Conveners
European Transformations in the Organization of Security
- Moritz Weiss (LMU Munich)
Description
With Russia’s full-scale aggression against Ukraine in 2022 has not only territorial warfare returned to Europe, but previous trends towards hybrid forms of warfare have dramatically accelerated. This panel will address how European states have responded to this new strategic environment. We ask whether, how and why have these trends transformed the organization of national security. The conventional wisdom holds that the return of territorial warfare in Europe drives ‘positive’ security state-building, i.e. (re-)establishing coercive state capacities (esp. armed forces). Yet, in fact, the evolving picture is more complicated. As European states face conventional and hybrid threats, they often combine the build-up of state coercive capacities with extensive civil-military collaboration. Private actors become key to the accomplishment of public tasks. In the Nordic states, for instance, governments have incentivized so called ‘total defence schemes’, which strongly call for an expansion of the regulatory security state. Moreover, experts are increasingly integrated into the organization of security – not only at the elite level, but effective responses to hybrid threats require a more inclusive approach to provide security at the societal level as a whole. This panel seeks for paper contributions that map these transformations and attempt to explain them on the basis of diverse methodologies in security studies.
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...
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 –...
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...
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...
