Recent articles
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Geopolitical Positioning of a Small State: Serbia in the Shadow of Yugoslavia’s ‘Third Way’
(2024 - Volume 18, Issue 2)Abstract This article examines Serbia’s positioning in the East-West axis during the post-Cold War era. This is a specific example of the ‘third way’ in twenty-first century geopolitical behaviour. The small country remains non-aligned within the existing alliances of the East and the West, trying to find a balance between their influence and remaining faithful to its national interests. Although with far more modest resources, the situation of the Serbian state is reminiscent of the fate of...
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The EU’s Approach to Sanctions on Russia: A Critical Analysis of the Existing Literature
(2024 - Volume 18, Issue 3)Abstract This article focuses on the EU's sanctions against Russia, which were adopted in several rounds after Russia’s aggressive actions against Ukraine in 2014 and 2022. This article reviews and critically examines the existing academic works on this topic. In particular, it identifies, distinguishes and analyses five types of the existing scholarship, each of which relies on a different explanatory perspective on why the EU has adopted its sanctions against Russia. These are: (1)...
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The Institutionalisation of Security Norms in the Context of Cyber Alignments: The Transatlantic Alignment in the Cyber Domain
(2024 - Volume 18, Issue 2)Abstract Realists argue that security alliances are established to confront military threats posed by one state to others. In contrast, this study argues that nonmilitary cyberthreats have become a factor in establishing new security arrangements that do not necessarily take the form of an alliance, but rather emerge in the form of alignments. Cyberthreats lie in the political, economic, societal and military repercussions caused by the employment of cyber technologies, not these technologies...
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The Three Seas Initiative and Romania’s Grand Behaviour in the Black Sea Area: Change and Continuity
(2024 - Volume 18, Issue 3)Abstract Drawing on classical realism, the article investigates whether the Three Seas Initiative (3SI), just like the other subregional projects that Romania took part in since joining NATO in 2004, has been part of Romania’s external balancing towards Russia. In contrast to the 1990s, when the Black Sea area had not been mentioned in Romania’s strategic documents, Bucharest came up with a grand principle (the internationalisation of the Black Sea area) and a grand behaviour (external...
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Two’s Company, Three’s a Crowd: Tripolarity and War
(2024 - Volume 18, Issue 2)Abstract International systems of three great powers, tripolar systems, remain an understudied topic. In this article, I make three claims about tripolarity. First, it is more warlike than either bipolarity or multipolarity. Second, the two weaker poles of a tripolar system usually ally against the most powerful one. Third, when a pole abruptly declines, the two others have a strong incentive to race to prey on it. To demonstrate this, I develop three cases of past tripolar systems rarely...
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Conventional Arms Control Agreements in Europe: Conditions of Success and Failure
(2024 - Volume 18, Issue 3)Abstract Under what conditions are adversarial conventional arms control agreements (CAC) in Europe successful or unsuccessful? This study aims to identify the conjunctural causes of conventional arms control success in Europe from the end of World War One to the present based on a dataset of 22 cases. It applies a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to assess arms control success and failure resulting from four conditions: great power rivalry, national limitations, demilitarisation and...