The rise of cryptocurrencies has introduced new dynamics in the global financial and geopolitical landscape, shaping both economic opportunities and security challenges. Among these challenges, cryptocurrencies have become strategic instruments for circumventing sanctions, exploiting their decentralized nature and regulatory fragmentation. The absence of a cohesive, multilateral regulatory...
As cyberspace becomes a central arena for geopolitical competition, middle-ground countries — those neither strictly aligned with Western nor Eastern spheres of influence — play a growing role in shaping cyber governance (Gartzke and Lindsay, 2015; Nye, 2022). Traditional neorealist frameworks, which emphasize balancing and bandwagoning, fail to explain the diversity of cyber sovereignty...
The Russia-Ukraine war has critically underscored the importance of cyberspace in modern conflicts, with cyberattacks, information operations, and infrastructure attacks playing a key role since 2014. Beyond the battlefield, both Ukraine and Russia have pursued ambitious digital sovereignty policies that seek to protect their respective “information spaces.” Rooted in the strategic imperative...
The invention of social media is one of the most significant technological developments of the last decades. It has transformed the way our society works by facilitating methods of communication that allow broader participation in public debate. This has given rise to the phenomenon of online influencers who establish themselves as authoritative voices within a specific field outside of...
International relations literature on status and prestige demonstrates that states tend to seek technological capabilities and premier weapon systems to shape and improve their international status and prestige. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence on whether such efforts are worthwhile and serve the purpose of enhancing status and prestige. I attempt to address this question through...
Europe – and much of the traditional liberal democratic world – has not had to think much about war for the last 30 years. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine changed this, while Sino-American competition and an America-first agenda only intensifies it. Where war was part of the collective policy framework or cultural imaginary it was wars of choice, not wars of necessity. International security, not...
As world politics has shifted towards strategic competition, states increasingly navigate an international terrain marked by intensified, protracted political conflict. Here, subversion appears as a central, but not fully understood form of statecraft. Great powers find themselves interlocked in a subversive-countersubversive dynamic characterized by the employment of a mixture of military and...
Focusing on the case of the Replicator Initiative, first announced in September 2023, this paper (re)examines the drivers behind the Pentagon’s push to accelerate the development and deployment of AI systems in support of its focus on great power competition with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Despite experimenting with AI associated technologies since the 1950s, it has only been since...
This paper will examine the evolving interplay between legacy military technologies and emerging innovations, arguing that the transformation of the battlefield has reached a critical tipping point at which traditional doctrines are no longer adequate, and will do so by using space as a case study. As Cold War-era systems—constructed on static deterrence models—confront cutting-edge dual-use...
Coercion is a central strategy for states in an increasingly competitive and hostile international environment, and there are several military means or tools they can use to coerce an opponent into submission, such as, air power, invasions and land grabs, or even nuclear threats. Military assistance, i.e. the training, equipping and advising of foreign state and non-state armed forces to...
This article examines the role of big tech companies in international politics through an infrastructural lens, focusing on their involvement in the Ukraine-Russia war. We situate the article in IR literature examining the public and the private not as a distinction but as public-private relations, and we draw inspiration from the infrastructural turn in social science to develop an approach...
Ever since the Gulf War, the Western way of war has been firmly anchored in network-centric combined arms operations and executing them with a Clausewitzian concentration of forces to disarm the enemy. For this dislocating attack to effect psychological shock and operational and tactical surprise, speed and agility in movement are essential. The undiminished belief in unrivaled AirLand...
The relationship between states and violent non-state actors (VNSAs) has been widely explored in International Relations and Security Studies over the past two and a half decades. Scholars have examined state-VNSA dynamics through frameworks of sponsorship, alliances, delegation, and proxy warfare, as well as through conflict and rivalry. However, a growing yet underexplored phenomenon is the...
Since the Cold War’s end, private military companies (PMCs) have increasingly served as third parties in proxy wars, with states and non-state actors relying on them for military operations. These actors have become a key feature of external involvement in contemporary conflicts. Notable PMCs include Blackwater in Iraq, Executive Outcomes in Angola and Sierra Leone, and the Russian Wagner...
The Resistance Operating Concept (ROC) brings Second World War and Cold War stay-behind resistance operations back into consideration for strategic and operational planners. The ROC describes national stay-behind civilian resistance organization during partial or total occupation by a belligerent actor. Current events in Eastern Europe have triggered military interest in preparing for such...
State formation is a continuous process, marked by the centralisation and monopolisation of power to establish authority over a population within a defined territory. This paper argues that insurgency is a centrifugal force challenging this centralisation. However, insurgents are not merely destructive but, driven by an idea of an alternative political order, are establishing a new form of...
In this paper, we explore the development of Western military missions, examining the shift from ‘winding down large-scale boots-on-the-ground multinational missions’ to a lighter military footprint, characterised by more distant security force assistance (SFA). Specifically, we focus on advisory and capacity-building activities in Iraq, concentrating on the day-to-day work conducted in NATO...
Belgium is widely known as one of NATO’s most persistent free riders, deprioritizing military investments for decades. Successive budget cuts have left its armed forces weakened and ill-prepared for major geopolitical shifts. Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine significantly disrupted the European security order, raising the question: to what extent did this external shock lead to a substantive...
The maritime warfare and security environment of the 21st century is changing. The proliferation of non-traditional maritime security threats, such as piracy, maritime terrorism, and illegal fishing, combined with the emergence of gray-zone warfare at sea through irregular actors, attests to this change. As a result, the international norms surrounding the use of force at sea are evolving as...
Under which circumstances is security assistance effective? This article aims to build a theoretical framework to help scholars and practitioners evaluate the effectiveness of security assistance (SA). Security Assistance consists in outsourcing the conduct of stability operations to local partners, increasing their military capacity and professionalism. While existing literature has...
While interaction between public and private actors is daily fare in European Union (EU) cybersecurity governance, two contrary paradigms pervade discursive rhetoric. On the one hand, a co-regulatory, inclusive allure of multistakeholderism. On the other hand, state-centric and autarkic ideas of digital sovereignty. Surprisingly little is known about links between – often informal –...
Military alliances are often seen as hierarchical security institutions where powerful patrons use ‘sticks’ (e.g., threats of abandonment) and ‘carrots’ (e.g., reassurance) to shape the policies of their protégés. However, alliance dynamics are not one-sided. Institutionalized alliances provide protégés with opportunities to bargain for better terms, rather than merely accepting their patron’s...
The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 posed a significant challenge to European foreign policy. The war forced the EU to react and resulted according to some in a geopolitical shift in EU foreign policy. Several institutions and high-ranking officials, including the President of the European Commission and the High Representative for Foreign Policy, argued that the EU should become...
In late 2024, the heated debate about an emerging alliance between China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran, which had started among U.S. think tankers, reached European policymakers and the public. At first sight, cooperation between these countries appears predominately bilateral and largely focused on support for Russia’s war in Ukraine. However, systematic empirical research about emerging...
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it has become abundantly clear that territorial aggression and large-scale international war are back in Europe. The conventional narrative in research on European security policymaking holds that this provides an impetus for the (re-)building of centralized coercive capacities within “positive” security states. With the return of...
Arms control has increasingly been pronounced “dead.” Indeed, recent empirics are grim. In 2023, Russia unilaterally suspended participation in New START, the last remaining bilateral arms control agreement since the Cold War. While the future of arms control is uncertain, Russia, China, and the United States have expressed nominal interest in maintaining strategic stability. However,...
When the Swedish Social Democratic Party shifted its stance on NATO membership in the spring of 2022, broad parliamentary consensus to divert from Sweden’s tradition of non-alignment to pursue collective security was achieved. A century earlier Sweden had contemplated similar trade-offs before joining the world’s first international organisation based on the principles of conflict mediation,...
This paper examines how small states adapt their defense strategies in a shifting global order shaped by intensifying great power competition, emerging regionalisms, and evolving security dynamics. It argues that small states enhance their defense posture through a mix of hard and soft balancing, shelter-seeking, and diversified security partnerships. Using Greece as a case study, the paper...
What explains the variation in the Soviet Union’s/Russia’s commitment to nuclear nonproliferation? While many scholars have examined the US role in the nonproliferation regime, relatively little scholarly research has systematically considered Moscow’s nonproliferation and nuclear assistance policy. By fusing insights from previous nonproliferation theories with literature about Moscow’s...
Defence cooperation - whether through NATO, the EU, or bilateral and multilateral arrangements -plays a crucial role in national security across all European states. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 reinforced the importance of military preparedness. However, after three years of war, it is clear that European responses in terms of defence spending have varied significantly....
The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) represents a critical step toward global nuclear disarmament, yet its universal adoption faces significant challenges, particularly due to resistance from nuclear-armed states. This paper examines the potential for expanding the TPNW’s adoption by drawing insights from the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and the Biological Weapons...
Previous research on whether the nuclear nonproliferation regime (NPR) works has focused on whether it deters states from seeking nuclear weapons, with mixed results. We investigate an alternative mechanism: by suppressing the global market for nuclear technology, the NPR forces would-be proliferants to build sensitive nuclear facilities on their own and in secret. This should affect both what...
Since the end of the Cold War, the decline in the formation of formal treaty-based alliances has coincided with a volatile security environment and the rise of network-enabled military capabilities. Developments such as the US push to prepare for network-centric warfare since the late 1990s, the growing interest in developing weapons systems through partnerships, such as the Australia-United...
The European Union’s defence innovation ambitions have evolved significantly since the early 2000s, driven by an increasing need for technological sovereignty amid the resurgence of great power competition. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 further accelerated interest in defence R&D, drawing greater attention from both the public and private sectors within the EU. Taking the...
Russia’s actions against Ukraine in 2014 led to a reassessment of the European security environment by the West. NATO reinforced its military presence in Eastern Europe and developed measures to counter hybrid threats, which were strengthened after 2022. Although hybrid threats are not new per se, their use over the past decade has posed new strategic challenges to the West. This paper aims to...
Why and how does Russia engage in the arms trade? Scholars have
largely focused on why Russia participates in the arms trade, often
neglecting the equally crucial question of how it conducts this trade. Yet, understanding the mechanisms by which Russia promotes arms sales
provides deeper insights into why it does so. While many portray Russia’s arms trade as driven by economic or strategic...
Since the onset of the war in Ukraine on 24 February 2022, the European Union (EU) has acted with unity and cohesion, taking unprecedented steps, particularly in defence. Although the illegal and unprovoked full-scale invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation has re-emphasised the importance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as the backbone of Europe's territorial defence, a...
This paper aims to answer who has been at the centre of the development of Unmanned Systems in Ukraine following February 2022, and how these actors have become organised into constellations that enhance military adaptability. With private actors being central as funders, producers and suppliers of drones, Ukraine demonstrates the contemporary role of the state and the military in guiding and...
Is the European Union capable of developing a credible European deterrence? This question is more pressing than ever, particularly in light of the second Trump administration and its inclination toward unilateralism. As the war in Ukraine approaches its third year, the EU’s efforts in defence cooperation have intensified—but have they been effective in meeting the evolving security demands?...
In an era of hostile geopolitics, states of all stripes are striving to fortify domestic defense industries and secure defense supply lines. Despite increasing scholarly attention on national strategies of self-reliance—especially in rising powers in the global south—the concept and its associated policy of ‘defense indigenization’ (DI) remains little understood on a conceptual and empirical...
This article studies the politics of fighting corruption, with particular attention to ‘building integrity’, which has emerged as a new concept in the field. NATO and its member states in particular, have since early 2000s have invested substantially in integrity mechanisms and practices in order to reduce the risk of corruption and to embed integrity principles in the defence establishments...
The need to enhance European cooperation in defence and security has become increasingly urgent since Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Participation in EU common security initiatives remains a pressing issue for Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. With their pivotal position, distinct historical experiences and perspectives on Russia and the war in Ukraine, and complex domestic...
This paper explores the dynamics between old and new military technologies which are in general, either poorly understood, commonly ignored and theoretically under-examined. Instead in much of the general literature about contemporary warfare there is a typical privileging of either high technology weapons systems (AI; hypersonic missiles; drones). Alternatively, academic attention has been...
Recent events, including Meta’s removal of third-party moderators, indicate the growing need for policymakers to engage with extremist content online as well as with the role that social media platforms play in its dissemination. A key issue, however, is the adaptability and fluidity of the online space, allowing extremist actors to circumvent moderation. This research aims to provide...
The United States has introduced outbound and inbound investment restrictions that prevent American and Chinese investors from funding competing startups developing emerging technologies in both countries. Amid these efforts, this paper investigates how overlapping ownership—where a single investor holds stakes in competing firms—influences cross-border investment decisions. This paper argues...
As a small state, Greece has always been trying to enhance its national security by participating in several bilateral and/or multilateral cooperative schemes, in order to facilitate the countering of the numerous international and regional threats of the security environment. To this end, the Greek government –in the context of its participation in the European Union as one of its oldest...
While NATO remains the primary alliance for collective defense in Europe, security guarantees have multiplied at the bilateral or minilateral level across the continent in recent years. In 2019, France and Germany signed the Treaty of Aachen, and in 2021, France and Greece formed a strategic partnership, both documents including a mutual defense clause between their respective parties. After...
Over the last few years, Turkish defense industry has made a tremendous progress, quickly pushing Ankara into the club of major arms exporters. Moreover, Turkiye managed to establish technological prominence in certain niches, most notably the production of UAVs: Bayraktar and Akinci became recognisable brands in the Middle East, post-Soviet countries and Eastern Europe. Most importantly,...
