open panels are proposed by participants. They are intended to broaden the range of existing themes in the EISS and to provide the community with the chance to uniquely shape the programme and content of the Conference.

EISS 2023 Programme.pdf

Thursday 29 June

09:00 Registration and Coffee

Remarks: Introductory Remarks

Conveners: Jacint Jordana (IBEI, Director), Elisabeth Johansson-Nogués (IBEI), Hugo Meijer (Sciences Po CERI)

Roundtables: Rountable 1: War, Coercion and Statecraft

Conveners: Tim Sweijs (Netherlands War Studies Research / The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies), Peter Viggo Jakobsen (Royal Danish Defence College / Center for War Studies, University of Southern Denmark), Kristin Ven Bruusgaard (Norwegian Intelligence School), Luis Simon (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Clara Portela (University of Valencia (Online))

Closed Panels: Defense Cooperation and Military Assistance

Convener: Antonio Calcara (University of Antwerp)

1 Changing Threat Perceptions and American Grand Strategy Evidence from Maritime Military Exercises

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 have even generated databases concerning some forms of exercises (eg. Bernhardt, 2022) Yet the study of military exercises remains inexplicably thin given their significance as a metric of national strategy and the wealth of analytic data that they offer on the hundreds of exercises that take place annually by militaries across the globe.
We begin to redress this oversight within the conceptual and empirical space limitations imposed by a paper.

Speaker: Peter Dombrowski

Dombrowski Reich EISS Paper Proposal Changing Threat Perceptions^J American Grand Strategy and Maritime Exercises (SR 1.13.23).docx

2 Alliance Cohesion and Military Manoeuvres: A Signal of Deterrence or Assurance?

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. Based on deterrence theory military exercises can be a mechanism to convey a credible threat and signal resolve to an adversary; and in case of extended deterrence a signal to allies that the protection will hold. Military exercises can also help in preparing prospective members to the alliance and create trust among former belligerents. With the help of quantitative analysis using data on joint military exercises we will assess whether regular military exercises among alliances partners contribute to more cohesion and more serious alliance commitments. We will also investigate whether military exercises with non-allied partners prepare for the accession of new members. Our results will shed light on the broader geo-political implications of this phenomenon.

Speaker: Dr Margit Bussmann (University of Greifswald)

3 Mightier Yet?: Explaining British Military Underconfidence in Reference to Anglo-American Alliance Formation

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 make-up of the German armed forces and its supporting economy were largely backward. I employ realist balance of power and balance of threat theory to argue that Great Britain attempted to expedite Anglo-American alliance formation processes by intentionally inculcating a sense of military underconfidence. By overstating its own military and economic weaknesses and exaggerating Germany’s military power British policymakers communicated a far more dire image to American policymakers than was warranted by the actual war situation. Empirical evidence from 25 May 1940 and 11 March 1941 relating to the British war situation regarding shipping, finance and materiel suggests that there were notable differences in public communications to the United States and the private assessments entertained in the British War council. It thus seems relevant to further research the role of inculcated military underconfidence in alliance formation processes within a multi-stage research strategy.

Speaker: Mr Sylvain Thöni

Mightier Yet [Draft paper EISS 2023].docx

Mightier Yet [Presentation EISS 2023].pptx

4 Military Assistance Within the Framework of the Defence of the Liberal International Order: How Does Military Assistance to Ukraine Fit into US Grand Strategy?

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 revisionist powers in recent decades has called into question the future of this order. Indeed, these revisionist ambitions were best portrayed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. On this point, the threat that this growing revisionism represents for the survival of the rules-based order has been recognized in the National Security Strategy published in October 2022 by the Biden-Harris Administration, where it is recognized that the greatest challenge is posed by autocracies with revisionist ambitions, which by the way would represent a slight change on the Administration's approach to competition. Thus, faced with the Russian aggression, the United States has decided to contribute together with its European allies to reinforce the Ukrainian defense, framing such military assistance in a defense of the liberal international order amid an acknowledged context of competition between the great powers. Nevertheless, how does military assistance to Ukraine fit into the US grand strategy and the strategic competition between great powers?

Speaker: Rocío Vales Calderón (Universidad Pablo de Olavide)

MILITARY ASSISTANCE WIHTIN THE FRAMEWORK OF THE DEFENSE.pptx

Open Panels: (In)security and Organized Crime in Latin America

Convener: Margarita Petrova (IBEI)

5 (In)security and organized crime in Latin America

Most lethal violence now occurs outside of war zones. In Latin America, countries like Mexico, Brazil, El Salvador, and Honduras have often had yearly homicide rates exceeding those in Afghanistan or Syria. In 2018, 78,667 people were killed violently in Brazil and 43,089 in Mexico, compared with 29,584 in Afghanistan and 16,905 in Syria in the same year. Direct conflict deaths now account for only a fraction of violent deaths worldwide, and organized violence outside armed conflict is increasingly of concern to policymakers, and to conflict and security scholars. The burgeoning literature on the causes, consequences, and dynamics of “criminal wars” is nonetheless underdeveloped relative to that on the causes, consequences, and dynamics of civil wars.
With a focus on Mexico and Central America, this panel makes several original contributions to that scholarship, emphasizing local, national, and international responses to organized criminal groups. We begin with a paper on criminal governance in Mexico during the COVID-19 pandemic, adding to our understanding of how organized crime groups affect people’s everyday lives through both violent and non-violent measures. The second paper asks why and how communities affected by criminal violence mobilize against violent criminal actors. In doing so, it contributes to current knowledge on local-level, unofficial responses to criminal violence. The third paper focuses on the response of the Mexican state, and specifically on the use of force by the state and how this is regulated under international law. Finally, the fourth paper examines the international response in the Northern Triangle of Central America, arguing that the World Bank follows a peacetime logic focused on developmental rather than humanitarian response, and questioning its appropriateness in contexts characterized by high-intensity criminal violence and severe humanitarian consequences.

Speakers: Prof. Margarita Petrova (IBEI), Juan Masullo (Leiden University), Miriam Bradley (Humanitarian & Conflict Response Institute, University of Manchester), Prof. Pablo Kalmanovitz (Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM))

EISS panel on security and organized crime in Latin America.pdf

12:30 Lunch

Closed Panels: Military Interventions

Convener: Silvia D'Amato (Leiden University)

6 Who Supports Policy Interventions to Terminate Civil Wars? Survey Evidence from The United States and Germany

Speaker: Martijn Vlaskamp (Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals (IBEI))

7 Bringing the Troops Back Home: A Strategy Adaptation Under Adverse Conditions

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 Afghanistan. There are many other examples in which governments and its leaders failed to adapt their strategies despite many years of military engagement with a lack of results. Arguably the least likely case of strategy adaptation is when the same leader makes a complete U-turn and decides to withdraw troops shortly after the initial deployment. Identifying key factors contributing to strategy adaptation in such cases might offer important insights into conditions under which military interventions are more likely to end. The U.S. Marines pull-out from Lebanon in 1984 under the Reagan administration represents a perfect case for such an analysis. An archival research of declassified documents allows us to track down key frictions and enablers at the individual, domestic, and international level, which jointly led to a withdrawal decision. The findings might then also tell us important things about the ongoing war in Ukraine and chances that the Russian government will change its course over time.

Speaker: Matus Halas (Institute of International Relations)

8 The Russian Invasion and the Changing Character of Proxy War: Toward a Comprehensive Framework

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 war as an event”), this paper examines to which extent “proxy war as an idea” adds analytical value to our understanding of the ongoing Russian aggression and, specifically, external support by Ukraine’s Western backers.
To that end, it offers a conceptual reflection on how the notion of proxy war has evolved over the past decades. It then presents a novel framework by adopting a level of analysis approach, which conceptualizes proxy wars as a logic, a relationship, and a process – thus enabling a comprehensive understanding that builds upon previous, at times competing, perspectives. Applying this framework to the war in Ukraine, the paper’s findings indicate that a proxy war framework can help illuminate some of the most pressing dynamics of the conflict including the interplay of interest and risks as well as the interactions between Ukraine, its external backers, and Russia. Conversely, the case study also finds a need to reconsider several generally accepted characteristics such as actor types and actor pairings, the notion of indirectness, and the role of airpower in proxy warfare.

Speaker: Michel Wyss (Strategic Studies, Military Academy at ETH Zurich)

Closed Panels: Private Actors, Armed Conflict and the State

Convener: Juan Masullo (Leiden University)

9 Alliance Formation and Rebel Co-Governance in North-East Syria: The Case of the PYD and the Syriac Union Party

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 employed by groups in North-East Syria, this study finds that during the early stages of multiparty civil wars, rebel groups evaluate factors such as ideological compatibility, long-term goals, and overall strategies in relation to the various parties involved in order to determine the most suitable alliance. Furthermore, it is observed that rebel alliances may be reinforced through formal agreements of co-governance and power sharing. By examining the case of the Syrian conflict, this study found that minor parties such as the Syriac Union Party (SUP) allied with the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) after evaluating the ideological compatibility and strategic goals of the other actors involved in the conflict. On the other hand, the PYD shared power with minor parties as part of its strategy for consolidating control over its core territories. This alliance was formalized through a power-sharing agreement, which enabled the creation of self-government institutions in North-East Syria. The findings of this study provide insight into the different alliance formation strategies employed by rebel groups and how they shape the creation of rebel governance institutions.

Speaker: Mr andrea novellis (university of milan)

10 Resident Resistance: The Territorial Logic of Denouncing Organized Crime Groups in Rio de Janeiro

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 denouncing OCG members and their activities to an anonymous hotline, Disque Denúncia. Building from insights garnered during 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in one set of OCG-controlled favelas, I argue that anonymous denunciation is highly strategic in nature and revolves around two dynamics related to OCG territorial control: violent competition with rivals and police enforcement. The observable implications of the theory are tested with a geo-located longitudinal dataset of 24,000 anonymous denunciations.

Speaker: Nicholas Barnes (University of St Andrews)

11 In the Crevices of the State: Criminal Governance in Uruguay

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. Criminal governance studies in Latin America tend to focus on countries with high levels of violence, powerful criminal organizations, and low levels of state presence in the territory. However, evidence shows that there is criminal governance also in cases like Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, where the state is present throughout the territory, and violence levels are comparatively low. This project’s main objective is to expand our knowledge about criminal governance in these settings, focusing on the case of Montevideo, Uruguay. The project employs a mixed-methods design, combining in-depth interviews with community leaders, members of NGOs, state and local authorities, and a public opinion survey containing a list experiment. This research strategy seeks to minimize the risks involved in studying criminal organizations while obtaining as much information as possible to understand the logic of criminal governance in Montevideo.

Speaker: Lucia Tiscornia (University College Dublin)

12 Rebel Governance as Self-Legitimation: The FARC's Justifications of Governance

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 position of power not only to others but also to themselves to help them identify as rulers. Moreover, any government seeking to make peace with rebel groups will need to take into account these self-legitimation narratives to find workable and sustainable solutions. A rebel group's discourses and practices of governance, I argue, provides a crucial lens to investigate such processes of self-legitimation. This paper discusses the self-legitimation of the Colombian rebel group FARC to provide an empirical snapshot of how the group embedded moral meaning into their governance relations. Drawing on several months of fieldwork in central Colombia where I interviewed ex-combatants about their relations with civilians during the conflict, I argue that the FARC developed a relatively stable legitimation pattern, a set of discourses and practices, that allowed the rebel group to justify themselves as rulers by emphasising their peasant origin, service provision and violence as revolutionary self-defence.

Speaker: Wolfgang Minatti (European University Institute)

Closed Panels: Military Technology

Convener: Dr Dominika Kunertova (ETH Zurich CSS)

13 Winning by Adapting: Battlefield Adaptation in the Long Russo-Ukrainian War

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 unfolding. The length of this war, in turn, has elevated a hitherto less critical factor—battlefield adaptation—to a position of primary importance.

Our research compares draws upon unique data including interviews with mid-level Ukrainian commanders and information provided to us by Ukraine’s state-owned defense manufacturer (Ukoboronprom) and the British MoD’s lessons learned team.

To preview our conclusions, both sides have demonstrated some capacity for adaptation. However, Ukraine’s aptitude for adaptation has far outstripped Russia’s because it empowers both bottom-up adaptation by soldiers and mid-level officers as well as top-down adaptation led by the military’s senior leadership.

Ukraine’s military—enabled by civil society—is demonstrating a high capacity for both bottom-up and top-down forms of battlefield adaptation. Ukraine’s company and battalion commanders, in particular, enjoy significant leeway to experiment and oftentimes draw upon civil society organizations for equipment or technical expertise they need. Oftentimes individual units’ creativity in adapting to the circumstances they face exists in a state of creative tension with the General Staff’s efforts to generate larger and more standardized formations.

Russia’s combination of a fragmented command structure and rigidly top-down command culture has, meanwhile, stifled bottom-up adaptation. What adaptation Russia has demonstrated is therefore overwhelmingly of the top-down nature. Pivotal decisions to target civilian infrastructure, mobilize larger formations and compel lesser quality (Wagner or DNR/LNR) infantry to provide the sacrificial “first wave” in assaults all fit this pattern.

Speakers: Dr Kristen Harkness (University of St. Andrews), Marc DeVore (University of St. Andrews), Dr Taras Fedirko (University of Glasgow)

14 Must the Drone Always Get Through? Coercion and One Way Attack UAVs in Ukraine and Yemen

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 coercive value on their survivability against enemy defenses. If exquisite air defenses can intercept an exquisite missile, for example, that system’s coercive quality is diminished; the potential victim can sit comfortably in the knowledge that the would-be attacker could not immediately build more. This paper shifts the focus away from exquisite systems to low technology systems, specifically one-way attack (OWA) drones. Until now, scholars have argued that Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) do not coerce because they are too vulnerable to modern air defenses to threaten a state adversary. With masses of weapons that are inexpensive, simple to manufacture, and easy to proliferate to allied actors, would-be attackers are less daunted by the costs of attacking – and, crucially, potential victims must now judge if they can sustain a long-term defense. By leveraging new data on OWAs through the empirical cases of Yemen and Ukraine, we show how simple offensive weapons that can be manufactured en masse may have more power to coerce or compel than analysts typically accredit to them.

Speakers: Marcel Plichta (University of St Andrews), Dr Ash Rossiter (Khalifa University)

15 The Shock of the Old in the Russo-Ukraine War? Misunderstanding Continuity, Change and Adaptation of Military Technology Under Fire

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 of coercive technologies? Alternatively does the war reveal remarkable continuities as regards specific old and legacy military technologies in determining battlefield outcomes? This paper adapts and applies David Edgerton’s Shock of the Old (2006) perspective together with the wider literature on technology and war to probe question of technological determinism in shaping war outcomes (Walton, 2019; Roland, 2016; Raudzens, 1990). Three arguments are advanced here. Firstly, despite all the hype about ‘charismatic’ weapon systems (HIMARS, Leopards) the war so far is notable for the much wider and effective use of legacy systems, many of Soviet or late Cold War NATO origin, and some of indigenous Ukrainian design. Secondly, it is argued we should make a distinction between observable outcomes that technology facilitates at the strategic, operational or tactical level of war, contrasted with the subjective political and wider social perceptions lavished on a few advanced ‘hyped’ weapon technologies. The former is often complex and difficult to document, while the latter is often more politically significant than it is militarily important. Finally, states and their militaries remain central in the production, sharing and refining of war technologies even if private non-state actors gain much of the limelight.

Speaker: Dr Brendan Flynn (University of Galway/Ollscoil na Gaillimhe)

Open Panels: Civil-Military Relations in Challenging Times

Convener: Stephen Saideman (Carleton University)

16 Civil-Military Relations in Challenging Times

The war in Ukraine reminds us of the stakes involved in civil-military relations. How do democracies ensure that their militaries are most effective while facing new challenges posed by technology and increasingly complex missions and battlefields? The papers in this panel address increasingly important yet still understudied issues: how to manage the inclusion of artificial intelligence in military efforts, how to manage relationships with non-government organizations while in and near combat, how reforms in managing the military affect the profession of arms, and how do defense ministries see their role in all of this.

Speakers: Ms Daphné Charlotte (Maastricht University), Dr Sofia Ledberg (Swedish Defense University), Stephen Saideman (Carleton University), Dr Vicky Karyoti (Swedish Institute of International Affairs)

Abstract for civ mil panel submission.docx

16:30 Coffee Break

Closed Panels: European Security

Convener: Šárka Kolmašová (Center for Security Studies, Metropolitan University Prague)

17 Parliamentary Acceptance of EU Military Operations in Member States: Beyond Rubber-stamping?

Speakers: Eva Michaels (IBEI), Robert Kissack (IBEI), Óscar Fernández (IBEI)

18 European Approaches to Chinese Foreign Policy – a Text-as-Data Approach

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 arranged and compared a group of states or offered a consistent set of measurements for alignment. This limitation impedes replicability and generalizability of analyses. We introduce a dataset that uses text as data to systematize discursive alignment of up to 34 European states for as many as 50 years, using two different automated content analysis techniques. In more recent years (since 2014), we focus on alignment specifically regarding China’s “Belt and Road Initiative.” We discuss the main features of this data in the paper, and the replication files will enable other scholars to build on our work in the future. In addition to automating the extraction of quantitative sentiments from key documents, we make our library of documents available for other researchers to analyze along other dimensions of interest to them. We illustrate the utility of the dataset by describing differences across countries and over time. By focusing on European states, we shed light on Europe’s relationship with both China and the United States, as well as the concept of European strategic autonomy.

Speakers: Jordan Becker (United States Military Academy, West Point, Brussels School of Governance, Ecole de Guerre (IHEDN, IRSEM)), Dr Andreea Budeanu (The French Research Institute on East Asia (IFRAE, CNRS & INALCO), BSoG), Dr Haemin Jee (United States Military Academy, West Point - Department of Social Sciences), Mr Maxwell Love (United States Military Academy)

19 The Role of National Secondments for Intelligence Support to EU Foreign Policymaking

Speaker: Daniel Neumann (King's College London)

20 The Politics of Sympathy Among NATO Member States

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 NATO members communicate a central part of their view of relationships: they impart their sense of suffering, their naturalness of caring for those members who suffer from attack, and their feeling that authority consists, above all, in the ability to nurture and protect deserving members from harm. Sympathy displays emphasize need, care, and solidarity among members of the transatlantic alliance. It activates a script that creates an emotional link between the suffering of a member and the protection and care for that member. My notion of sympathy exchange extends existing approaches to alliance politics, which view mutual interests, common threats, and social communication as a fundamental mechanism for alliance development, towards including emotional sympathy transactions. As NATO members give and get sympathy, they create and recreate emotional bonds. This institutionalized sympathy give-and-take arguably contributes to stabilizing intra-alliance relations.

Speaker: Prof. Simon Koschut (Zeppelin University)

Closed Panels: Intelligence

Convener: Kristin Ven Bruusgaard (Norwegian Intelligence School)

21 The Intelligence Community as a Normative Actor under International Law

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 mutually constituting.

International law first constitutes a strong permissive tool for the intelligence community. The intelligence community invokes international law to explain, justify, and legitimate its activities, while international law itself provides legitimation to many intelligence activities. At the same time, international law also constrains the intelligence community through the risk of accountability, which matches the increase in intelligence exposures.

In turn, the intelligence community shapes the content of international law when it uses it for political legitimation. Whereas, in the past, the intelligence community remained silent on its practices, at best uttering ‘neither confirm nor deny’, the situation has changed. Forced exposure has triggered a matching need to legitimise intelligence activities through law. The intelligence community is now openly engaging with and interpreting international law, putting forward interpretations that will legitimise its preferred outcomes and empower it to pursue its choices of policies. In doing so, the intelligence community changes the meaning ascribed to international norms. In addition, when the intelligence community refuses to abide by the rules of the legalism game by providing a legal justification for its activities, it undermines the status of international legal norms, which may be perceived as less binding by the rest of the international community. For these reasons, the intelligence community has truly become a normative actor under international law and should be considered an occasional norm-shaper, if not yet a norm-setter.

Speaker: Sophie Duroy (KFG Berlin-Potsdam Research Group 'The International Rule of Law: Rise or Decline?')

22 Effects of Open Source Satellite Imagery on Nuclear Verification

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 explore how the democratization of satellite outputs may reshape nuclear crisis management and verification of arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. Our paper identifies key gaps in the international relations literature and lays out five theoretical mechanisms underlying such developments. Overall, we find that commercial satellite data can both complement and supplement national technical means. Historical cases reveal that the comparatively less sensitive nature of open sources can position these data at the forefront of crisis bargaining and treaty compliance discussions. The net effect, however, need not promote nuclear cooperation. States must now grapple with the risks inherent in deepfake satellite imagery and the wider accessibility of military targeting information.

Speakers: Dr Alexander Bollfrass (ETH Zurich, Center for Security Studies), Dr Stephen Herzog (ETH Zurich, Center for Security Studies/Harvard Kennedy School, Project on Managing the Atom)

23 On the Institutional Battlefield of Intelligence Oversight: The Case of Questioned Democratic Accountability in The Danish Intelligence Services

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 resulted in more overseeing to ensure their accountability. And while intelligence studies have provided important insight into the resulting conflicts as intelligence agencies attempt to resist increased control, this literature builds on the notion of an institutional principal-agent relationship, hence assuming that the accountable and their accountants are parts of the same institutional body. Alternatively, we draw on insights from the literature on institutional logics that would approach the two agencies as constitutive of fundamentally distinct mandates in society and, resultingly, comprised of distinct sets of institutionalized norms, values, beliefs, and practices. In applying this framework to the analysis of a case of rare exposure of conflict between the Danish Defence Intelligence Service and the Danish Intelligence Oversight Board, we demonstrate that institutionalised oversight mechanisms and legislation alone are not sufficiently promoting democratic accountability. The institutional logics of intelligence services and their overseers have a significant impact on the actual practice of democratic accountability.

Speaker: Melanie Hartvigsen (University of Southern Denmark)

24 The Complexity of the Grey-Zone: the Experience of Military Intelligence on NATO’s North-Eastern Flank

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 experience this complexity in their daily work. This paper contributes to filling this gap. It focuses on the experiences of the Multinational Corps North-East in Poland and the Baltic States against the background of the Russo-Ukrainian war, Belarusian migrant crisis and NATO’s response to these and other challenges on its north-eastern flank. The research is based on extensive data collection, including more than 50 semi-structured interviews with NATO military intelligence personnel at various levels (corps, division, battlegroup) as well as numerous observations during the 4 field visits the authors made. The analysis is structured around the personnel’s perception of the operational environment, their comprehension of complexity and how NATO has organized intelligence for dealing with such complexity. The conclusion draws on the nexus of complexity science and organizational theory to reflect on the organizational validity of military intelligence with regard to complex problems.

Speaker: Sebastiaan Rietjens (Netherlands Defence Academy and Leiden University)

Roundtables: Roundtable 2: Publishing and Preparing for the Academic Job Market

Conveners: Nicolas Blarel (Leiden University), Angela Chnapko (Senior Editor at Oxford University Press), Jacqueline Hazelton (Belfer Center, Executive Editor at International Security), Olivier Schmitt (Center for War Studies, SDU), Michel Wyss (Strategic Studies, Military Academy at ETH Zurich)

Friday 30 June

Closed Panels: Arms Procurement and Transfers

Convener: Brendan Flynn (University of Galway/Ollscoil na Gaillimhe)

25 Entrepreneurs in EU security policy: A comparative study of European Peace Facility and European Defence Industry Reinforcement Through Common Procurement Act.

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 domain. The progress of this hitherto lagging development of EU security policy is evidenced by the adoption of multiple new instruments with the European Peace Facility (EPF) and European Defence Industry Reinforcement Through Common Procurement Act (EDIRP) constituting two potentially the most far-reaching tools. By investigating entrepreneurs from the perspective of their access to policy venues and their ability to alternate between the venues, this article engages in a comparative study design and unpacks the dynamics of the policy process that led to the adoption of these two instruments. Both instruments differ in terms of their institutional positioning in the EU security architecture implying the involvement of various types of policy entrepreneurs. Against this backdrop, the paper provides insights into what types of policy entrepreneurs were most successful in linking ideas for these instruments with favorable socio-economic and political factors to promote a certain policy instrument and why were some types more successful than others. Furthermore, the analysis shows to what extent did the dynamics between various entrepreneurs and their ability to push for change evolve throughout the stages of the policy process. From the broader perspective, the contribution sheds light on the de-facto distribution of powers between various EU security policy stakeholders.

Speaker: Prof. Monika Sus (Hertie School / Polish Academy of Sciences)

26 Engine or Brake? The Franco-German Couple and the Future of the European Defense Industry

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 size - the first exclusively related to defense, the second including the broader commercial-industrial base - is key to understanding convergence and divergence in Franco-German approaches to defense-industrial cooperation. France and Germany share a general interest in European defense market integration. However, because each country has a relative advantage in one of the faces of market size, we expect them to feature different - even opposing - views towards defense industrial cooperation. Germany is less competitive than France in the first face of the market size (defense) but more competitive in the second (commercial). It will therefore seek to inject efficiency into EU-level initiatives aimed to integrate the European defense market because it calculates that it can benefit more than France over the long-term, thanks to its commercial-industrial edge. At the same time, Germany would protect its less competitive defense industry from France by championing autonomy in the context of ad-hoc arms programs. In turn, France would prefer to leverage its first-face advantage by injecting efficiency into arms programs to take the lion’s share of the project. Conversely, we expect France to protect its autonomy in the context of EU initiatives that could bring about defense integration and benefit the more competitive German commercial-industrial base. To test our argument, we examine French and German preferences towards two important EU initiatives in recent years: the European Defense Fund and the Future Combat Air System.

Speaker: Antonio Calcara (University of Antwerp)

27 EU Arms Collaboration and Procurement: The Impact of the War in Ukraine

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 divide. And yet, in March 2022, just a few weeks after the invasion and with the EU busy stimulating MS’ collaborative investments in joint projects and joint procurement of defence capabilities, it was a Western European country such as Germany who suddenly procured three squadrons of US-made F-35 fighter aircraft. In fact, by investigating MS arms collaboration and procurement over the period 2014-2023 through both primary and secondary sources, this paper shows that no such divide exists. When it comes to the procurement of foreign weapons, Western and Eastern MS show similar EU/extra-EU ratios, with France actually buying less European than Hungary. As for arms collaboration, rather than a West-East divide, the findings strongly suggest the existence of a large-small divide within the EU, with smaller MS typically avoiding high-end PESCO projects in favour of defence offsets. Indeed, whereas larger MS can negotiate favourable workshare arrangements, contrary to elsewhere argued, smaller ones do not expect to reap technology transfer benefits from arms collaboration. Overall, however, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has had a negative impact on EU defence cooperation. Virtually all new joint development and procurement initiatives have occurred through a NATO framework and may well eventually see the participation of the US, or the procurement of extra-EU weapons. Moreover, EU defence supply chains expand (e.g. US, Israel) and extend (e.g. South Korea) considerably, thus putting into further question EU defence cooperation as well as EU strategic autonomy more broadly.

Speaker: Jonata Anicetti (Metropolitan University Prague)

28 Arms Purchases in the Baltic States and Transfers to Ukraine: Balancing National Security Interests.

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 countries meet NATO’s benchmark for defense spending and even go beyond that figure as the threat remains very close. On one hand, increased budgets allow for the expansion of military capabilities and acquire modern arms for national armies, but on other hand, the need to support Ukraine with arms remains crucial for national security. Most eastern NATO countries treat the fight in Ukraine as a national interest: if Russia will be stopped in Ukraine it will not be capable to inflict any harm on bordering NATO countries. As a result, national decision-makers have to make hard choices on balancing mentioned needs, deciding what particular capabilities need to be transferred to Ukraine, and what capabilities have to be reserved for national needs, to repel Russian aggression. The research results indicate a different national approach being used while balancing national security interests. The US leadership remains the key in coordinating support for Ukraine, setting a premier example in support of Ukraine, encouraging, and pushing other countries to perform.

Speaker: Mr Donatas Palavenis

Open Panels: Challenges and Opportunities for Post-Cold War NATO

Convener: Marcel Plichta (University of St Andrews)

29 From Guarding the Fulda Gap to Addressing a Knowledge Gap: Updating our Understanding of NATO Security Politics for a New Strategic Era

Recently, Russian aggression against Ukraine and the twin prospects of Swedish and Finnish accession to NATO have refocused scholarly attention on the alliance. NATO’s responses to emerging strategic dilemmas–in part sparked by these developments–have important implications for policymakers, strategists, and citizens. Moreover, they offer immensely valuable information to security scholars, particularly in terms of testing theories of state and alliance behaviour in periods of conflict.

Given this imperative, our panel undertakes a multifaceted examination of the political and strategic implications of NATO expansion. It explores dynamics of cooperation and competition within the alliance (Seitz and Carver’s paper), outside the alliance (the papers by Larsdotter and Blanchette, respectively) and across the alliance through the politics of NATO’s borders (Micko & de Macedo’s paper).

Papers explicate salient contemporary issues for NATO and the Nordic region, including the influence of new members on the alliance’s warfighting potential, the impact of NATO ASW operations on nuclear stability in the High North, and the evolution of member states’ approaches to military support for non-member states. To approach these questions, panellists adopt diverse analytical approaches, drawing on sociological theory, operational modelling, and international relations approaches to interdependence. Empirically, they leverage diverse methodologies–from aggregate analyses to in-depth historical and qualitative work–to analyse campaign data, elite interviews, and case studies. Importantly, they recast and reevaluate old debates within a contemporary context characterised by fraught geopolitics and expanding opportunities.

Our panel features work from researchers at Oxford, the Swedish Defence University, MIT, Charles University, and the European Labour Authority, hailing from the US, Canada, Portugal, Norway, and Slovenia. Researchers comprise a majority of early-career academics within political science and international relations, military history and strategic studies, and practitioners with backgrounds at NATO and the EU. Furthermore, gender diversity is reflected by a 50-50 gender balance in panellists.

Speakers: Ana Verdnik (University of Oxford), Julia Carver (University of Oxford), Marcel Plichta (University of St Andrews), Maria-Sofia Macedo (European Labour Authority (EU)), Nicholas Blanchette (Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT))

EISS Panel Abstracts - NATO expansion panel.pdf

Open Panels: Addressing Wicked Problems in Cyber Conflict

Convener: Julia Carver (University of Oxford)

30 Addressing Wicked Problems in Cyber Conflict

The cyber domain is filled with “wicked problems” (Churchman 1967, Rittel and Webber 1973, Conklin 2006). Be they how and when to attribute a cyber attack, how democracies should respond to election interference, integrating the cyber domain in wargames, or finding the best models and experimental methods to understand international cyber security.

Because they are the "symptom or result of multiple, contingent, and conflicting issues" (Marshall 2008), all of these questions are plagued with complexities that we are just beginning to comprehend. They require an interdisciplinary approach and the creation of a strong epistemic community. Therefore, this panel brings together scholars and practitioners of cyber conflict in the mindset of war studies approaches. We will tackle these important issues by shedding light on how human agents, organisations, and technology interact with each other in the context of cyber conflict, widely understood. Our discussant will then leverage problem structuring methods (Rosenhead 1989) to provide a common methodology to apprehend them.

In line with the spirit of the conference, we have put great emphasis on diversity and representativity, with the presence of Eastern and Southern European institutions, of experimental and epistemological approaches, as well as policy-makers and embedded scholars. Members of the panel and authors are in majority early-career researchers, and have a 50-50 gender balance.

Speakers: Mr Arthur Laudrain (University of Oxford), Ayhan Gucuyener (Kadir Has University), Christina Rupp (Stiftung Neue Verantwortung), Julia Carver (University of Oxford), Peadar Callaghan (Games Lab - Tallinn University), Samuel Seitz (University of Oxford - RAND Corporation)

EISS23_Wicked Problems in Cyber Conflict-2.pdf

Open Panels: Intelligence Success and Failure in Historical Perspective: Lessons from Beyond the Anglo-Sphere

Convener: Eva Michaels (IBEI)

31 Intelligence Success and Failure in Historical Perspective: Lessons from “Elsewhere”.

Today both the empirical focus of scholarly enquiry and the conceptual framing of intelligence studies still remain firmly rooted in the experiences of the Anglosphere and liberal democratic political tradition, the US primarily, but also the UK and the Five Eyes Alliance (Van Puyvelde & Curtis, 2016). With probably the sole exception of the Soviet/Russian intelligence, interest in “other” intelligence systems was sporadic and concerned only specific episodes (for instance: Israel before the 1973 war, and covert assassinations against the PLO, Italian, Dutch and Norwegian “Stay-Behind” systems).

Only recently scholars have ventured into the terra incognita of the so-called “elsewhere”, that is outside the anglosphere, and started to more systematically study other conceptions of intelligence building on the pioneering work of Bozeman (Bozeman 1989) as well as to map and compare empirically the structure and operations of other intelligence services (Davies and Gustafson, 2016). Scholarship of this kind however remains thin.

This panel expands on this line of inquiry in intelligence studies by exploring the understudied issues of success, failure and effectiveness (Bar- Joseph and McDermott, 2017) in historical perspective in different geographical cultural and operational milieux during the 20th century: Italy, Latin America, Israel and South Africa. Its purpose is to distil an initial corpus of knowledge on these topics by assessing outcomes in different realms of operational activity (strategic warning, counter-terrorism, military intelligence and internal security) and identifying key variables that determined those outcomes.

Speakers: Dr Gil-li Vardi (Stanford University), Mr Kyle Harmse (Stanford University), Niccolò Petrelli (Roma tre University), Dr Zakia Shiraz (Leiden University)

Between Manipulation and Failed Adaptation - NPetrelli.docx

Harmse - Apartheid intelligence failures Angola 1975 and beyond.docx

Shiraz - Intelligence under Dictatorship and Democracy.docx

Vardi - The Failure Before 1973 Israel’s Intelligence Failure in 1967.docx

12:30 Lunch Break

Closed Panels: Weapons of Mass Destruction: Non-Proliferation and Arms Control

Convener: Elisabeth Roehrlich (University of Vienna)

32 Populist Publics and Nuclear Weapons: Does Populism Predict Higher Nuclear Use Willingness, but also Opposition to Nuclear Sharing?

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 populism and foreign policy leads to the emergence of two competing hypotheses. On the one hand, populist voters exhibit higher hawkishness compared to other citizens and may therefore be more inclined to support nuclear sharing and use. On the other hand, the people-centric and sovereigntist dimensions of populism may lead to decreased support for nuclear sharing. In addition, the anti-elitist dimension of populism may feed into the untransparent and undemocratic nature of the nuclear sharing arrangements, further bolstering opposition towards them. We leverage an original dataset resulting from a survey on German and Dutch respondents fielded in June 2022 to provide evidence for these dynamics. Moreover, relying on an earlier wave of the two-wave panel design (in September 2020), we shed light on whether populist beliefs correlate with an increased willingness to use nuclear weapons since the start of Russia’s war in Ukraine. To our knowledge, this study is the first to report on the link between populism and nuclear mass attitudes in non-nuclear weapons states, while retaining high policy relevance given the nature of the two nations at hand. Given the study’s design, it is not possible to temporally predict nuclear attitudes with populist beliefs, which future research might consider studying.

Speaker: Tom Etienne (University of Pennsylvania)

ETIENNE.TW_EISS_WMD_presentation_v2.pptx

33 Proliferation-Related Legislation in the EU: Is There a Need for Further Convergence?

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 anti-proliferation legislation that there can be effective regulation of the proliferation of materials. In this context it is noteworthy that both the chemical and biological weapons conventions include an obligation to implement national measures prohibiting and preventing the proliferation of biological and chemical weapons. This has been strenghtened by other international efforts, such as Security Council Resolution 1540 and the Australia group. The EU has sought to be active in this field by incorporating EU-wide export controls and having EU sanctions against individuals suspected of proliferation activities. However, in many regards the national legislation of the member states of the EU are still quite divergent when it concerns proliferation activities, which raises the question of whether continued convergence in this field is necessary. This submission will look at this by discussing the current activities of the EU in this field and contrasting this with the existing legislation in the 27 member states. It will show the gaps that exist within the EU regulation as well as in the national legislation concerning proliferation activities for biological and chemical weapons. It will then discuss why a more comprehensive and coherent framework of prohibitions should be strived for in the EU and which steps can be taken to close these gaps.

Speaker: Barry de Vries (Justus-Liebig University Giessen)

34 How Russia's War on Ukraine has an Impact on the EU’s Nuclear Disarmament Policy

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 commitment to disarmament. At large, Russia's War on Ukraine has made it more difficult for the EU to advance its nuclear disarmament agenda by raising security concerns, reducing trust in Russia, increasing support for NATO, and reducing the EU's ability to project soft power and act as a global leader in nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation.
This paper focuses on evaluating the impact of Russia’s war on Ukraine on the EU's foreign policy in the field of nuclear disarmament. First, I analyze how this war weakened the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliteration of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) regime. Second, I analyse the factors that had an impact on the EU's foreign policy-making in the field of nuclear disarmament. My argument relies on the fact that the policy decision of each EU member state is affected by security concerns, which include a deteriorating security environment and external threat perception as conditioning factors. Third, I use these factors to identify the following effects that were produced by the war: reduced trust in Russia, increased support for NATO, and reduced EU's soft power on the international stage. Fourth, and ultimately, considering these conditioning factors and effects, I examine why Russia's War on Ukraine undermines the EU’s foreign policy in the field of nuclear disarmamen.

Speaker: Dr Aderito Vicente (Odesa Center for Nonproliferation)

Open Panels: Re-Visiting the Political Economy of Security

Convener: Moritz Weiss (LMU Munich)

35 Industries of Sovereignty: Strategic autonomy, defence industrial interests and the French government’s use of the “European sovereignty” discourse in EU politics (2017-22)

Throughout the Macron presidency, the French government persistently used the ‘European sovereignty’ discourse to advocate for a ‘Europe of defence’. ‘Strategic autonomy’ is a core component of this broader discourse and refers to the EU’s capacity to provide for its own security needs. For the purposes of this article, we define ‘strategic autonomy’ as a point where the integration of core state powers in defence policy is advanced enough that EU member states can jointly conduct large scale military operations. This paper argues that the French government became a proponent of ‘European sovereignty’ not because of a genuine desire for strategic autonomy but because of defence industrial policy objectives. After he became president, Emmanuel Macron sought to create a continent wide protected defence market where non-EU companies are excluded to the benefit of France’s own defence industry. The ‘European sovereignty’ discourse was used to rationalize defence industrial protectionism and government intervention to favor EU-based producers, amongst which the largest are French defence firms. On the flip side, the French government’s interest in institutionalized cooperation with EU partners is far more limited than the ubiquity of the ‘European sovereignty’ discourse may suggest. In fact, the French government continues to avoid binding commitments at the EU level and seeks to preserve its ability to act unilaterally when it comes to operational -as opposed to industrial- aspects of defence policy. We use process tracing methodology in order to examine the formulation of French defence policy discourse and preferences in the 2017-2022 time period. Our argument on defence industrial interests is systematically tested against a competing explanation, namely that the French government pursues a long term plan to achieve European strategic autonomy. We make an extensive use of primary sources including official documents, speeches and more than 20 interviews with policymakers.

Speakers: Mr Ediz Topcuoglu (College of Europe), Salih Isik Bora (Sciences Po Paris)

36 Re-visiting the political economy of security

The war in Ukraine has once again shifted global defense policies and continues to cause economic turmoil. Against this backdrop, we are witnessing vivid debates on the political economy of security highlighting the close connection between the two domains of security and economics. The objective of this panel is to shed light not only on those recent developments, but to take a broader – also historical – look at the political drivers and constraints of arms production. Panelists will address the challenges that states face from different perspectives including foci on policy processes, market size, the conversion of ideas into military capabilities, and bureaucratic politics. They will explore the drivers of defense-industrial specialization as well as of outsourcing, but also the distributive politics of military innovation of the past and the failures to generate military power in the present. What the papers share and what is, therefore, the key contribution of this panel to the EISS Annual Conference is to link the past with the present in order to bring politics back into a better understanding of arms production.

Chair and discussant: Moritz Weiss (LMU Munich)

Speakers: Prof. Kaija Schilde (Boston University), Mr Lucas Hellemeier (Freie Universität Berlin), Dr Moritz Weiss (LMU Munich), Dr Sanne Verschuren (Sciences Po Paris)

Security-Economics_OpenPanel by MoritzWeiss (LMU Munich).pdf

Poster Sessions: Poster Session

15:30 Coffee Break

Roundtables: Roundtable 3: Gendered Exclusion and Discrimination in Academia

Conveners: Dr Hugo Meijer (Sciences Po CERI), Annick Wibben (Swedish Defence University), Vanessa Newby (Leiden University), Stephen Saideman (Carleton University), Chiara Ruffa (Sciences Po)

Open Panels: Alliance Management

Convener: Jeffrey Michaels (IBEI)

37 Credibility in Crises: How Patrons Reassure in Crises

How do citizens of U.S. allies assess different reassurance strategies? This article investigates the effects of U.S. reassurance policies on public opinion in allied states. We design and conduct a survey experiment in five Central-Eastern European states---Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania---in March 2022. Set against the backdrop of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, this experiment asked respondents to evaluate four types of reassurance strategies, each critical tools in U.S. crisis response policy: military deployments, diplomatic summitry, economic sanctions, and public reaffirmations of security guarantees. The international security literature typically attaches great importance to capabilities in providing deterrence and reassurance benefits, while dismissing public reaffirmations as mostly `cheap talk' and economic sanctions as being largely ineffective. Yet we find preferences for the use of economic sanctions and public statements as reassurance strategies during crises, in part because these approaches help states manage escalation risks.

Speaker: Lauren Sukin (London School of Economics and Political Science)

38 The Allied Defence Dilemma: Balancing between Autonomy and Alliance Cohesion

Against the backdrop of both an exacerbation of the threat environment and growing uncertainty about the reliability of the US security guarantee, in recent years allies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific have begun reinforcing their militaries. Such efforts were framed as necessary, at least in part, for the sake of alliance cohesion: greater burden-sharing would make the alliance more attractive as it would render the US commitment less costly. Reality is more complex, however. Asymmetric alliances typically have both a ‘capability aggregating’ and ‘control’ value, and therefore increased protégé strength can upset the terms on which an alliance is based, potentially pushing a patron away. Aware of the risks that come with this trade-off between greater spending and alliance cohesion, protégés adopt various strategies to mitigate the potential loss in patron commitment and as such maximise their security (getting both arms and allies). This project examines how these protégé defence efforts reflect different calculations of the potential costs and benefits of increased burden-sharing. It hypothesises that allied defence strategies are shaped by protégé perceptions of both the abandonment cost and probability. Variation within these variables leads them to pursue autonomy-focused or patron-leaning defence strategies. To test this claim, this project examines the evolution in defence strategies among four US middle power allies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific throughout the Cold War, post-Cold War period and current era.

Speaker: Lotje Boswinkel (Centre for Security, Diplomacy and Strategy)

39 NATO and Multi-Domain Operations: Between Deterrence and Conflict

Authors:
Andrea Gilli, Mauro Gilli, Nina Silove
In recent years, the United States and its Allies have adopted the concept of Multi-Domain Operations to handle the return of Great Powers’ rivalry, the diffusion of anti-access/area-denial capabilities, as well as the opportunities and vulnerabilities generated by emerging technologies – including cyberattacks and manipulation of the information space. MDOs represent an attempt to achieve military superiority in a more complex and contested world against near-peer competitors, neutralizing coercion, managing escalation as well as penetrating segregated environments by seamlessly exploiting capabilities belonging to different domains. The planning and conduct of MDOs requires, however, an extensive transformation: existing force structures will have to be re-calibrated for maneuvering across strategic distances; current formations will have to develop the capacity, capability and endurance to operate across multiple contested domains against capable adversaries; armed forces will have to achieve cross-domain synergies to launch multiple forms of attack through the rapid, continuous, coordinated and disciplined integration of capabilities from all domains. Such transformations entails severe challenges, primarily in terms of command and control, capabilities development and strategic planning, as well as digitalization, standardization and human capital. At the NATO level, such challenges are further exacerbated due to traditional dilemmas of coalition warfare and alliance management, including intelligence and capability sharing, harmonization and doctrinal alignment. The article looks at these challenges, highlighting the obstacles NATO Allies need to overcome for deterrence as well as winning future conflicts.

Speaker: Andrea Gilli (NATO Defense College)

40 US Preponderance in NATO: The Role of Logistics, Intelligence, Training, Cyber, and Coordination

To meet the pacing challenge of a rising China, the United States seeks to devote increased resources and attention to the Indo-Pacific. Some have argued that the United States can free up resources by withdrawing most or all of its troops from Europe. After a US drawdown, the European members of NATO would make up for the loss of US manpower and equipment, though the United States would still provide C4ISR and a nuclear umbrella to its European allies. We argue that the US contribution to its NATO allies is much broader than manpower, equipment, C4ISR, and nuclear deterrence—and maintaining this larger contribution requires US boots on the ground in Europe. The United States provides important contributions to NATO allies in four main areas, which we term LITC: logistics, intelligence/information technology, training, and coordination. LITC includes the US contribution to multinational logistics efforts to transport, supply, and sustain NATO allies’ troops in the event of a war; strategic intelligence and offensive and defensive cyber capabilities; training activities, exercises, and broader ways in which the United States shares knowledge within NATO; and US coordination of allied procurement, war plans, and alliance decision-making. We show how US contributions in these areas cannot be easily replicated by the European members of NATO. Furthermore, substantially reducing US troop presence in Europe saves little money yet reduces its ability to provide LITC. Finally, we evaluate US alliances in the Indo-Pacific and offer recommendations for improving LITC provision to improve integrated deterrence in the region.

Speaker: Mr Hugo Meijer (Sciences Po)

Open Panels: Psychology and Emotions in War and Strategy

Convener: Katerina Krulisova (Nottingham Trent University)

41 Psychology and Emotions in War and Strategy

Psychology and emotions are integral to war, strategy, and the management of insecurity. This is evidenced by the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war and the passions that permeate it at every level of analysis. It is also apparent in the huge amount of attention the classical writers on strategy, from Thucydides to Carl von Clausewitz to Joseph Wylie and Thomas Schelling, dedicated to understanding human behaviour. Over the last few decades, research has demonstrated how cognitive biases, emotions, and other psychological factors influence human cognition and behaviour in the context of war and crises.

This panel highlights these themes. The papers explore the role and value of psychology and emotions in war and strategy. They articulate new ways of approaching strategy that takes account of psychology and emotions, and examine the challenges inherent in such approaches. Can the passions justify war? Can they be harnessed successfully to manage crises? Can new models help incorporate human factors more effectively into strategy and warfare? Where are the limitations? Drawing on political, social, evolutionary and behavioural psychology, and multidisciplinary research on emotions, this panel offers an innovative and interdisciplinary approach to the human dimensions of war. It aims to shine new light on the centrality of these topics to the wider field, and expand conceptual and theoretical understanding of these ideas.

Speakers: Katerina Krulisova (Nottingham Trent University), Claire Yorke (University of Southern Denmark), Mr Samuel Zilincik (Masaryk/Leiden University), Robin Burda (Masaryk University), Marie Robin (Université Paris Panthéon-Assas)

EISS - Panel Proposal - 2023.pdf

Awards: Award of the European Security Studies Best Paper Prize

Conveners: Mr Hugo Meijer (Sciences Po CERI), Nicolas Blarel (Leiden University), Silvia D'Amato (Leiden University)

Remarks: Concluding Remarks

Convener: Mr Hugo Meijer (Sciences Po CERI)

19:15 Cocktail