2024 — Prague

The Indo-Pacific region has experienced a notable surge in the establishment and consolidation of new multilateral and minilateral frameworks, largely driven by the shifting geopolitical landscape shaped by China's growing influence. Notably, he Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad), consisting of Australia, India, Japan, and the United States, has advanced through intensive and regular cooperation to address pressing challenges in the region such as climate protection and health policy to maritime security. Concurrently, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), a political and economic union representing 10 states in Southeast Asia, has progressively expanded its objectives to encompass the establishment of a shared security regime, in ordeer to contrast political repression by member states, narcotics trafficking,and terrorism. However, a noticeable research gap persists in the current literature regarding the ASEAN and Quad frameworks comparison. This paper aims to delve into the evolving dynamics within these two entities, meticulously scrutinizing the intricate interplay of differences, convergences, and emerging challenges within the evolving geopolitical landscape. The research will unfold in several key dimensions. Firstly, it will thoroughly examine the impact of changing geopolitical dynamics on joint military exercises, capacity-building efforts, and trainings for defense cooperation. Secondly, an in-depth analysis of existing charters and members' declarations will be conducted to illuminate the formal structures and commitments of both ASEAN and the Quad. Thirdly, the research will delve into the ASEAN-Quad bilateral relations with countries in the region —specifically South Korea, Mongolia, and Pakistan— providing a comprehensive understanding of the interconnectedness of these frameworks. Finally, the paper will undertake examine and analyze the interactions between ASEAN and the Quad. This comparative approach will shed light on the distinct roles, contributions, and potential collaborations between the two frameworks, thereby contributing to a more nuanced understanding of defence cooperation dynamics in the Indo-Pacific region.

Multilateral military exercises (MMEs) are largely ignored by scholars of international security, despite the fact that they tell us much about a state’s strategic goals and contingency plans. They arguably serve as a better indicator of a state’s intent than either studying discourse or policy documents alone or other metrics than are often invoked such as force structure, which may take decades to substantially alter. In that sense, they are a better predictor of where states intend to conduct humanitarian operations, manage crises or fight wars. Furthermore, their planning and execution represents a huge investment of any military’s time and energy, often being described as the “meat and potatoes” of what military forces do. In sum, they matter in theoretical, policy and operational terms. We examine that the role that maritime multilateral exercises play in the implementation of American grand strategy in three regions—Europe, the greater Middle East and the Indo-Pacific. First, we develop a conceptual framework, offering a threefold categorization of types and MMEs, and an explanation for why each might predominate in a particular region. Second, we explain why we focus on US-led exercises. We then discuss what MMEs can reveal about the evolving strategies of the last three American presidential administrations (Obama Trump, and Biden). Third, we examine our claims in the U.S.’ primary three theaters of operation, examining variance both across the regions and within each region over time and perceptions of the operating environment has changed. Finally, we conclude by considering the potential for using this approach to study the grand strategies of other states) in a comparable manner.

This paper examines the current state of Sino-Russian strategic cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region through the lens of joint military exercises. Over the last two decades, China and Russia have conducted an increasing number of joint military exercises around the globe, both multilaterally and bilaterally. In 2012 the two countries launched their first joint naval exercise in the Yellow Sea, codenamed “Joint Sea-2012”. Since then, China and Russia have continued to develop their “Comprehensive Strategic Cooperation” and conducted a series of strategic air and naval patrols in the Asia-Pacific. Additionally, they have shown more willingness to take political risks, by increasing their military presence in sensitive sea lanes in the East China Sea, the Sea of Japan, and the Western Pacific. Drawing on existing academic literature on political and coercive signaling, this paper highlights the diplomatic-military dimension, as well as the significance of Sino-Russian exercises. By outlining emerging trends in the planning of bilateral exercises between China and Russia over the past decade, this paper shows how China is gradually shaping this cooperation to its advantage. Finally, this paper offers a reflection on the strategic risks and potential for escalation against the backdrop of territorial disputes and China’s military ambitions in the region.

With the advent of the New Revolution in Military Affairs, the strategic environment that existed during the post-Cold War “unipolar moment,” when the US and its junior alliance partners could conduct combined arms operations with guaranteed air superiority and freedom of maneuver in the seas, is no more. Nevertheless, the fact that the globalized, hyperconnected 21st century will be a century where great power competition will in large part be over command of the sea is at odds with the scant literature to inform in particular small states’ naval strategy in the new bi/multipolar strategic environment. While there have been some recent works reviewing the literature, for example by Mulqueen et al. and McCabe et al., the latter rightly admit that these works have “only touched the surface of the topic”; indeed, it is more descriptive than theorizing. Long lulled into a false sense of security, and unwavering American protection, Europe’s current posture and approach are wholly inadequate. Especially if multiple crises in different parts around Europe crop up simultaneously, smaller European states dependent on the UK and France––Europe’s only two serious naval powers––will soon be overwhelmed. At the same time, it is smaller European countries’ combined economic surplus that can potentially yield the added capabilities that move us to European “strategic autonomy.” That is, if a region-centered common naval strategy is devised, a communication and command infrastructure separate from NATO is set up, needs-based procurement toward 2035 happens in a coordinated, complementary fashion, and there is the political will and long-term financial commitment along the lines of the “Zeitenwende” to do so. This article explores what a credible European external posture could look like, and how small European navies could contribute to such an overall stronger defense outlook.

Cold War strategic competition was dominated by the actions of the US and USSR. Their material preponderance, coupled with tightly integrated multilateral alliances systems in Europe, oriented competition around this central axis of competition. But the current environment is less centralized, characterized by cross-cutting alliances and interacting nuclear dyads. How has this changed the nature of nuclear competition? We assess this question by considering the inter-Korean competition and its effects outside the peninsula. In response to North Korea’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, Seoul has procured stealth aircraft and precision, long-range missiles. It has also authorized the deployment of US missile defense systems to its territory, pursued greater nuclear coordination with Washington, and even threatened nuclear acquisition itself. These moves are aimed at Pyongyang, but they have spillover effects on China. Exploiting new Chinese language military documents, we show that South Korea’s increasingly sophisticated arsenal of counterforce systems is contributing to Beijing’s anxiety about the survivability of its nuclear arsenal, helping to spur China’s nuclear arsenal expansion. This has important implications both for the academic literature on alliances and arms racing as well as for policy debates surrounding Sino-American nuclear competition. In particular, it suggests that alliances might not just entrap patrons in wars but also in arms races. This creates a type of inter-alliance security dilemma, where security spirals in one state dyad produce security spirals in separate state dyads. Further, it reveals that contemporary strategic competition in East Asia systematically differs from the Cold War due to the existence of multiple cross-cutting alliances. This complicates signalling efforts, and, by increasing the number of relevant actors, augurs deep challenges for any efforts at bilateral nuclear arms control between the US and China.

Amidst escalating geopolitical competition and fears of weaponized interdependence, cyber capacity building assistance has climbed the foreign policy agendas of both weak and powerful actors. Yet, conventional wisdom about cyber capacity building (CCB) assistance implies a strategic conundrum: on the one hand, CCB assistance is held to be crucial for improving the recipient’s autonomy and security in cyberspace. On the other hand, three major providers of such assistance—the United States, the EU, and China—have been accused of benefiting from the same network vulnerabilities that these programmes aim to redress. Therefore, this paper asks, how do powerful donors perceive CCB assistance provisions to developing states as shaping their strategic advantage? Further, what factors have shaped variation in donors’ provision of CCB assistance to developing states? I argue that CCB assistance is a new and increasingly popular form of strategic alignment which has been used to reconfigure or maintain networked asymmetries in the donor’s favour. To probe the plausibility of this argument, I undertake a qualitative analysis of primary source documents and elite interviews to assess American, EU, and Chinese provision of CCB assistance to African states. My analysis supports this argument, and further shows these donors have adopted different strategies of assistance to encourage favourable structural alignments with the recipient. Three mediating factors help to explain their different strategies of assistance: the donor’s relative access to and control over the intermediary provider, their normative approach to development, and the locus of geopolitical competition. Ultimately, this paper reveals how CCB assistance can be instrumentalized to shape the hard and soft infrastructural conditions for strategic advantage.

In the past 600 years, only one war has occurred between China, Japan, and Korea (Imjin War, 1592-1598). Yet contemporary foreign policy conversations emphasize China’s threat to the West without proper consideration for the region’s security architecture and balance of power. Analysts predict Sino-American and Sino-European relations based on 19th century neorealist theories that derive from Western conflicts, failing to contextualize China’s role in its own regional security context and the power of competition between the three East Asian powers. Within the East Asian security complex, the political choice to engage – or not engage – will determine wars, as seen by the region’s approach to security competition in the past. This paper argues that East Asia is not a sub-section of the global security architecture, but rather demonstrates unique security dynamics. Consequently, when analysing, we must consider regional security complex theory in predicting great power competition that would integrate non-kinetic statecraft, such as cyber and nuclear capabilities. I challenge explanations of conflict that privilege structural explanations and instead explore how several aspects of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean foreign and security policy–their security interests and motivations, force projection capabilities, and willingness to balance against China–will define broader dynamics of competition and conflict both amongst these regional actors and between the US and China. By teasing out the regional drivers of competition, I highlight the multiple avenues through which competition can manifest that are overlooked in more structuralist theories of great power war.

Debates over great power competition in the western Pacific have largely been shaped by the question over a Taiwan contingency. Nevertheless, the scholarly work on the topic has rarely focused on the strategic and operational roles that some of the Japanese administered islands in the vicinity of Taiwan. We argue that the group of Japanese islands that are adjacent to Taiwan–namely the Sakishima Islands–are strategically important assets since they are both enablers of deterrence against a Chinese invasion of Taiwan and potential vulnerabilities that China could leverage for a wedge strategy. Taking the opposite side of the main island of Okinawa across the 155-mile-wide Miyako Strait, the Sakishima Islands are part of Japan’s southwest island chain that stretches towards Taiwan. Drawing from a series of Chinese, Japanese, and military-technical sources, we demonstrate that patrolling and fortifying these islands as anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) outposts could strengthen deterrence against hostile Chinese action on two levels. First, fortifying this group of small and vulnerable islands is crucial in denying China the opportunity to engage in a salami tactic to test the strength of the U.S.-Japan alliance through a fait accompli. Second, arming the group of small islands as A2/AD outposts could complicate Chinese operational planning for a blockade against Taiwan by directly threatening Chinese naval assets operating east of Taiwan. By doing so, the small islands not only closes a potential vulnerability of Chinese coercion but also plays a key role in checking Chinese maritime aggression. Our findings generate broad scholarly and policy implications in addressing strategic challenges in an age of great power competition, some of which are also of direct relevance to European security regarding deterrence in contested spaces, alliance politics, and escalation control.

The Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine supposedly marks the return of the paradigmatic conventional high-intensity warfare, thus calling into question the past two decades of irregular conflict. Upon closer inspection, however, the war in Ukraine also exhibits several continuities, including the fact that non-citizens are fighting on behalf of both conflict parties. This paper examines the role of such volunteers in the Ukrainian war effort. Based on a review of the existing literature, our study argues that there is a need for a distinction between regular and irregular foreign volunteers. The paper then proposes a novel typology of such volunteers, based on their host’s legal status as well as their organizational capacity. Through a number of case studies including the International Legion, Chechen volunteer battalions as well as the Russian Volunteer Corps, and by comparing them to previous conflicts, the paper examines the utility of foreign volunteers for Ukraine. Its findings indicate that the Ukrainian experience largely confirms historical trends: Foreign volunteers are primarily useful for strategic messaging and garnering international attention. Meanwhile, their impact at the operational and tactical level is limited, with irregular volunteers having a higher probability than regular ones to affect battlefield outcomes. On the other hand, the Ukrainian case also shows some nuances with regard to the International Legion neither fitting the irregular nor regular volunteer category neatly as well as the attainment of deniability by using Russian volunteer groups carrying out cross-border raids.

The rise of political polarization and partisan contestation over foreign and security policy has challenged traditional notions of bipartisanship and cross-party consensus in democratic countries. While partisan contestation seems to be prevalent, there are instances where cross-party consensus emerges. This paper theorizes a novel causal mechanism of partisan entrapment through which cross-party consensus can emerge in parliamentary democracies. The paper tests this novel mechanism by examining the partisan contestation over Germany’s military aid to Ukraine in the wake of the 2022 Russian invasion. This paper contributes to the growing literature on the party-political contestation of foreign and security policy and the scholarship on foreign policy consensus.

After the Vietnam War, the United States attempted to reduce its troop levels, which led to a deterioration of the South Korea-US alliance. However, little attention has been paid to the Carter administration's ultimately unsuccessful attempt at withdrawal. This paper examines why civil-military preferences clashed and how this led to the failure of President Carter's complete withdrawal of US ground forces from Korea. Previous studies suggesting that US foreign policy patterns and strategic interests determined the withdrawal of US forces stationed abroad have not provided a coherent account of the domestic determinants of withdrawal failure, in particular the intervention of military elites. An alternative but essential factor to consider is civil-military relations. Even in mature democracies such as the United States, the foreign and national security policy preferences of civilian leaders and military elites can differ significantly. In such cases, military elites have resisted presidential foreign policy leadership through various political tactics and alliances with Congress. This paper develops a dual principal-agent model and causal process tracing to trace the trajectory of strategic interactions between the president, Congress, and military elites. In doing so, this paper demonstrates how US military elites can undermine presidential supremacy over US foreign policy.

This paper explores what drove Vladimir Putin’s decisions to send troops on combat missions to foreign countries since his ascent to the Russian presidency on the last day of 1999. The author will first infer hypothetical drivers of Putin’s decisions to send troops to fight abroad from the academic literature on the subject. He will then explore whether any of the inferred drivers have been present in instances when, as the evidence that will be presented in this paper demonstrates, Putin has deliberated whether to order such an intervention. The author will examine a total of nine such instances, including six in which the Russian leader decided to send troops to fight abroad, and three in which he chose not to. This examination will aim to reveal what confluence of conditions has been both necessary and sufficient for the Kremlin autocrat to order a military intervention in a foreign country. Ascertaining this confluence would constitute a modest contribution to the body of academic knowledge about the use of force by post-Soviet Russia against other countries, in the author’s view. The paper’s findings may also be of practical use for policymakers whose job it is, to paraphrase Winston Churchill’s 1939 adage, to unwrap the riddle in a mystery inside an enigma in order to forecast to you forceful actions of Russia against other countries.

Both academic studies and internal EU documents have established that contracting Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs) services by the EU is nowadays a widespread practice, despite the persisting lack of EU-level regulation and significant divergence in Member States’ national regulatory frameworks. PMSCs have been used primarily to support and sustain EU activities abroad, i.e. both civilian and military Common Security and Defence Policy missions and European External Action Service delegations and diplomatic missions. In this paper, we conduct a congruence test of two explanations for the use of PMSC services by the EU. First, building on Christopher Hill’s “capabilities-expectations gap” concept, we examine whether PMSCs have been contracted to provide manpower that the EU and its member states lack completely or which they do not possess in sufficient quantity and/or quality when they are needed by an EU mission. Second, building on Asle Toje’s “consensus-expectations gap” concept, we further explore whether PMSCs have been used to circumvent Member States’ unwillingness to provide manpower that they actually possess, thereby helping circumvent existing political constraints on EU power projection abroad.

Since, the Russia-Ukraine conflict, particular concerns exist about disruptinon of energy supplies and transportation systems, including global ports, such as the Port of Rotterdam (Ornstein, 2022). While threats to critical infrastructures are not new (e.g. attacked ports during WWII), the contemporary situation is different: (digital) technology plays a key role in hybrid warfare, making the potential fallout for ports even bigger. The Netherlands has key global ports, including the Port of Rotterdam and Northe Sea Canal Area. These ports handle shipping and are important for energy distribution (NCTV, 2017). An attack on these ports could lead to a ‘serious social disruption’ for the Netherlands (NCTV, 2017, p. 1), and Europe more broadly. Especially the Port of Rotterdam has concerns due to more sanctions against Russia (Port of Rotterdam, 2022), and subsequently asks for a ‘digital anti-aircraft defence’ to fend off possible Russian cyberattacks in the port of Rotterdam (Ornstein, 2022). However, it remains unclear whether (cyber)attacks on ports can be attributed to other state actors, as well as that it remains unclear what really counts as an act of hybrid war and what role European maritime ports play in hybrid warfare. Hence, port policing should focus on a hybrid warfare scenario, next to the well-embedded tackling of organised crime; but is it status quo? This paper aims to dig into this question, using ethnographic date gathered between April 2022 and March 2023 in the Dutch ports of Rotterdam and the North Sea Canal Area/Port of Amsterdam. Moreover, this paper shall focus on the hybridized policing of organized crime and state/hybrid threats in the global port environments. There will be a focus as well on what hybridized policing as a topic implies for the interdisciplinary cross-pollination of criminology and security studies.

In recent years the operations of mercenaries and other comparable service providers such as private military and security companies (PMSC), have come to light more frequently, nevertheless there are still many unanswered questions surrounding the phenomena. The relevant regulatory frameworks, are of limited use given the changes in the nature of these actors and how they have been used in recent decades. Attention has been paid to, for instance, recruitment practices and the involvement of mercenaries and PMSC in non-international armed conflicts, but there are still issues that remain opaque. The financing of mercenarism is one area of concern. While the connections between mercenaries and PMSC and the exploitation of natural resources are well known, less is known about the intermediaries, routes, and resources involved in funding mercenarism . What is clear is that financing methods have evolved, especially in light of the growing significance of cryptocurrencies. This paper examines the channels exploited by mercenaries, their clients, and enablers, and questions whether existing regulatory provisions around the financing of mercenaries and related actors are fit for purpose.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is poised to have a deep transformative effect on the character of war. While discussions on military AI predominantly centered on the implications of Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS), empirical evidence highlights that AI applications extend beyond the notion of “killer robots”, especially in the form of decision-support and Lethal Targeting Assistance software. This is shown in these systems’ increasing presence in contemporary conflicts, as exemplified by the Russo-Ukrainian war and the conflict between Israel and Hamas. However, the existing body of literature in Security Studies investigating military AI usually falls short of comprehensively understanding the functioning, advantages, and limitations of statistical learning-based algorithms underpinning current AI systems. This hinders the effective study of military AI and often leads to tendencies of technological determinism and overestimation of AI’s actual role and capabilities in warfare. This research seeks to address this pitfall by integrating Strategic Studies literature with knowledge from the field of Machine Learning to understand whether current AI systems are capable of facing war on their own devices. This research aims to demonstrate the limitations of statistical learning-based AI in warfare by drawing on Security Studies literature to identify the set of capabilities required to effectively address the inherently nonlinear and chaotic nature of warfare. Subsequently, these capabilities will be tested against the heuristics and main tenets of Machine Learning. By doing so, this research provides technically informed insight into the suitability of AI in warfare, shedding light on its actual limitations and potential. The central argument posits that current AI systems are not ready to be deployed autonomously and without human judgment, as they rely on an inductive type of reasoning based on dataset analysis that is ill-suited to face the complex and unpredictable nature of warfare.

This paper seeks to investigate whether and how cybersecurity firms have possibly gained business power over democratic governments in the digital age? First, we propose an interaction-oriented view to approach the public-private coordination of how to secure cyberspace. Public and private actors need to agree on policies; and the one with lower costs of non-agreement arguably achieves the more desired outcomes. Second, we suggest a baseline model that combines two conditions shaping these costs of non-agreement and thus business power: (I) Do cybersecurity firms have either a specific expertise or a large amount of general resources at their disposal? (II) Is power bargaining either exercised through more formalized coordination (e.g. civilian markets) or rather through informal arrangements (e.g. military markets)? Third, we engage in an empirical stock-taking exercise of mapping the private suppliers of USCYBERCOM since 2018. We gathered more than 250 contracts from https://www.usaspending.gov/ to reveal USCYBERCOM’s most important contractors; to identify the most relevant services and to assess the extent of competition on these markets. Moreover, we explored the suppliers’ geographical location as well as their attributes and the primary markets that they were involved in. By drawing on this extensive empirical evidence, we suggest that the substantial share of non-competitive tendering increasingly normalizes quiet politics; and, therefore, provides manifold opportunities for the possibly ‘unwarranted influence’ of business power on how to secure cyberspace. In sum, this paper seeks to contribute to both the better understanding of funding innovative military technologies and the more generalizable politics of public-private coordination in international security in the digital age.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 inaugurated a high-intensity prolonged conventional war that has since become stalemated. Recent Russian and Ukrainian offensives have failed to achieve meaningful territorial advances. The fate of the war increasingly hinges on each sides’ ability to adapt and innovate—particularly for Ukraine where the early loss of territory and dependence on western aid create vulnerabilities for strategic loss in a context of military draw. This project is collecting extensive new data on how Ukrainian military adaptation collected from research trips to Ukraine, compilation of open sources, and interviews with Ukrainian experts and decision-makers. Early analysis suggests that Ukraine’s approach to adaptation largely depends on the decentralized efforts of individual military units collaborating with a dense network of civil society organizations. For example, Ukraine’s success innovating drones that inflict disproportionate damage on Russian forces is a case in point. Drones collective and amateur workshops have led the way modifying commercial drones for military operations. Civil society organizations then spearheaded the training of 35,000 Ukrainian drone pilots. Close informal relations between individual military units and these outside actors have fostered rapid feedback loops between soldiers at the front and technicians in the rear. However, there are drawbacks to Ukraine’s decentralized approach including that policymakers lack adequate mechanisms for identifying and funneling resources to the most successful developments. Limited resources are also dispersed across multiple organizations that duplicate one another’s efforts.

Emotional influence on academic knowledge production is a pervasive but overlooked phenomenon. Like all academics, strategic studies scholars generate knowledge through thinking. Contemporary psychological and neuroscientific research indicates that all thinking is, for better or worse, influenced by emotions. Recent research from across different fields indicates that scholarly thinking is not an exception in this regard. Emotions as diverse as fear, anxiety, wonder, awe, and anger accompany scholars in their everyday investigations and shape how and what academics think about their subjects of inquiry. Building upon this previous research, this paper investigates how the emotion of interest matters to the development of strategic studies scholarship. In our field, we usually treat interest in a rationalistic manner; almost as a manifestation of a cost/benefit calculation. The infamous trinity of “fear, honour, and interest”, unfairly ascribed to Thucydides, is perhaps the most popular example of this tendency. However, there are other ways to think about interest. Specifically, contemporary psychological literature shows that interest can also be understood as an emotion. This literature allows us to understand how interest emerges, how it influences our thinking, how it motivates behavior, and how it can be regulated. Accordingly, this paper combines this emotional perspective with abductive logic and selected examples of contemporary strategic studies scholarship to illustrate how interest shapes knowledge production in our field. The paper further discusses some notable implications of interest’s influence on strategic studies scholarship. In particular, it highlights certain positive and negative aspects of interest’s influence and elaborates on the possibility of regulating interest for the purpose of improving the quality of thinking in strategic studies.

After the outbreak of a new war in Europe, the field of Strategic Studies is enjoying renewed attention and relevance. While this field, situated between history and political science, offers a wealth of knowledge on war, the field lacks ontological and epistemological diversity. Specifically, it lacks a critical tradition, akin to Critical Security Studies. The lack of such a tradition has meant that scholars pursuing constructivist or critical approaches tend to self-identify with (Critical) Security and thus are unable to make a mark on Strategic Studies. As a consequence, the ontological and epistemological foundations of the field have never been fundamentally questioned. The Western-centrism and state-centrism of the field have largely gone unchallenged, leaving the field ill-prepared to offer a deep and global understanding of war. In this paper, we develop a research agenda and an argument for the necessity of Critical Strategic Studies. We first offer an in-depth investigation of the state of Strategic Studies, analysing its research strands and traditions and assessing the extent of its ontological and epistemological diversity. Based on the limitations, gaps, and opportunities identified in this review as well as established critical traditions in Security Studies, Terrorism Studies and Intelligence Studies, the paper sketches a research agenda for Critical Strategic Studies. We argue that CSS is necessary to interrogate how the field produces knowledge, to provide alternatives to the hitherto hegemonic approaches, and to ensure that Strategic Studies is sufficiently diverse to allow for an in-depth understanding of war.

How can an ontological framework help us to better understand strategic behaviour in cyberspace? Characterized by low entry barriers, fluid borders, and networked hierarchies, cyberspace presents opportunities for us to problematize classical assumptions about power projection and their implications for how we conceive of strategic behaviour in the digital age. However, present literature has largely overlooked the ontological dimension to cyberspace, focusing instead upon the production and consequences of cyber effects. This oversight is particularly stark in debates about how global actors have engaged in ‘cyber-geopolitics’, which seem to rely on–and simultaneously eschew–territorial sovereignty to explain strategic behaviour. This paper argues that the field’s failure to take ontology seriously has resulted in inadequate assumptions and explanations about contemporary strategic behaviour. To advance this claim, I make two analytical moves. First, I interrogate scholarly assumptions about what makes certain cyber capabilities ‘matter’ for producing effects in the first place. Building on these findings, I then demonstrate the utility of ontological security theory for explaining how and why policymakers have pursued geopolitical objectives in cyberspace through particular discourses and practices. The European Union’s cyber-foreign policy development from 2013-2022, which has thus far escaped pure realist and materialist-oriented expectations, is leveraged as an illustrative case. Overall, the paper reveals the co-constitutive relationship between cyberspace as an environment and foreign policy actors’ self-construction within it through discourses and practices, contributing to an emerging research agenda on this subject (e.g. Lupovici, 2022).

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to help policy makers and military officers navigate the battlefield in Gaza and Ukraine has often made headlines in the past months. Rather than fully autonomous applications of AI, the technologies are reported to be used to quickly perceive, evaluate, and act upon battlefield information. Among scholars of security and strategic studies, the use of AI in the military domain has raised many questions on the ethical, legal, political, tactical and strategic implications of this development. Pivotal to this debate is the question if and to what extent decision-making can be outsourced to machines and which tasks require human expertise. However, what human expertise is and how this notion of expertise changed over time since the early uses of computer models for military purposes is not well studied. This paper therefore investigates how the relation between humans and machines in the production of expert knowledge has transformed. More specifically, it will adopt a historical approach to analyse how early computational programs, developed for a military purpose, balanced mechanically processed data with human judgment to create expert knowledge.

How does tactical, organizational, and other information pass between armed groups? Existing research overwhelmingly focuses on observable links like alliances, training camps, and shared foreign patrons. Yet, information is also passed via organizational lineage through processes of splitting, merging, and membership migration. Focusing on organizational splitting in particular, we test this argument with a case study of Republican armed groups in Ireland and Northern Ireland, and by statically forecasting how organizational linkages shape patterns of tactical diffusion between groups. The results confirm our expectations and they underscore the critical role of organizational lineage in the diffusion of information between groups. This has important ramifications for how researchers model the dynamics of armed groups particularly as they relate to operational capacity, tactical innovation, and future trajectory.

In the post-Cold War World, stigmatization emerged as a way of disciplining transgressive states. However, the existing state of affairs raises questions on the feasibility of targeted punishment and disciplining through stigmatization. Even the members of the Western liberal-democratic society of states sharing certain normative stances and similar security concerns do not always act in solidarity in creating an "audience of normals", a group of states that come together to "stigmatize" -label, stereotype, separate and discriminate- a norm-breaking/deviant/transgressor actor, to put an end to its transgressive behavior. When they do, the stigmatization might not bear the targeted outcomes due to either the stigmatized actor's stigma management or the stigma's inadequate intensity. Adopting the theoretical insights revolving around the concept of stigma in international relations, this paper aims to explore at which instances a Western "audience of normals" was able to be mobilized to stigmatize states involved in terrorist activity. Three case studies from the Middle East and North Africa region, namely Iran, Libya, and Syria are selected to show the consensus and difference of approaches of the EU and the US in stigmatizing the terror-related activities of these actors. By doing this, the study will contribute to the theoretical debates on stigma imposition and discuss potential outcomes for international security.

This paper broadens the research on the international agenda of Countering/Preventing Violent Extremism by putting it into conversation with critical research on countering hybrid threats. While both international security agendas differ in their identification of the origins of the respective threats and specific countermeasures, they share the focus on security threats stemming from the interplay of actions of malign actors present inside the social body and domestic social failures. Drawing on the theoretical research on social imaginaries and critical research on resilience, the paper traces the imaginaries underpinning these international agendas and highlights the rising interest in societal divisions, polarisations, marginalisation, and alienation as a source of social vulnerabilities. Such imaginary foregrounds the idea of a cohesive society as a precondition for societal resilience and thus security, while pointing to threats stemming from groups that might not be properly attached to the state body and the rest of the society. Due to their marginalisation and alienation, these might be swayed by hostile propaganda or extremist recruiters and thus potentially present a security threat to the rest of society. In conclusion, the paper points out a novel social security imaginary foregrounding various societal failures as well as social cohesion as a precondition of societal resilience and thus security.

This study embarks on a comprehensive exploration of the intersection between narrative and terrorism, delving into the pivotal role narratives play in the radicalisation process. With a methodological approach grounded in an exhaustive literature review, employing keywords such as "narrative," "terrorism," and "radicalisation," the study identifies three patterns of findings on this topic. The first category of researchers establishes a direct causal link between narratives and their impact on the opinions and behaviours of individuals, suggesting that stories can significantly influence audience actions. In contrast, the second category acknowledges the importance of narratives in radicalisation but refrains from asserting a straightforward causal relationship between narrative content and the commitment to violent actions. The third category casts doubt on the direct correlation between narratives and violent behaviours, positing that current academic discourse may overstate the influence of narratives, overlooking the critical element of individual agency. This investigation highlights the divergent scholarly perspectives on the role of narratives in radicalisation, revealing a common thread of scepticism towards the unequivocal power of narratives and underscoring the absence of rigorous, evidence-based studies. By examining the existing literature, the study seeks to address pressing questions surrounding the certainty of narrative influence on individual radicalisation and to define the narrative’s function more clearly within this complex process. The anticipated outcome is to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the narrative dimension of terrorism, challenging the existing literature's potential overemphasis on narrative power and advocating for a balanced consideration of audience agency.

Nuclear weapons and climate change put future generations in the wrong by externalizing potential long-term harm and constraining their freedom of choice through extended policy trajectories. Focused on nuclear weapons, this article conducts a comparative analysis of intergenerational justice concerns in both contexts. The principal argument emphasizes the distinct temporality of these challenges, revealing three crucial temporal disparities. First, the externalization of intergenerational harm follows different timelines. Climate-related risks intensify across successive generations, while the risk of future generations navigating the aftermath of nuclear war accumulates over the long term, becoming more likely over extended periods compared to shorter ones. Second, the sustainability of present generations' incentives to prioritize immediate benefits over future generations’ well-being varies. The appeal of fossil fuels is expected to wane over time in the climate context, whereas perceived benefits of nuclear deterrence are likely to endure. Third, while the visual salience of the intergenerational implications of nuclear weapons is diminishing, the gradual impacts of climate change are becoming increasingly evident. Comparing how intergenerational injustice unfolds through continued reliance on nuclear deterrence and climate change not only highlights the oversight of intergenerational justice in nuclear ethics debates, but also carves out the distinct nature of intergenerational justice concerns in the context of nuclear weapons. Derived from this comparative analysis, a more nuanced understanding of intergenerational injustice in nuclear weapons facilitates a critical examination of mitigation and rectification strategies.

In 1996, the International Court of Justice was unable to “conclude definitively whether the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be lawful or unlawful in an extreme circumstance of self-defence, in which the very survival of a State would be at stake”. This highly nuanced legal (non-)condemnation of nuclear threats came after decades of the Cold War, which was characterised by nuclear threats, but also decades of efforts to stigmatise nuclear weapons in general and nuclear threats in particular. The latter culminated, for example, in Article 1(d) of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which prohibits signatories from threatening to use nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, over the past decade, we've seen a normalisation of escalatory nuclear rhetoric through the rise of populism and authoritarian emboldenment. A universal norm against nuclear threats has yet to manifest, and nuclear armed states have been the persistent objectors. In November 2002, however, the G20 Bali Declaration of November declared the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons “inadmissible”. What is striking about this declaration is that there was no disagreement on this language, even though the group includes six nuclear armed states, their allies and partner countries that base (part of) their security strategies on nuclear deterrence. The credible threat to use nuclear weapons is integral for nuclear deterrence as practised by nine nuclear armed states. It's also noteworthy that one member (Russia) has recently been heavily and widely criticised for its thinly veiled nuclear threats in the context of its war of aggression against Ukraine. Does this indicate a strengthening norm against nuclear threats? And what implications does this have for deterrence and progress towards nuclear disarmament? This paper aims to examine the emergence and strength of the norm against nuclear threats through historical discourse analysis and process tracing.

The strength of Nuclear-Weapons-Free-Zones (NWFZs) is put to the test as global strategic stability falters from conflict between Nuclear Weapons States (NWS). Currently, five NWFZs are legitimized by treaties that span large regions including Africa and South America (Goldblat, 1997; Green, 2009). This prominence is explained by the historic utilization of NWFZs as a diplomatic tool for countries championing nuclear disarmament—for example, many Middle Eastern countries push for an NWFZ to pressure Israel to destroy its alleged nuclear arsenal (Bahgat, 2007). However, as tensions heighten between NWS in crises such as Ukraine and North Korea, a new conceptual framework for understanding the importance of NWFZs stems from the differentiation between “stationing” and “proliferating” nuclear weapons in Non-Nuclear Weapons States (NNWS). As norms surrounding stationing nuclear weapons within NNWS weaken, NWFZs will play a more prominent role in keeping certain areas of the world nuclear-free. Understanding this role could prove vital to both long-term disarmament and nonproliferation goals. The paper will explore the conceptual importance of NWFZs in an attempt to modernize relevant frameworks developed in the late-1990s and early-2000s. The paper considers the historical value of NWFZs and argues that a re-emergence of the diplomatic power of NWFZs will occur due to heightened and more direct conflict between NWS over the next decade.

As a result of the pro-disarmament discourse stemming from the Humanitarian Turn in nuclear disarmament, there has been a growing salience of domestic voices in European countries which contribute to NATO's nuclear mission. At least prior to the Russia's invasion of Ukraine, many of these voices advocated for strong steps towards nuclear disarmament. But how do the technocrats, who often shape the policy, view the public view; and how do they engage with it? Drawing on unique study of technocratic responses to nuclear sharing contestation in all five host nations in Europe, I advance a technocratic theory of nuclear sharing, which takes democratic responsiveness seriously. Drawing on the work in the field of political and democratic theory, I develop a model of technocratic response to political contestation; which I then test against existing empirical record.

This book offers the first comprehensive study of defence offsets and its economic, security, political and theoretical implications. Originating in the second half of the 19th century, defence offsets – additional economic, industrial and technological benefits to states for buying foreign weapons – have since been a key feature of the global arms trade and defence industry. And yet, offsets are an underresearched and undertheorised phenomenon. This book fills this gap in the literature by offering the first general theory of defence offsets, as well as the first systematic analysis of the offset phenomenon. By building on the insights of scholars of defence economics and drawing from the International Relations liberal paradigm, as well as reviving and adapting Robert Putnam’s two-level game framework, the book proposes a liberal-rationalist theory of defence offsets. It then proves the worth of such a theory through Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) of fifty-four fighter aircraft transfers from 1992 to 2021 inclusive, and three in depth case studies addressing offsets negotiated and agreed to as part of fighter aircraft competitions in Brazil, India and South Korea. This book will be of interest to students of defence studies, defence economics, security studies and International Relations.

Increased strategic competition over technology puts defence innovation at the forefront of current national security and defence policy strategizing. A central issue in the defence innovation debate is how different types of countries – from advanced major powers such as the US, over catching-up states like China to middling powers such as Russia, Iran and India, and finally to small countries, often advanced innovators like Israel and Singapore – organise their defence innovation systems. Filling a gap in the literature which focuses on either great powers or small but great innovators, this article reconstructs the logic of strategic sensemaking in defence innovation for small states without a particularly strong defence and innovation portfolio. For small states who are unable to either develop advanced defence materiel on their own or to participate in but a few of the leading international (allied and partner) capability development programmes, technology scouting – scanning the military technological edge – is both crucial to their strategic sensemaking. We reconstruct three modes of technology scouting as integral to national defence planning and capability development decision-making. The argument adds to the academic agenda of defence innovation and the global technological aspects of strategic competition, and is relevant to policy makers redesigning defence innovation and materiel policies.

Social scientists are increasingly focusing on the factors that explain the development, organisation, and enforcement of cybersecurity capabilities. However, a systematic analysis of these capabilities in terms of the policy instruments used has not been attempted so far. Which policy instruments can actors use? How do they vary between the institutions? How can the variation in the availability and use of capabilities be explained? This paper aims to answer these research questions using text-as-data techniques to analyse policy documents of EU Member States and European institutions. Reviewing the literature concerning the different phases of cybersecurity policy design, I develop a set of hypotheses within a general theoretical framework. I use mixed methods to cross-validate hypotheses and refine the theoretical framework. The data used are policy documents from 1990 to 2023, sourced from the online libraries of the UN, NATO, EU, and Member States, focusing on the cybersecurity policy sub-areas of Defence, Crime, Diplomacy, and Resilience. The identification of the policy instruments and the actors involved is conducted using Named Entity Recognition (NER) in the documents. Furthermore, I combine NER with a machine-learning method for estimating bureaucratic constraint variation to consider potential effects on implementation. Upon obtaining numerical values that represent the variety and frequency of policy instruments, I assess the consistency of the models corresponding to hypotheses through regression analysis. The findings offer a comparative analysis of state policy instruments within the EU’s supranational framework. The paper’s contributions are threefold: it provides a method for analysing the policies of individual states, considering the influence of supra-national frameworks, replicable in other policy areas; this methodological contribution follows the development of a theoretical framework that combines the literature of IR, policy analysis, IPE, and organisational studies in the field of cybersecurity; and it provides a systematisation of European cybersecurity policy documents.

In liberal market economies like the US and UK, private actors have come to play an indispensable role in the emergence of robust defense industries and the provision of security. States particularly rely on the private sector in areas of high technological innovation, such as arms production and cybersecurity. While technological innovation and the resulting public reliance on private expertise has been a common denominator, the emergence of public-private relations has been inconsistent across security sectors. Despite ideological parallels between the US and the UK, public-private relationships differ in the degree of consolidation or autonomy, and standardization of practices, between the state and private actors. In this study, we map these variations in the consolidation of relationships between public and private actors, attributing it to differences in institutional legacies and security pressures. Through case studies on the US and the UK, we trace the evolution of public-private dynamics in two security sectors, defense industry and cybersecurity, since end of the Cold War. We find that more entrenched institutional legacies in the military industry have led to a closer, less market-oriented position of private actors and greater dependence on the state through contractual relationships. Conversely, less entrenched institutional legacies in the nascent cybersecurity sector have contributed to a more market-oriented, stronger position of private actors vis a vis the state, as evidenced by ongoing challenges in regulating the private tech industry. Furthermore, we find that the changing nature of security pressures in the cyberspace could push states towards a (re-)integration of this sector into more consolidated defense military pipelines. This paper contributes to the growing literature on public-private-partnerships in security governance and offers insight into the nexus of state security and technological innovation in two historically different, yet connected security policy fields.

During the Cold War, Western public opinion was an important factor in shaping the trajectory of nuclear arms control talks between the United States and the Soviet Union. However, we know little about the extent of public support for arms control in today’s era of renewed great power competition. To address this gap, we conducted a series of surveys and survey experiments in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Poland. Our results show a high rate of approval of new arms control talks between the United States and its strategic competitors, Russia and China, among the citizens of all five NATO countries. Using data from a new elite survey of UK parliamentarians, we also found a sizeable gap between the views of the UK public and their political representatives. Finally, we demonstrate that public views can be strongly shaped by elite cues from experts and politicians, with arguments about the risk of non-compliance significantly reducing the support for new arms control negotiations. Our findings contribute to the scholarly literature on public attitudes toward nuclear weapons as well as to the policy debates on the feasibility and desirability of strategic arms control in the “third nuclear age.”

Why do states continue to invest in military technologies that are ineffective or simply do not work? Despite nearly 70 years of research and development in the United States, missile defense continues to face high, if not insurmountable, technological challenges, is financially burdensome, and has resulted in negative outcomes for strategic stability. Hence, this paper asks: What explains the continued and widespread support for missile defense among Americans policymakers? Contrary to common arguments about American cultural features, public appeal, and organizational politics, I contend that the persistence of missile defense can be explained by two conditions: technological malleability and a framework of ignorance. In a context of deep uncertainty and high complexity, technology is malleable, meaning that policymakers can envision it to serve many different purposes and thus have some benefit for everyone. At the same time, discussions about technology take place under a framework of ignorance, which enables policymakers to overlook, downplay, and deny the costs associated with missile defense. This creates the illusion that investment in the technology is relatively cost-free. Using original interview and archival evidence, I contrast two crucial cases: the entrenchment of national missile defense during the Obama Administration (2008-2016) with the decision to limit the development and deployment of missile defense under the ABM Treaty during the Nixon Administration (1969-1972). Not only does this paper introduce two novel concepts—technological malleability and ignorance—into the study of international relations, but it has also important implications for other emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence and cyber technology, that are bound to shape warfare in critical ways.

This article reviews competing understandings of the agency and moral relevance of nuclear weapons for international politics among two incommensurable worldviews in global nuclear politics: hegemonic nuclearism and subaltern anti-nuclearism. It argues that what (if anything) is considered a responsible nuclear weapon state largely depends on implicit assumptions about the agency and moral relevance of nuclear weapons. Despite the enormous growth in research related to nuclear deterrence, the available evidence remains ambiguous and inconclusive allowing for competing interpretations about the efficacy and reliability of nuclear deterrence and the co-existence of various ”nuclear ontologies“ (Ritchie 2022). After introducing the concepts of action schemes and second-order responsibility, the article analyzes how the two ontologies understand the agency of nuclear weapons for international politics. Whereas hegemonic nuclearism places emphasis on the instrumental role of nuclear weapons for deterrence and stability, subaltern anti-nuclearism pays much greater attention to unintended ways in which nuclear weapons shape the sets of options available to human agents, including the inherent risk of inadvertent escalation, the opportunity costs of nuclear deterrence, and the extremely unequal distribution of security benefits from nuclear deterrence. From a subaltern anti-nuclearist perspective, the diminished human agency in nuclear deterrence provides little need to distinguish responsible from irresponsible nuclear weapon states based on their identity and intentions. Instead, subaltern anti-nuclearism deems nuclear possession itself problematic in the sense of second-order responsibility. The article contributes to a growing literature seeking to operationalize and engage with notions of responsibility in relation to nuclear weapons and explores the ontological foundations of competing discourses in global nuclear politics.

How has Russia’s invasion of Ukraine influenced domestic debates on nuclear strategy in Russia? Western scholars and analysts have voiced the concern that as Russian conventional capabilities deteriorate due to the war, its reliance on non-strategic nuclear weapons could grow. Contrary to this expectation, this article argues that a close reading of political and military elites’ nuclear debates suggests more continuity than change in the role of nuclear weapons in Russia’s security strategy. By analyzing the Kremlin's nuclear signaling, strategic deliberations among military elites, and public exchanges among policy analysts in the first 18 months of the war, it finds that there has been a significant increase in nuclear discourse at all these levels. Nevertheless, the select voices among policy analysts calling for a lowering of the nuclear threshold diverge from the signaling by the political leadership and the debates among military elites.

While trite to say, the world’s geopolitical and geoeconomic centre of gravity has shifted to the Indo-Pacific. Trade between the EU and Asia is massive and almost exclusively waterborne, with the Indian Ocean being the hub, while high-tech supply chains now focus on multiple states in the Western Pacific. A European role in the Indo-Pacific is unavoidable but demands significant resources in an era of concurrent challenges in the Euro-Atlantic following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A naval presence is a powerful signal of interest, but European naval capacity is limited. How and with whom can these naval assets be deployed, and what are the central trade-offs? The paper tackles these issues, by spelling out the relative costs, risks, and benefits for various European coalitions of naval powers that look to build their presence in different parts of the Indo-Pacific.

The EU’s interest to play a role in Indo-Pacific security is rooted in the realization that European prosperity is inherently connected to and dependent on a stable and peaceful regional environment. Brussels has been advocating a more proactive engagement in the region already in its 2016 Global Strategy. The EU “Strategy for Cooperation in the Indo-Pacific”, published in 2021, explicitly highlights security and defense as one of the key priority areas for cooperation. While the rationale stands, the exact contours and content of this engagement remain often unclear and misunderstood. Indeed, as a trading power with no army nor military leverage, the EU’s capacity to effectively contribute to the region’s traditional security hotspots is limited. However, such view fails to consider the evolving nature of security, which has become increasingly defined by hybrid tactics and all-encompassing weaponization. At the same time, it omits the importance of everyday functional security concerns that have been sidelined in the context of great power politics. This paper argues that the EU can play a constructive role in the Indo-Pacific at several levels. First, it can leverage its economic, technological, and normative heft in areas such as economic security, emerging and disruptive technologies, and governance of global commons, including the maritime, the outer, and the information space. Secondly, its expertise in addressing non-traditional security challenges such illegal fishing, transnational crime, or environmental degradation, is of great value to many developing countries in the region. Finally, its effort to forge a third way in the escalating Sino-American rivalry echoes the sentiments of many regional partners, building its image as a trustworthy, stabilizing force.

In 2021, the Indo-Pacific suddenly and unexpectedly rose on top of the foreign policy agenda of the European Union (EU). The publication of the EU’s Indo Pacific Strategy (henceforth ‘Strategy’) in September 2021 showed that the EU considers the region of great geopolitical interest with important security challenges. The Strategy laid down the EU’s policy preferences and at the same time was an instance of signaling to various audiences. We argue in this paper that the EU, as a regional organization with intergovernmental and supranational elements, signals as well, albeit differently. We sketch what have been the most effective signals of the EU’s interests in the Indo-Pacific since the launch of the Strategy, as well as some of the limitations. We focus on the EU’s naval strategy and related signaling such as the EU Maritime Strategy. First, because a free and open Indo-Pacific (which the naval strategy aims to underpin) is a necessary condition to achieve many of the other European policy objectives. Secondly, because the EU’s naval strategy directly shapes the maritime security interests of countries in the region as well as external great powers.

How effective were U.S. attempts at reassuring its allies and partners in the wake of the February 2022 Russian re-invasion of Ukraine? During this major crisis moment, the United States implemented a wide-ranging series of policies to support Ukraine, to deter Russia, and to reassure its NATO allies. These actions included broad sanctions, enhanced U.S. force presence in Central and Eastern Europe, and repeated verbal assurances. Yet these actions stopped short of a military intervention, with Washington refusing to impose a no-fly-zone or send forces to Ukraine. In handling this crisis, Washington had to contend with diverse allies and partners, who differed prior to the war on their willingness to engage with or to contain Russia. The United States thus faced a major reassurance challenge, the management of which could strengthen cohesion among its many partners or create major splits. Using surveys of public opinion in 23 countries on 6 continents, we evaluate whether and why U.S. reassurance efforts in the wake of the war succeeded. We find that the measured U.S. response to the crisis was generally lauded internationally. This finding shows that worries about the U.S. ability to balance the interests of NATO allies with those of its partners in East Asia and the Global South did not materialize.

International Military Assistance (IMA) is undergoing a major revival in the light of the war in Ukraine, in which it is a fundamental marker, both in terms of the ability of the players to last in a war of attrition (Western support for Ukraine, North Korean and Iranian support for Russia) and as a means of indirect action for the benefit of the states providing the aid. While this case study is essential and will not fail to be referred to, this contribution aims to move beyond the specific case to examine International Military Assistance as a foreign policy tool. The purpose of this contribution is to carry out a conceptual and historical study of military assistance. It will then be seen that the common definition based on the four pillars of Train, Advise, Assist, and Equip is a protean implementation, strongly determined by the international context in which it takes place. An essential but not easy distinction with co-belligerence will be made, providing a welcome conceptual perspective for the other contributions on the panel, which will look at contemporary case studies in IMA. Finally, a brief presentation of the history of IMA will also be given to provide a comparative overview, both in terms of the evolution of doctrines (particularly since the founding American document of 1976 establishing the creation of Foreign Internal Defense dedicated to military assistance) and in terms of the variety of practices, from lease loans and the supply of equipment (cf. The Mutual Defense Assistance Act of 1949) to indirect intervention by foreign volunteers (ex: Spanish Civil War). In conclusion, this contribution is intended as a theoretical and historical characterization of IMA and defense cooperation, which will provide a conceptual introduction to the analysis of specific cases in the remainder of the panel.

The Black Sea stands out as a region of heightened complexity due to the divergent military, economic, and legal interests among its littoral states. Faced with the challenge of pursuing discordant objectives, its states’ policies towards this arena oftentimes appear incoherent. In this volatile geopolitical landscape, characterized by risks and intense competition, a nuanced understanding of the dynamics at play is imperative. We argue that the concept of the strategic “trilemma” best explains these dynamics. To demonstrate the heuristic utility of trilemmas for understanding Black Sea geopolitics, we examine in Ukraine’s case in depth. At its most basic, a strategic trilemma is a situation when a government pursues three distinct objectives, yet where only two can logically be achieved at the same time. For Ukraine, the three imperatives that Ukraine faces in the Black Sea include: 1) upholding/restoring national sovereignty over its 1991 borders; 2) deterring/defending against Russia, and 3) upholding a regional order favorable to Ukraine’s economic development. We demonstrate the utility of the strategic trilemma concept by examining how successive Ukrainian governments sought to reconcile these conflicting imperatives. We draw on various sources, to provide a detailed account of how Ukraine navigated sequential crises in the Black Sea, including Russia’s seizure of Sevastopol and efforts through proxies to expand along the Sea of Azov, Russia’s construction of the Azov Bridge and efforts to claim the Kerch Straits as “internal” wars. Moreover, we suggest that the strategic trilemmas that littoral states face are a key factor complicating Ukrainian, Turkish, Romanian and Bulgarian efforts towards defence cooperation in the face of Russian revisionism. By understanding the trilemmas confronting Black Sea states, we can better conceptualize the forms of bilateral and multilateral cooperation that could roll back and contain Russia’s efforts to dominate the Black Sea.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine would be expected to constitute an external shock sufficient to cause a dramatic transformation of the defence policies of European countries. Political leaders have frequently referred to this critical event as a ‘wake-up call for Europe’. Yet, defence policy experts generally suggest that this perceived sense of urgency has not yet translated into a transformative development of European defence integration. Research indicates that defence policy remains primarily a matter of national importance. However, a comprehensive overview of the changes in the EU member states’ and European NATO allies’ national defence policies after February 2022 has not yet been compiled. This article aims to address this gap in empirical knowledge by triangulating the results of expert interviews with document analysis to assess changes in European defence policies on three dimensions: (1) European defence budgets and equipment investments, (2) the objectives of European defence policies and (3) defence cooperation among European states. Subsequently, it builds on literature on Foreign Policy Change and NATO burden-sharing to develop a theoretical framework aimed at explaining the (varying) impact of Russia’s war against Ukraine on European defence policies.

Russia’s war in Ukraine has brought unprecedented attention to open-source intelligence (OSINT) researchers who collect and analyse publicly available information on conflict zones and security threats. Some observers believe easy access to online information has “democratised” intelligence. The investigative group Bellingcat even claims to be an “intelligence agency for the people”. While the digital revolution has turned many smartphone-equipped individuals into sensors, it did not turn everyone into a professional intelligence collector and analyst. The ubiquity of digital tools enables small groups of skilled and well-resourced individuals to leverage open-source data and information (OSINF) and produce outputs that are comparable to finished government intelligence. Barriers to entry in the field of professional intelligence remain high. The rise of OSINT is not about democratization but proliferation of intelligence capabilities.

Many today believe that developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI), sensors, and automation presage the coming of a ‘Revolution in Intelligence Affairs’ with far-reaching consequences on the performance of intelligence systems. RIA proponents advocate vast-scale acquisition of AI, state-of-the-art sensors, and automation technologies; support swift organizational and operational changes fostering integration between the various stages of the intelligence cycle; recommend development of operational concepts for human-machine teaming. In such a view, intelligence organizations embracing the RIA will be capable of collecting, analyzing, and disseminating information at such scope, speed, and scale as to enable decision-makers to leverage ‘decision advantage’ on an almost continuous basis in the conduct of statecraft. How would such a transformation affect intelligence performance? We do not know, as scholars and experts advancing the RIA construct have assumed rather than demonstrated increases in effectiveness and scholarship has paid only scant attention to the impact of ‘technological revolutions’ on the functioning of intelligence systems. This paper argues that the RIA will yield results incrementally and unevenly, providing an answer in four steps. It first defines the RIA construct and identifies the causal mechanisms underpinning it by reviewing scholarship on the integration of advanced ICT into intelligence systems. Secondly, it develops a theory of intelligence power, by inductively deriving measures of effectiveness for the key intelligence functions from historical studies and grey literature. Third, it conducts an in-depth within case empirical analysis of the implementation of the RIA employing the Israeli intelligence between the late-1990s and 2014 as a case study. Fourth and last, it uses the intelligence power theory to test the actual performance of the RIA construct taking advantage of the extraordinary insights provided by the 2017 special report of the Israeli State Comptroller on the conduct of the 2014 war, which is based on official intelligence records.