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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The Institutionalisation of Security Norms in the Context of Cyber Alignments: The Transatlantic Alignment in the Cyber Domain
(Ahead of Print)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...