Blog by Stephane J. Baele, Thierry Balzacq, Philippe Bourbeau. “The political world, just like the physical world, in many respects may be regulated by weights, number and measure” (Diderot 1751). Political speeches, official reports, tweets and other outputs are filled with numbers. Even the propaganda produced by the so-called Islamic State contains stats-based infographics. […]
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European Energy Union? Caught between securitisation and ‘riskification’
European Journal of International Security, Issue 2:2 (forthcoming). By Andrew Judge (University of Glasgow) and Tomas Maltby (King’s College London) EU energy policy over the past decade has been characterised by two key developments – liberalisation and ‘securitisation’. The Commission has sought to liberalise and integrate electricity and gas markets as part of its […]
When the Whip Comes Down: Marxism, the Soviet Experience, and the Nuclear Revolution
European Journal of International Security, Issue 2:2 (forthcoming). By Campbell Craig, Cardiff University Marxism, once a venerable theory of international relations as well as all other realms of politics, fell well out of fashion following the collapse of the Soviet Union and almost complete disappearance of state socialism over the past 25 years. Recently, however, Justin […]
The Permissive Power of the Ban on War
European Journal of International Security, Issue 2:1. View full article here. By Ian Hurd, Northwestern University, USA In 1945, the UN Charter made it illegal for governments to go to war with each other. It enacted the first ever general legal ban on the use or threat of force by one state against another and has […]
On Non-Western Norm Shapers: Brazil and the Responsibility while Protecting
European Journal of International Security, Issue 2:1. View full article here. By Cristina G. Stefan, University of Leeds, UK The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) norm has been discussed extensively since its initial emergence in the 2001 report on the topic, and especially after 2005, when it was institutionalized at the UN. The UN Secretary-General’s 2009 report […]
On “Springs and Their Offspring: The International Consequences of Domestic Uprisings”
Blog by John Owen European Journal of International Security, inaugural issue. View full article here. The ‘Arab Spring’ is a conceptual blob – or, at best, a tangle of events across thousands of kilometers and scores of days, events whose connections are not clear. We do not have a good account of how the self-immolation […]
Private Security Industry Self-Regulation – Are We Expecting Too Much from Clients?
Blog by Elke Krahmann European Journal of International Security, inaugural issue. See full article here. The killing of 17 innocent civilians by the private security company (PSC) Blackwater in Nisour Square in Baghdad in 2007 attracted huge media and political attention. The incident and its aftermath demonstrated the potentially detrimental effects of the use of […]
Democratic curiosity in times of surveillance
Blog by Jef Huysmans Professor of International Politics, Queen Mary University of London European Journal of International Security, inaugural issue. Full article available here. Key words: Surveillance; Democracy; Extitution; The Everyday; Dispute A 2013 study on mass surveillance requested by the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs states that the key question following […]
Making sense of diplomatic pecking orders in international security
Formally, the practice of diplomacy rests on the principle of sovereign equality. Many rituals, from ambassadorial titles to alphabetical seating, are meant to convey diplomatic parity in practice. And yet, as any state delegate knows, not everyone weighs the same around the multilateral table. On the contrary, the “international pecking order” (as diplomats call it) […]
