Recent articles
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Half-Hearted or Pragmatic? Explaining EU Strategic Autonomy and the European Defence Fund through Institutional Dynamics
( 2024 - Volume 18, Issue 1)Abstract In 2016, the EU Global Strategy introduced the ambition of strategic autonomy referring to the ability to autonomously protect the Union against external threats. To realise this ambition, the EU also launched various capability development initiatives, in particular the European Defence Fund (EDF). Much of the available literature presented rationalist explanations of the EU’s development of strategic autonomy and EDF. It attributed these ambitions to external conditions and...
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EU’s External Action and Russia: How Can Institutionalisation Affect Decision Making?
( 2024 - Volume 18, Issue 1)Abstract The independent role of international institutions has been taken to be the core of the debate between institutionalists and realists. This study explores the EU’s relations with Russia in two cases as a testbed for this debate. Institutional independence, meaning restriction on the ambitions of powerful states on the one hand, and the impact of less powerful states on decisions on the other, are taken here to be the opposite of the power politics of realism. Two cases are studied to...
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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 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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Terrorism Financing Typologies: Comparison of the PKK and ISIL in Turkey
( 2024 - Volume 18, Issue 1)Abstract This comparative case study investigates the financing typologies of Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in Turkey. The PKK is a Marxist-Leninist organisation that pursues ethnic separationist policies in Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. ISIL is a radical Wahhabi network that aspires to re-establish the Caliphate and restore the ‘glory’ of Sharia by defeating the ‘near’ and ‘far’ enemies. Based on primary/secondary interviews, content analysis of...
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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...