2023 — Barcelona

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.

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.

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.

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?

During the COVID-19 pandemic, organized criminal groups (OCG) in Mexico adopted various social control strategies to adapt their interests to the health risks stemming from the pandemic. Some used violent measures to enforce social distancing while others provided basic goods to ameliorate the economic consequences of the health crisis. What explains the variation in OCG governance strategies during the pandemic? What are the political consequences of such actions? To answer these questions, we deployed an online survey containing a list experiment to understand the extent and strategies of criminal control during the pandemic. Our research contributes to current knowledge about the manifestations of criminal governance regimes and opens new lines of research for the understanding of the effects of criminal governance on a wide range of behavioral outcomes.

What explains collective mobilization against criminal violence? Why do communities mobilize against criminal victimization in different ways? Mexico has been entrapped in a vicious cycle of violence since 2006. Given the absence of state-sponsored security, ordinary citizens in many parts of the country have mobilized to resist the violence and coercive orders imposed by criminal organizations. Mobilization strategies, however, have not been homogeneous. Some communities have engaged in violent forms of collective action, such as organizing self-defense groups, while others have resorted to peaceful protest. We examine original data on citizen mobilization against criminal violence in Mexico from 2013 to 2018 to understand the forces that drive the emergence and type of collective mobilization against criminal groups. We find that similar dynamics drive violent and non-violent mobilization, in particular, moderate levels of violence and inter-cartel competition. However, while violent mobilization is associated with past experiences of armed struggles, non-violent mobilization is not. Based on detailed qualitative evidence from a set of cases of contemporary armed mobilization, we contend that past experiences of armed struggles leave organizational and normative legacies that make violent mobilization more available.

The scale of violence in Mexico and some other Latin American countries is comparable to that in some of the deadliest contemporaneous civil wars, and criminal violence is now firmly on the agenda of conflict studies, International Relations (IR) and political science. Significant attention has been paid to the similarities and differences between criminal violence and political insurgencies, but less has been paid to the international legal regulation of state responses to organized crime. In principle, international humanitarian law (IHL) regulates the conduct of hostilities in armed conflict contexts, and international human rights law (IHRL) applies in full in peacetime. The (in)applicability of IHL has important implications for, inter alia, who can use force, whom they can use force against, and the conditions under which they can use lethal force. Through analysis of the discourses and practices of domestic and international actors regarding organized criminal violence in Mexico, this paper argues that the “criminal wars” there are treated as a legal grey zone, regulated neither as war nor as peace. Even though the violence in Mexico is not formally classified as a non-international armed conflict, selective quasi-IHL thinking underpins public discourse and militarized responses, in particular in official designations of who is a legitimate target and who deserves protection from violence.

Development and humanitarian relief organizations often follow contrasting operational logics: while humanitarian assistance is short-term, neutral, and prioritizes access to populations in need, development aid is long-term, partisan for the state, and dependent on state capacity to succeed. In cases of protracted armed conflict, this division becomes problematic, as only through development aid can humanitarian emergencies be overcome and prevented. Increasingly, humanitarian and development organizations work jointly within UN peacebuilding in a “triple nexus” aimed at long-term peace and security. This paper examines the relevance of the triple nexus construct for organized criminal violence in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. While not formally armed conflicts, the intensity and humanitarian toll of transnational criminal violence in the region is comparable to armed conflicts. And yet, prominent development aid organizations have followed the peacetime logic, instead of working jointly with humanitarian actors or UN agencies. The paper looks specifically at World Bank practice, contrasting its protocols for “Fragile and Conflict-Affected States” with its strategies of adjustment and response to organized criminal violence in the region.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It is increasingly acknowledged that civil society actors and the military can establish cooperative relationships, not only in implementing security policies, also in actual policy design. We see this clearly in the design of Protection of Civilians policies, where non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as PAX or the Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC) are organizing trainings for military staff, both national and international, to raise awareness and improve policies. Yet, we do not know when and why the military is receptive to such cooperation with NGOs. We answer this question by studying a typical case of NGO-military cooperation towards policy improvement, which is the relationship between NATO military staff and NGOs PAX and CIVIC in the development of the NATO Policy for the Protection of Civilians. Theoretically, we borrow from resource exchange theory, which makes us hypothesize that NGO-military cooperation depends on the awareness of military staff that NGOs can contribute scarce resources, such as expertise about on-the-ground repercussions of the use of force. Empirically, we follow a dual-track approach, relying on interviews with NGO staff to gain insights in their supply of expertise, and with NATO military staff to explore their demand for expertise. The findings of this paper contribute to the civil-military relations literature by demonstrating that NGOs can take part in military affairs when military staff lack the adequate resources to formulate their policies.

For the past decade, scholars, practitioners, and policy makers have been focusing on the possible uses of AI and the automation of weapon systems. Largely drawing attention to applications of lethal AI, public discourse and scholarly work is endeavouring to answer questions of legality, ethicality, strategy, and politics. Military officers, especially in positions which are closely tied to the application of technological systems are viewing the possibility of increased automation with concern and suspicion. Increased automation means lowered human control, more uncertainty and unpredictability, possible disrupted chains of command, and unnecessary risk. These concerns focus on the possible commission of war crimes by lethal AI systems which cannot distinguish between combatants and civilians, the fear of escalation, and the real threat of technologically based vulnerabilities. There is a distinct gap in examining what higher automation might mean for one's own forces (for example, automated systems going awry against their own structure) and most importantly, what it might mean in an alliance context. The way military officers feel about using/cooperating with autonomous technologies can impact decision making on a strategic/political level. The research project connects military innovation studies – which looks into change in military organizations vis-à-vis new technologies, warfighting concepts, and organizational configurations – and alliance theory in order to investigate how policy choices by civilian leadership are informed by military officers and their viewpoints on AI technologies in their duties, and essentially what that means for the future of defence cooperation within alliances like NATO.

The relationship between civilian control over the armed forces and military effectiveness is a central focus in studies of civil-military relations. Both the characteristics of political control and its intensity is thought to affect the maneuverability of the armed forces and their performance. Previous research has suggested that recent reforms, conducted to increase effectiveness of the public administrations in many liberal democracies, has rather led to an increased bureaucratization of the military. This bureaucratization, in turn, is argued to affect negatively the possibility of the military profession, e.g. the officer corps, to exercise its professional judgement in the running of everyday affairs. It is not uncommon to describe this as a 'deprofessionalization' of the armed forces that has detrimental consequences both for the application of military expertise and the social control of individual officers. Yet such conclusions are generally drawn based on a select number of examples and exactly what such a deprofessionalization might entail is for military profession is seldom addressed in any detail. In this paper, I rely on surveys with military officers conducted over the past 25 years to investigate how the past decades of public management reforms in Sweden have affected the Swedish officer corps, both regarding its ability to exercise professional judgement and how it perceives its maneuverability. The conclusions of the study points to a need to update the understanding of professionalism within the armed forces.

Defence agencies—ministries and departments of defence—play a key role in the civil-military relations of modern democracies, but what role is that? This paper explores the possibilities from overseer of the armed forces to supporter to protector. After developing the typology, the paper then develops several explanations for why particular roles develop for a variety of democracies. It then suggests the implications of different roles for the behavior and influence of the armed forces. This paper presents a preliminary set of case studies to illustrate the dynamics shaping the defence agencies' roles and then the impact of those roles on the making of defence and foreign policy.

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.

Existing scholarship on intelligence cooperation is largely informed by Anglo-American experiences at the strategic level. However, this paper seeks to contribute to the understanding of intelligence cooperation by examining member state intelligence support to foreign policymaking in the European Union. Increasingly, policymakers in the European Union take important foreign policy decisions for European nations. Although the European Union has various sense-making systems, these intelligence consumers require support from the national intelligence communities. Therefore, several member states are seconding intelligence officers to the European Union Intelligence and Situation Centre to share expertise and to facilitate this cooperation. These experts with diverse backgrounds, identities, cultures, attitudes, and interests are tasked with working in conjunction to improve policymaking. Their home organisations have varying selection procedures and retain different relationships to them. Given this diversity, this intelligence cooperation does not occur without friction, impacting its performance. In studying diplomatic secondment and cooperation, especially on building a European ‘esprit de corps’, the European Studies have addressed similar issues at the organisational level. Leveraging this literature and drawing on elite interviews with European intelligence practitioners, this paper seeks to understand the impact of national seconding practices on intelligence support to foreign policymaking in the European Union.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Borderwork and its connection with strategic dilemmas have seldom been reflected in the academic literature on NATO. Territorial expansion of any international organisation is associated with constructing new borders, as the former internal and external differentiations need to be replaced. At the same time, new borders and related borderwork produce additional challenges in ensuring the new members are reined in, and the organisation is adapted to a new strategic environment. We argue this connection can be seen in the case of NATO expansion in the 1990s and early 2000s. A novel set of (re-)bordering practices was introduced, reflecting the longer border to be defended outwardly and inculcating the new differentiations on the inside. The installation of NATO-standard radios to supplement Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) systems on new members’ MiG-29 aircrafts, concerns over the Suwałki Gap, or accession’s democratic requirements illustrate this perspective. Such changes led not only to opportunities that NATO could pursue from its renewed geopolitical setting but also to a redefinition of challenges which required a more robust posture to deter adversaries and defend the expanded Alliance area. The presented paper thus identifies a connection between required bordering practices and the strategic dilemmas the Alliance had to face. In this regard, we use comparative analysis to examine the proposed relationship during and after NATO’s post-Cold War expansion and apply our findings to the potential integration of Finland and Sweden.

Does the accession of Sweden and Finland to NATO alter the strategic balance in the Baltic? The recent decision by Sweden and Finland to join the alliance has rendered most analyses on this question moot, as extant scholarship has focused on how the two countries could cooperate with NATO outside the alliance. To redress this gap, this paper assesses how Nordic NATO expansion shifts the military balance in northeast Europe using a mixed-methods approach with campaign models and elite interviews. Specifically, it employs logistics and combat models to evaluate Russia’s ability to deploy force against Finland. It further assesses the implications of the extension of the Russia-NATO border on force density levels and Baltic conflict scenarios. Finally, it models how control of the port of Stockholm and island of Gotland alters NATO maritime logistics capacity in the event of the closure of the Suwalki Gap. Our findings suggest the addition of Sweden and Finland meaningfully diminishes Russian force projection capabilities while simultaneously increasing NATO’s regional maritime control and logistical capacity. Interviews allow us to corroborate these findings against the strategic assessments of key NATO and European policymakers, to explore how NATO officials’ perceptions of strategic balance shape their engagement with and understanding of feasible operational concepts vis-à-vis the Baltic, and to probe the extent to which their strategic judgements mirror popular discourse around NATO expansion. Our findings contribute to the academic literature on territorial control and conflict, and they have important implications for ongoing policy debates by suggesting that NATO’s Nordic expansion is net positive for the alliance. It substantially enhances the regional power of the alliance and reduces the viability of a Russian fait accompli in the Baltic.

How secure are secure second-strike nuclear forces? For many, secure second-strike capability has been embodied by nuclear ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs), whether deployed in open-ocean patrol patterns or in naval bastions. The historical record, however, highlights significant variation in the relative survivability of deterrent forces due to technological advancements in weapon accuracy and intelligence. This paper evaluates vulnerability with respect to SSBNs. Specifically, it focuses on the vulnerability of Russian sea-based nuclear deterrent forces in the Barents Sea to U.S. anti-submarine warfare (ASW) platforms engaged in an effort to trail SSBNs. Examining undersea competition in the Arctic using the campaign analysis method, this paper asks two questions. First, how vulnerable are Russian SSBNs? And second, how effectively can U.S. attack submarines (SSNs) detect and trail SSBNs in the Barents Sea? After considering the oceanographic characteristics of the campaign’s environment and the availability and capability of U.S. and Russian forces operating in the Arctic, this study argues that U.S. SSNs would likely struggle to effectively and covertly trail Russian SSBNs in the Barents Sea. Importantly, U.S. challenges do not equate to Russian advantages in ASW against the United States. Instead, in an environment characterized by shallow water and ever-quieter submarines, both sides risk playing “blind man’s bluff” in the Barents.

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.

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.

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.

In 1968-69 Italy was swept by a wave of protests and riots by workers and students which were seen by right-wing politicians and extra-parliamentary organizations as the harbingers of a revolution. From that moment on the country experienced an appalling series of acts of subversion and terrorism by a multitude of right-wing groups that would last more than 10 years, including a sustained bombing campaign, several planned and attempted coups d'état, and almost continuous street killings. In the face of such an unprecedented wave of terror the Italian intelligence services performed very poorly; first they failed to provide strategic warning with regard to the shift of right-wing organizations from riots and aggressions to outright terrorism; secondly, they mostly failed also in the provision of tactical warning, proving unable to deliver timely and targeted information on the plots of right-wing extremists. Scholarly studies have generally explained such an intelligence failure by emphasizing the connivance between right-wing organizations and many high-ranking intelligence officials and the de facto adoption by the Italian intelligence service of what we might call a “manipulation strategy” geared towards taking advantage of right-wing terrorism to strengthen consensus around state institutions, in this way stabilizing the country (Bull, 2007, Willan, 2002, Ferraresi, 1996). This paper, by contrast, aims at providing a broader explanation for the Italian intelligence failure in countering right-wing terrorism by focusing on two hitherto overlooked variables, the “institutional culture” of the Italian intelligence, and its collection and analysis capabilities, and by integrating a vast range of archival sources declassified between 2014 and 2021 by the Italian security services. In the period under scrutiny, the institutional culture of the Defense Intelligence Service (SID – Servizio Informazioni Difesa), heavily biased towards political (and military) intelligence, significantly affected both collection and analysis. In fact, the SID managed to penetrate the majority of right-wing extremist organizations, and combining HUMINT and SIGINT disposed of non-negligible collection capabilities; these nonetheless proved inadequate for providing tactical warning of impending bombings, plots and attacks as the intelligence service penetrations tended to focus on gathering political rather than operational intelligence. Similarly, in terms of analysis, the SID showed an inclination to privilege understanding the overall political vision of right-wing organizations to the detriment of their social background, organizational features, and working mechanisms. Cumulatively, these had a deeply adverse impact on the intelligence service performance between 1969 and 1982.

The Israeli intelligence's failure to predict, identify, and warn against an impending Egyptian-Syrian attack in October 1973 has by now become a benchmark of intelligence failure followed by a strategic surprise. The failure became a well-studied history, almost too banal to discuss. Its sources, too, have been exhaustively examined. The Israeli “conception,” resting on the assumption that the Egyptians are required to take certain necessary steps before they attack, and that Israel has “special means” at its disposal to detect these steps and invariably alert it when an attack is immanent, led the heads of AMAN (Israeli military intelligence) to believe that they are safe in assuming the Egyptians do not plan to attack Israel in the Sinai in October 1973. (Gilboa, 2014; Bar-Joseph 2005) But what were the sources of AMAN's willingness to stick to its assessment, no matter the warning signals suggesting the opposite; to arrogantly silence diverging opinions effectively creating an environment in which they are preempted; and mostly, why would the Head of Intelligence cultivate a culture in which his opinion, and his alone, is the first and final word? The 1973 intelligence failure was predated by a 1967 intelligence failure: as late as the spring of 1967 AMAN failed to predict an immanent war, which would start shortly thereafter in June 1967. AMAN's 1967 oversight is not recognized in Israeli historical narratives or public discourse. It was never acknowledged as a failure or studied as one. In effect, it guaranteed that AMAN, and its leader, will fail spectacularly when tested again. Examining a wealth of archival sources from the IDF General Staff, this paper argues that between January and May 1967 AMAN failed to understand that war was an option for Egypt, that this option was indeed on the table, and worse, that Israeli actions—IDF actions—were pushing Nasser to opt for war. Beside failing spectacularly, in this way the AMAN leadership laid down the foundations for the emergence of serious organizational pathologies that would adversely impact the military intelligence performance in the years to come.

In the twenty first century, there has been a broad doubling of intelligence expenditure across the world. This has taken place alongside various forms of cooperation including notable forms of South-South cooperation. However, the intelligence services of the global South that are at the forefront of contemporary security dilemmas associated with violent conflict, terrorism, and transnational organised crime remain at the periphery of scholarship. As early as 1988, the pioneering scholar Adda Bozeman wrote a path-breaking essay on the importance of the study of intelligence cultures in non-Western societies. In the same year, Argentine security practitioner and scholar, Eduardo E. Estévez, offered one of the first assessments of intelligence in democratic transitions in Latin America. In 1996, Mexico's leading expert of intelligence and national security, Sergio Aguayo Quezada, characterised the imbalance as 'not only absurd, but dangerous'. Latin America offers fertile ground for the pioneering study of intelligence under dictatorship and democracy. Processes of democratisation from the 1980s resulted in constitutional shifts, legislation to establish national truth commissions, centres of national memory, and judicial proceedings, which have naturally led to the gradual opening of some notable official across all major Latin American states–Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico–and several other countries. More recently, the press has emerged as an informal oversight mechanism that has led to spying scandals in almost every state in the region as well as the disbanding of the premier intelligence services of Argentina and Colombia. This paper examines the extent to which intelligence services and their activities are impacted by (un)democratic shifts in political governance. Using an Area Studies approach to the study of intelligence, it explores legacies of authoritarianism in Latin America's secret services and examines how processes of democratic transitions and democratic consolidation since the 1980s have impacted intelligence practices and oversight in region.

In October of 1975, the South African Defence Force (SADF) launched Operation Savannah. The operation quite rapidly turned into an abject military failure, with the South African intelligence apparatuses shouldering a significant portion of the blame. (Warwick, 2012) Drawing on a vast number of south African archival sources, this paper examines the structural and doctrinal causes for South Africa's poor performance in Angola in 1975 and argues that, due to an almost pathological obsession with the internal security of the Apartheid system as a whole, the work of South African Military Intelligence (SAMI) was significantly hamstrung by the competing security requirements of the South African state. Formed from the outset as an organisation designed to quell internal risings by disaffected Africans, the SADF and its attendant Military Intelligence system had been forced to adapt to more conventional military intelligence work by the twin challenges of the Second World War and the emergent Cold War. However, by the 60s and 70s, disengagement from international organisations and the British Commonwealth brought about by Pretoria's intransigence on its policy of Apartheid prompted political-doctrinal shifts that again focused SAMI's attention inwards, towards matters of internal security (Frankel 1984). The so-called “securitisation” of the Vorster government during that time, did not, however, rationalise and reform intelligence systems—instead complicating their operations, muddying jurisdictions, diluting and duplicating efforts, and prompting outright political competition between four major South African organisations: SAMI, the national Bureau of State Security (BOSS), the South African Police's Special Branch (SB) and the Foreign Ministry's own intelligence system. Together, this awkward system persisted in an alliance with Salazar's Portugal (governing the territories of Mozambique and Angola) and Ian Smith's Rhodesia, undergirded by an assumption that an anti-revolutionary firewall of settler states could be sustained well into the 1980s. (Meneses, Rosa and Martins, 2017).

How do we prepare for a developing reality that has little to no historic precedent? How do we adequately prepare for cyber-enabled conflict where the 'fog of war' is exacerbated in the virtual domain, resulting in greater uncertainty? Wargames have been used throughout history to train for realities that have yet to happen; be they theoretical conventional battles or full scale nuclear conflict. For this reason the introduction of the cyber domain into kinetic or joint wargames has become an area of interest for both planners and game designers. The integration of the two forms of warfare gaming (cyber and kinetic) into a coherent system has proven elusive and problematic. The Quantified Judgment Model (QJM) of Dupuy (1979) has gone on to inform and impact wargame design such as the Tactical Numerical Deterministic Model (TNDM) (Lawrence 2017). The QJM uses seven characteristics to generate the Operational Lethality Indices (OLI) of conventional weapons. By applying these indices to cyberweapons it becomes clear that they are fundamentally different from kinetic wargames weapons. This paper argues that cyber weapons cannot simply be plugged into large scale kinetic wargames. It offers an overview of the methods that can be used to add the cyber domain to such games. These range from the use of umpires as proposed by Curry and Drage (2018), to the use of cyber ranges to gather realistic attack and defence data. This paper also critiques the various approaches and outlines suggested directions for future studies in order to make these games as realistic as possible.

Because of the pervasiveness of digital technologies, academic interest in cybersecurity studies from all disciplines has surged. Cyber threats have become a compelling problem for international security and the object of a growing interest in International Relations (IR). IR scholars have sought to catch up with the empirical evolutions of conflict in cyberspace; to unpuzzle motivations behind state interactions in this domain. However, rigorous scholarship, in particular theorisation and conceptualisation (Smeets 2022, Egloff 2022) remains at an early stage. Still today, the field needs progress in methodological tools (Stevens 2018). While the literature has been primarily focused on meta-theoretical work, one of the methodological advances in cybersecurity studies has been the application of Foreign Policy Decision Making (FPDM) methods that include scenario playing and simulating. As McDermott (2019) and Gomez (2021) pioneered the “cognitive turn” in cybersecurity studies, this approach allows looking beyond the black-box of the state, by shifting to an agent-oriented system. All the while, scenario-based experiments can provide cybersecurity scholars with a fertile ground to observe decision-making dynamics (Gomez and Whyte 2022). However these tools are not the panacea, and there are significant obstacles in developing an experimental design, primarily when research is conducted in a comparative approach. On this basis, the purpose of this paper is to discuss the methodological framework in an ongoing comparative study that looks at decision-making dynamics of cybersecurity professionals, using a scenario-based experimental design. The study will also discuss difficulties in developing cyber threat scenarios, in a domain that differs significantly from that of the kinetic domain. This paper will also address potential deadlocks in conducting cross-national cybersecurity research, such as difficulties in matching samples, the fragility of trust between agents, and other barriers to information sharing.

Recent episodes of foreign meddling in elections in the U.S., France, and the U.K. have led observers asking whether democracies could uphold their electoral sovereignty in the 21st Century. Free and fair elections are the cornerstone of democratic regimes, and such encroachment on a people' sovereignty and self-determination would be expected to trigger a strong response from the affected states. Yet, what we have witnessed ranges from unspecified threats and diplomatic sanctions to total inaction. How can we explain this response? In other words, why democracies fail to counterbalance against the threat of foreign interference into their electoral processes? In a previous paper, I argued that neoclassical realism's position in the agency-structure debate makes it particularly apt at tackling cyber-enabled foreign election interference (CYFI) research problems. In this new paper, I test this theory with primary empirical evidence. Focusing on election interference episodes of 2016-2017, I conducted dozens of elite semi-structured interviews with direct participants in the foreign policy and national security policy-making process of their respective governments. I adopt a methodological synergy design. On the one hand, I probe the internal validity of the theory with a causal narrative. I combine it with an internal comparison as the primary method to generate evidence from causal process observations. On the other hand, I probe external validity with cross-case analysis in the form of a multistage Millian method, generating evidence akin to dataset observations. I find that foreign policy response to CYFI is a consequence of a balancing by decision-makers between the structural stimuli of components of power and a combination of intervening variables relating to threat perception and public opinion constraints. I then discuss the important policy implications of these findings, highlighting the need for a whole-of-society approach to tackling foreign interference.

An increasing number of states use direct public political attribution to call out inappropriate behaviour in cyberspace attributable to another state. Shared understandings about conducting and communicating political attribution practices are essential to avoid misunderstandings and mitigate the risk of potential escalation between states. However, attribution remains only marginally addressed in the context of diplomatically negotiated cyber norms so far. This makes this policy instrument well suited to explore the formation of normative ideas through state practice as it leaves ample room for practical interpretation by states. Based on a selection of five case studies, this paper identifies which cyber operations the selected states have publicly attributed, how the attribution was communicated and justified, to what extent other states were involved in the process, and how other states perceived the attribution. This analysis of established and emerging state practice will permit new insights into how States currently perceive the respective normative framework, that is, formalised cyber norms, and conclusions as to what extent the observed State practice gives rise to new shared understandings about appropriate state behaviour - practised cyber norms - when it comes to direct public political attribution of cyber operations.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Thanks to its unparalleled defense budget, the United States possesses a comparative advantage in arms production. This confronts US allies with the US hegemony dilemma, a trade-off between efficiency and autonomy. Allies can procure comparably cheap high-end weaponry from US sources instead of securing more costly autonomy in arms supply. Overall, US defense industrial market power forces its allies to specialize in arms production, thus, to decide what kinds of weapon systems to produce on their own. Given this need to specialize caused by US hegemony in the defense industrial order, what explains US allies' defense industrial specialization? I confine my analysis to Europe since it represents an especially interesting case with its unparalleled regional economic and political integration and its relationship to the US shaped by geostrategic cooperation on the one hand, and industrial competition on the other hand. Furthermore, I focus on the missile sector, a rather understudied arms production sector compared to fighter aircraft and drones. I argue that since the US is the structural constraint that sets the conditions under which European defense industries operate Europeans seek to strike a balance between efficiency, i.e., buying American, autonomy, i.e., producing nationally, and cooperation. I leverage market size, understood as the national market but also the market countries expect to sell to, as the central variable explaining European missile production decisions. These production and export decisions have important political implications because they shape countries' foreign policies decisively. According to conventional wisdom, a country's grand strategy shapes its defense industrial policy. I argue that this causal relationship is more complicated and that a country's defense industrial policy has a profound effect on its grand strategy.

21st century states have increasingly outsourced security and defense to the market, acting as regulators of the tools of violence rather than owners of the tools of violence. While the phenomenon is now recognizable and common, it remains puzzling because a core feature of modern states is their legitimate political authority to control the 'public good' of national security within their territory. Advanced industrial democratic polities such as the US, European states, and the EU, however, have transferred significant aspects of domestic and foreign security power to private, market actors. I argue that outsourcing has not been driven by strategy but by a changing risk tolerance on the part of security bureaucracies. In a reversal of how 20th Century states absorbed political, financial, and legal risk for their societies and markets, states—under certain conditions—are shedding their willingness and ability to absorb public goods across the board, including the public good of security. Decisions to outsource have occurred when government personnel made low-level decisions to cede the authority of their agencies to the market, due to transparency, accountability, legal reporting, or financial pressures on their bureaucracies. In a number of critical functions, sovereign security power is now disaggregated and diffused into the market, without sovereign or strategic prerogatives. This paper evaluates one of these phenomena: the diffusion of public-sector defense R&D funding from state bureaucracies to the private sector, in the form of private, industry R&D funding of military prototypes. It evaluates original cross-national data on industry self-funding of defense technology amongst advanced industrial states, including firms active in the European and North American national defense markets.

Why and how do states decide to develop different weapon systems within a similar domain of warfare? For example, why does the United States invest in ever-more expansive forms of national missile defense, while France briefly dabbled in such matters and the United Kingdom has been reluctant to do so? Contrary to the assumption in the existing literature that states know the future threat environment and are able to develop suitable military technology in response to it, I argue that ideas, particularly those about the future, play a critical role in shaping states' decisions about military technology. Because the future is unknown, domestic actors imagine radically different future states of the world. These ideas—what I call “images of warfare,” consisting of actors' construction of future threat environment and their theory of victory—shape actors' preferences for weapons systems. Not all of these ideas, however, are equally influential. In order to transform their ideas into actual capabilities, actors need to build cross-cutting coalitions within the broader defense community around their “imagined security interests.” The ability of these actors to build such a coalition and funnel their ideas through the state's decision-making process is shaped by the political opportunity structure, more specifically the level of openness of the relevant institutions. I explore these dynamics through an in-depth case study of the development of missile defense capabilities in the United States from the 1980s until the mid-1990s.

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.

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.

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.

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.

From the conflict in Ukraine, to the global pandemic, and the rise of violent extremism, crises can generate uncertainty, trauma, and insecurity. Strong and intense emotions often accompany such events. Sometimes these emotions can cloud strategic vision, compelling swift action at the cost of long-term strategy, whereas at others they can help to mobilise society and generate shared feelings and connections that contribute to resilience and help societies to withstand shocks. For leaders and strategists there is an imperative to manage these emotions and harness them successfully to guide citizens and military forces alike through the crisis. Despite the prominent image of strong leaders at such times, growing evidence points to the power of care. From Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand during the pandemic, to President Vlodomyr Zelensky in Ukraine during Russia's war in the country, leaders are finding value in demonstrating consideration for how their people feel. Yet it is not without problems. Depending on its focus, and its expression, care can be perceived as weakness or a form of excessive control, undermining long-term policy efforts. A tension exists that is deserving of further study. This paper explores the concept of care by examining its psychological, social, and strategic function during times of crisis. Care is considered to encapsulate ideas of empathy, compassion, and consideration of others, reflecting an approach that puts people first. It argues that different crises require different forms of care, and that it has to be situated within a broader context of the political environment, policy efforts by government, and other qualities and characteristics of leaders. Critically, given the growing discourse around its value, this paper analyses the potential limits of care and the challenges it presents to security, politics, and strategy.

Can passions be used strategically to justify wars? To justify their violent endeavors, actors design strategic communications aiming at convincing others – their community, the international community, international jurisdictions – of the validity of their violent project. From Menelas who “had to” get his revenge against Pâris, to contemporary jihadists of the likes of the Kouachi brothers who mention that they fight to “avenge the Prophet”, desires for revenge seemingly constitute one of such strategies. In fact, Richard Ned Lebow sees in revenge one of the four main justifications of wars from the 19th to the 21st centuries. Centuries before them, Just War thinker Gratian had declared, quoting Cicero's De Republica, that “those wars are unjust which are undertaken without cause. For aside from vengeance or for the sake of fighting off enemies, no just war can be waged” (Rep. III. 35a). Vengeful passions are thus strategically mobilized, at the discursive level, to posit the morality of a war cause, i.e., to justify taking up arms. Other passionate outbursts also seemingly play a role in justifying political violence. In international law, preventive and preemptive self-defenders seem justified to act because they “fear” that something may happen. Similarly, States may be justified in acquiring nuclear capacities because they “fear” that others, non-liberal actors, may own them too. Realist accounts of war, additionally, justify the accumulation of capabilities around the fear that others may be preparing for attack. In the history of conflicts, therefore, actors who feel vengeful and/or afraid may arguably be justified in going to war. How is that so? What is the status of passions as justifications for war? Can they ever be used strategically to justify violent endeavors and what are the ethical underpinnings behind such use?

Classical strategic studies literature posits that sound strategic practice ought to be guided by appropriate answers to two kinds of questions. The first kind of questions relate to an inquiry into the character of the war at hand. Strategists ought to ask about the respective political objectives of the belligerents, the means at their disposal etc. The second line of questions concerns the anticipation of the consequences of strategic performance. The “so what?” question, which directs attention to the consequentialist logic of strategy, is the prime example here. This article advocates for strategists to adopt the approach/avoid tension as the third crucial question in the strategist’s toolkit. The approach/avoid tension forms the most fundamental question of human psychology, especially its motivational system. Consequently, everything strategists do can be understood with reference to either approach or avoid motivations. Most importantly, the approach/avoid tension gives meaning to the first two questions. It only makes sense to ask about the character of the war at hand if one intends to approach or avoid it. Similarly, it only makes sense to ask about the consequences of one’s actions if one intends to take those actions or to avoid them. Contemporary psychological research further indicates that the approach/avoid tension can improve our understanding of how particular choices change strategist’s character in the long term. Drawing on the relevant literature from evolutionary psychology, the article discusses the many relevant implications of the approach/avoid tension for our understanding and navigation of strategic affairs.

Russia has been attempting to influence politics and society in various European and NATO countries in recent years, aiming at the minds of the citizens. Decades ago, Jacques Ellul (1973) described propaganda as a social phenomenon that grows within society and is intrinsically intertwined with it. In recent years, a new concept has been emerging and is even being described as the sixth operational domain – Cognitive Warfare (Cluzel 2021). The implications on the information domain were not yet explored in depth. Without a look back into the historical experience, it is impossible to assess what should be done in the long term by organizations such as the EU or NATO in the information environment. As Cognitive Warfare can be considered a relatively new phenomenon, albeit not dissimilar to Ellul's (1973) view of propaganda, the experience of nations involved in protracted conflicts of the 21st century, including Russia's hybrid warfare campaigns, is invaluable. Therefore, an inductive approach is utilized to draw inferences from available data from such countries. One of the nations used for the analysis is the Czech Republic, a country with a quite significant pro-Russian segment of society, which Russia has exploited for many years. The other is Ukraine, which is now in a full-out war but has been a victim of Russian hybrid warfare since at least the 2010s. The paper aims to assess the importance of continuous effort of organizations such as NATO or the EU in the cognitive, human-oriented domain. I expect the Czech and Ukraine's experiences to show that being on the defence in the cognitive domain might prove to be a mistake with a significant impact on the future of democracy for any country.