26 - 27 June 2025 · University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki.
The 8th EISS Annual Conference brought the community to the University of Macedonia for two days of panels and roundtables.
It opened with a keynote from Loukas Tsoukalis, President of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP) and a professor at Sciences Po, who asked “Will Putin and Trump finally force Europe to behave as a political adult?”. His challenging and somewhat provocative argument on European strategic autonomy set the tone for the two days that followed.
A short film, shot and edited on site, captures the atmosphere across the venue.
Keynote
Loukas Tsoukalis
President of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP), Professor at the Paris School of International Affairs (Sciences Po), and Emeritus Professor at the University of Athens.
“Will Putin and Trump finally force Europe to behave as a political adult?”
Round Table 1 · Chair
Michal Onderco
Erasmus University
“Nuclear coercion — Ukraine, Europe, and beyond.”
Round Table 2 · Chair
Nicolas Blarel
Leiden University
“How to Publish in Security Journals.”
The full programme of panels, roundtables and papers, as it ran. Open a session to see its papers and speakers.
Registration & Coffee
Introductory Remarks
Cybersecurity and digital technologies in international security, strategy, and global power relations
Regulatory Asymmetries in Cryptocurrency Governance: Implications for Sanctions Evasion
Competitive Cyber Statecraft of the Middle-Ground: A Neoclassical Realist Model
·
Infrastructural frontlines of (dis)information: data territoriality in the Russian war against Ukraine
Online military influencers in a social media age
Military Technology
Does Preeminence in Emerging and Military Technologies Matter for International Status and Prestige? Experimental Study
What’s Got You So Worried? The Replicator Initiative and US Techno-Anxieties in an Age of Great Power Competition
The Erosion of Traditional Deterrence: Space as a Case Study in Military Transformation
War and Strategy
Reanimating Grand Strategy in Volatile Times
The Strategy of Subversion: National Security between Warfare and Diplomacy
·
Assisting to Win? Military Assistance and Coercion in War
Lunch
Roundtable 1: Nuclear Coercion
Military Interventions
The “Transparent Battlefield” and its Implications for Western Movement and Maneuver Warfighting
Helping your friends in need? Military Interventions and the Reliability of Defense Cooperation Agreements
·
The Resistance Operating Concept’s Deterrent to Impress: Distinct Causal Theories of Success
Negotiation of front ends and back ends in NATO military advisory missions
·
Private Actors, Armed Conflict and the State
Big tech at war: The infrastructural politics of public-private relations
We Are Peers Now: States’ Relations with Violent Non-State Actors That Became State/Sub-State Actors
Private military companies as proxy forces in international politics with special reference to the Russian Wagner Group/African Corps and its operations in Africa
From Revolt to Rule: Insurgency as Proto-State Formation
Poster session / Coffee break
Keynote: Will Putin and Trump finally force Europe to behave as a political adult?
Defense Cooperation and Military Assistance 1: Studies in (Re)alignments
The Delegation of Defense and Security Responsibilities at Sea in Historical Perspective
Do Principles Become Agents? Security Assistance between cooptation and orchestration
Beyond Exit: Examining Protégés’ Intra-Alliance Bargaining Strategies
Advancing authoritarian alignment? A systematic mapping of defense diplomacy between China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran
European Transformations in the Organization of Security
Belgium’s Defence Policy After the Invasion of Ukraine: A Free Rider’s Business-as-Usual Approach
·
Paradigm Paradox: How Emerging Cybersecurity Communities Moderate EU Governance
Geopolitical Europe: The European Union as a signaling actor in the Russia-Ukraine war
·
’Total Defence’ and Transformations in the Making of European Security
· ·
Weapons of Mass Destruction: Non-Proliferation and Arms Control
Strategic Stability Without Arms Control
The Soviet Union/Russia and the spread of the bomb
The Universalization of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons: Lessons from the CWC and BWC and the Role of Customary International Law
Changing Pathways to the Bomb
Defense Cooperation and Military Assistance 2: New Research Directions
Sweden and the League of Nations: The partisan contestation of national identity and collective security
Small State Defense Cooperation and Security Strategies in a Changing Global Order
Common Threat, Diverging Responses? Explaining European States’ Military Spending After the War in Ukraine
·
Informal is the New Normal: Command and Control as the Choice for the Functional Source of Security Commitment
Lunch
Political Economy, Technology and the Defence Industry
Examining the Factors Behind the EU’s Defence Innovation System
Russian Countertrade as a Mechanism for Promoting Arms Sales and Diplomatic Influence
· ·
Innovation and engineering at the front: the Ukrainian case of Unmanned System
Dynamics of Defense Indigenization: state-private relations in India’s quest for self-reliance
Defense Cooperation and Military Assistance 3: Reforms in European Security
Reassessing European Security: The drivers of NATO’s response to hybrid threats since 2014
The EU’s Collective Defence Framework: A Law-in-Context Analysis of Article 42.7 TEU Amid the War in Ukraine
Can European Defence Cooperation Build European Deterrence?
Roundtable 2: How to Publish in Security Journals
Poster session / Coffee break
Award of the European Security Studies Best Paper Prize
Concluding Remarks
Cocktail
Reconstructed from the conference's final printed programme.
Each year, the EISS conference is organised on a rotational basis in a different European country. The 2025 conference was held at the University of Macedonia.
