Captivity is a complex phenomenon in international politics with a broad range of purposes, functions, and consequences. Existing scholarship suggests that states use captivity, for example, to facilitate hostage or prisoner exchanges, to extract material rewards, or, in the case of human shields, for deterrence purposes. This article argues that states may use captivity to deter not only traditional military threats emanating from other states, but also perceived threats to regime security posed by non-state actors, including individuals, and that emotions are central to this process. The argument is illustrated through three empirical vignettes that show how the Chinese government has detained foreign academics, publishers, and NGO workers engaged in activities seen as threatening regime security. Detention is interpreted as attempts to deter such actors. While fear is often seen as key to successful deterrence, the article indicates that paying attention to other emotions can help better understand deterrence failure. Specifically, because captivity, and deterrence, involve the denial of the captive’s agency and may trigger feelings of humiliation and shame, it can backfire as the target of deterrence efforts might seek to act to regain agency.

This article offers an original discursive analysis of the construction of terrorism within travel advice published by the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). It argues that this advice positions terrorism as a very specific – omnipresent, Islamist, and non-state – security threat from which British nationals will never be safe. Three contributions are made. First, empirically, the article offers a descriptively rich exploration of terrorism’s production in an entirely neglected site of discourse. Second, analytically, it details the work done by specific rhetorical mechanisms within FCDO guidance, including the recycling of generic claims relating to terrorism, quantifications of risk, and the imagination of hypothetical attacks. Third, conceptually, it demonstrates the contingent and precarious character of this discourse by highlighting important exclusions that cohere and constitute terrorism as constructed in travel advice. These exclusions – notably the violences of right-wing actors and of states themselves – contribute to a very specific construction of terrorism that helps foreclose discussion of UK responsibility for, or involvement in, terrorism.

Can Ukraine avoid a frozen conflict with Russia, and could it have done so with more Western aid and victory in the war? Drawing on the Klosek et al. (2021) dataset of frozen conflicts, the paper outlines five criteria that are necessary to bring a frozen conflict to a military end. Two counterfactual scenarios explore whether increased or accelerated Western aid could have enabled Ukraine to meet these criteria. The analysis concludes that even with substantial Western assistance, Ukraine was unlikely to achieve the kind of victory needed to compel Russia to accept defeat and address the core issues. Ukraine’s victory-oriented approach was implausible not due to a lack of Western weapons, but because it failed to resolve entrenched political issues and lacked structural military advantages. The findings suggest that policy should emphasize diplomacy, while scholarship should explore why this unfeasible approach received strong backing.

This article argues that power–dependence relations are a crucial dimension of analysis to understand how states navigate between realist and liberal logics and particularly between the balancing and integration strategies. Specifically, I distinguish between three types of power–dependence relationships: limitation, neutralisation, and competition. Limitation and neutralisation make the balancing strategy viable by allowing power to offset dependence and thus preserve the autonomy of the state. On the other hand, when limitation and neutralisation are no longer workable, particularly in the case of cross-temporal interdependence, the balancing strategy becomes unreliable, and integration tends to become an attractive alternative. In the case of competition between a state’s different sources of dependence, the loss of flexibility brought about by integration may prove costly by limiting the state’s ability to address various dependencies simultaneously. Empirically, I illustrate these mechanisms by showing that post-war European integration started as a response to a situation of cross-temporal interdependence between France and West Germany, which tended to make the limitation and neutralisation strategies unreliable. However, military integration was later hindered by the tension between competing sources of dependence for France, which increased the cost of the loss of flexibility entailed by military centralisation.

This article examines whether strategic narratives and grand strategies exhibit continuity or change after traumatic geopolitical events. It scrutinises Israel’s response to the 7 October 2023 attacks and Czechia’s reaction to Russia’s February 2022 Ukraine invasion. Through (i) qualitative content analysis of leaders’ speeches and (ii) delineating Israeli and Czech grand strategies, it finds that the degree of change was proportional to the level of shock and threat. Israel responded to a first order critical situation with a grand strategic overhaul; Czechia answered a second order critical situation with a less substantial grand strategic adjustment. Yet both cases exhibited a key commonality: leaders drew on existing perceptions to frame and justify policy shifts, demonstrating that continuity and change are co-dependent in grand strategy. In sum, this article contributes new primary source data pertinent to two contemporary conflicts, challenges grand strategy’s great power centrism, and demonstrates the importance of rhetoric in preventing or facilitating grand strategic change.

This article tackles head-on a question that is often thought to defeat pacifism: ‘How then would you react against a Nazi invasion?’ That multiple wars are still recurrently justified as necessary to confront yet another ‘Hitler’ makes tackling this question critically relevant far beyond pacifist circles. On the Nazi context specifically: the question comes too late if pitched in 1939; militarism did not deter Hitler; there were actually many examples of nonviolent resistance against Nazis; even Hitler was mindful of public opinion; and the fight ‘against Nazis’ claimed many non-Nazi German victims too. More generally, and adding theoretical depth: pacifism need not entail a single absolute rejection of violence in all scenarios; nonviolent resistance has been proved to be effective; war-readiness has a corrosive constitutive impact; the Nazi question tends to assume that the application of retaliatory violence is controllable; and to presume that violence is the only option is absolutist and idealistic. Far from delivering a conclusive victory, the Nazi question, carefully considered and discussed, exposes cracks in conventional thinking about violence and war and provides opportunities to unpack and clarify multiple arguments advanced by pacifism.

In the last decade, the idea of total defence – a whole-of-society approach integrating civilian and military capabilities – has gained renewed prominence in Europe, including within the European Union (EU). Concurrently, the concept of strategic autonomy – the EU’s ability to act independently – has emerged as a central feature in its security policy, driving ambitions for ‘a quantum leap forward on security and defence’.1 Despite significant conceptual overlaps, the relationship between total defence and strategic autonomy remains underexplored. Drawing on discursive institutionalism and the ideational power framework, this article examines EU security discourses from 2010 to 2024, analysing how strategic autonomy has shaped the development of European total defence. The study considers three dimensions of ideational power – through, over, and in – showing that while the idea of total defence predates strategic autonomy, the latter has certainly elevated the idea of European total defence and enhanced collective capability building, especially through entwining civilian and military domains, and yet has constrained the establishment of a unified military defence. The findings underscore the long-term discursive evolution underpinning the EU’s security strategy and its ongoing efforts to consolidate a European total defence framework, now more tangible than ever.

In times of new geopolitical challenges, many states have revived the concept of total defence, in which all citizens contribute to national defence efforts. How authorities communicate the need of this new defence strategy and when such crisis communication leads to an increased defence willingness is an important research question. We hypothesise that individuals who feel a sense of empowerment or an increased risk of war when exposed to crisis communication are more willing to engage in the defence. To evaluate our hypotheses, we collected representative survey data from 2,068 Swedish respondents, at the same time as the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency was distributing a new brochure on expectations on and advice for citizens in case of war. By analysing the responses of individuals who had read or not read the brochure, we gauge the impact of the crisis communication on defence willingness. The results show that individuals experiencing a higher sense of empowerment and perceiving a higher risk of war when having read the booklet were more willing to engage in total defence activities. This has important implications for our understanding of how specific types of crisis communication influence commitment and defence willingness in the population.

The assumption that state behaviour is primarily driven by a survival interest remains widespread within international relations (IR), even as many others attract critique. This article problematises that assumption, arguing that the meaning of survival itself, not just states’ means of pursuing it, varies significantly. Common conceptions of state survival reflect a legal definition of sovereign statehood encompassing a permanent population, defined territory, government institutions, and political autonomy. Yet leaders and publics do not uniformly conceive and value these aspects of statehood, which often generate contradictory policy incentives. Expanding on recent works in ontological security studies, this article argues that national narratives produce diverse interpretations of state survival that generate distinct meanings and prioritisations among the core aspects of statehood. Put another way, states’ physical bodies and physical survival – as IR scholars frequently discuss these concepts – are chiefly ideational. These theoretical arguments are illustrated through case studies of Georgia and Kazakhstan, which displayed radically different interpretations of survival and, hence, threat perceptions and security choices during the early 1990s. Accounting for variations within the concept of survival – both across states and within a state over time – can help future research explain a broader range of state behaviour.

What societal factors influence the reach of Russian propaganda outlets among fringe audiences? Recent debates within international relations and political communication have questioned the ability of Russia’s information warfare practices to persuade general public opinion in the West. Yet, Russian propaganda outlets have historically focused on reaching Western fringe communities, while a growing literature on societal resilience argues that variance in specific societal factors influences the effect of information warfare. Here I study the degree to which various societal factors condition Russia’s ability to reach fringe audiences. I measure the reach of Russian propaganda outlets among online fringe communities in ten Western European countries in the three months before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. I compare national measures of public service media, media trust, affective polarisation, and populism and find descriptive indications that the latter two are tied to performance of Russian propaganda outlets in fringe communities. In addition, I find reach to be concentrated among regional great powers, highlighting the need to consider strategic risks when discussing societal resilience.

What do people in liberal polities believe they owe soldiers for their service? The UK’s Armed Forces Covenant, promulgated in 2000 and enshrined in law in 2021, presents a real-world opportunity to examine the effects of inducing citizens to reflect on soldiering. We develop and test two contending theoretical logics, grounded in the liberal political culture from which the Covenant emerged, using unique observational data and a novel survey experiment. Does prior knowledge of the Covenant or exposure to a Covenant prime highlight the abiding tensions between liberal ideals and military service and underscore the debt that citizens owe soldiers? Or does it prompt liberal citizens to resolve their discomfort with military service in a distinctively liberal way – by emphasising soldiers’ contractual terms and their willing consent to deployment? In line with the latter logic, respondents with prior knowledge of the Covenant or exposure to the Covenant prime were more likely to endorse the use of force and were less sensitive to casualties, and they were no more likely to grant soldiers and veterans additional benefits or preferential treatment. This paper has significant implications for public support for military missions and the relationship between military service and citizenship.

This paper examines China’s strategic response to the Japan–South Korea entente within the broader context of US-led trilateral security cooperation since the 2010s. Rather than employing conventional wedge strategies such as selective accommodation and coercion, China has pursued a ‘soft wedging’ approach, leveraging rhetoric to subtly reinforce pre-existing divisions without direct intervention. This strategy seeks to discourage South Korea from deepening its alignment with Japan and the United States while minimising the risk of alienating either Japan or South Korea. Drawing on official materials and expert interviews, this study analyses China’s rhetorical tactics in public statements and diplomatic engagements, along with the strategic calculus underpinning its preference for soft wedging. By providing an alternative to more resource-intensive and risk-prone measures, soft wedging broadens the existing theoretical framework of wedge strategies. The empirical analysis further deepens our understanding of multi-target wedging dynamics and China’s strategic objectives in Northeast Asia’s evolving security landscape.

What factors make aligned relationships possible, and how can we account for transformation of alignments? Alignment patterns and the durability of some aligned relationships above others have often raised questions about factors that influence cooperative arrangements. This article makes a twofold contribution by proposing a tentative process-centred alignment typology as an analytical tool and by empirically applying this tool to examine Sino–Russian alignment (1991–2024). Our conceptual typology differentiates among six primary alignment types: thin strategic partnerships, coalitions, thick strategic partnerships, alliances, non-allied security communities, and allied security communities. We propose that these types become possible due to varying compatibility between prospective or existing alignment partners in their assessment of threats, interpretations of identities, and status expectations. Our empirical analysis focuses on specific upgrades in the Sino–Russian relationship as presented by both states in 1996, 2001, 2011, and 2021 while also discussing more recent developments after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Contemporary deterrence scholarship remains disproportionately focused on military instruments, often neglecting the strategic utility of diplomacy, information, and economic statecraft. Our study addresses this imbalance through a new methodology for analysing how authoritarian states respond to the range of foreign policy tools: diplomatic, information, military, and economic (the DIME framework). Using a state’s propaganda, official statements, and media (POSM) to capture target states’ reactions to adversarial DIME actions, we offer an innovative analytical framework that enhances understanding of deterrence dynamics beyond the military sphere. Within the framework, we use computational text analysis, statistical analysis, and data visualisation to create a replicable process for analysing POSM big data. Applying this methodology to a case study of China, we find that Beijing’s POSM-based responses to information tools – such as public criticism of censorship and information control by NGOs – are more negative than to diplomatic, military, or economic tools. Our methodology contributes to deterrence theory and policy through its insight into non-military effects and by offering a scalable process for empirical analysis ripe for AI implementation. For policymakers, our process and findings hold implications for crafting more effective and sustainable deterrence strategies in an increasingly complex international security environment.

A growing literature examines why and under what conditions citizens are willing to fight for their country, yet it often overlooks societal heterogeneity. In multiethnic states, ethnic minorities may hold fundamentally different views about defending a majority-dominated nation-state. We argue that in divided societies, citizens’ willingness to fight is deeply shaped by cultural identity and historical narratives, which influence threat perceptions and, ultimately, readiness to fight. We test our argument in the crucial case of Latvia, a country with a sizable Russian-speaking minority and heightened security concerns about neighbouring Russia. Using three waves of original survey data (2022–2024) and logistic regression models, we find evidence of a ‘minority effect’: On average, Russian speakers are less willing to fight for Latvia than ethnic Latvians. A mediation analysis shows that this disparity is substantially driven by divergent historical memories. Russian speakers display greater Soviet nostalgia and are less likely to perceive Russia as responsible for the war in Ukraine, which in turn reduces their willingness to fight. Our findings have important implications for defence planning and resilience in multiethnic states facing external threats.

A recent wave of survey experiments has advanced scholarly understanding of public attitudes towards the use of nuclear weapons. In this article, we address the central question: can public opinion influence decision-makers’ views on nuclear weapon use? We bridge this critical gap in the literature with a survey experiment conducted on samples of UK parliamentarians and US and UK government employees in official policy roles. We varied public support for nuclear strikes in realistic scenarios to examine participants’ responsiveness to public preferences when considering nuclear first use, nuclear retaliation, and third-party nuclear threats. We show that high public support notably increases willingness to endorse nuclear first use against non-nuclear adversaries. Furthermore, public backing shapes beliefs about national leaders’ willingness to order nuclear strikes. However, the effect of public opinion is weaker in nuclear retaliation contexts, suggesting that different considerations become prominent when the ‘nuclear taboo’ has been breached. Importantly, sympathetic public opinion strongly influences perceptions of the credibility of third-party nuclear threats, carrying implications for the practice of nuclear deterrence. Our findings highlight the role of public opinion as both an enabling and constraining force on nuclear use and provide new theoretical and empirical insights into elite decision-making in nuclear politics.

This article provides novel insights into Russia’s strategic use of migrants, using the Federal Security Service (FSB)-enabled migration flows towards Norway and Finland in 2015/16 as a case study. Through the use of semi-structured interviews and an empirical study, we identify several potential Russian goals tied to its use of migration, including restoring bilateral relations to the levels before Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine, influencing the European Union’s (EU’s) decisions on sanctions and cooperation, warning Finland against seeking NATO membership, testing the effectiveness of a new tool, collecting intelligence, and weakening Western influence per Russia’s broader information confrontation towards the West. These objectives served the broader regional and grand strategic goals of maximising Russia’s influence and minimising the EU’s and NATO’s sway in the region. Our findings challenge earlier interpretations that downplayed Russia’s role, arguing instead that the operation established coercive potential rather than immediate concessions. We contribute to the literature on the strategic use of migration and authoritarian states’ innovative use of unconventional methods.

Developments in military AI highlight that maintaining state control over military innovation that is driven by private corporate experts is challenging. Even the leading military AI power, the United States, has struggled to meet this challenge, while trying different modes of control over time. What explains these struggles and the shifting modes of state control over private military innovation? Bringing together the ‘competence–control theory’ of indirect governance and research on technology-driven transformations in the making of national security, we propose a novel theory of state control over military innovation. We argue that states face a trade-off between (fostering) the competence of private corporate experts and (enhancing) state control over military innovation. This trade-off is shaped by technological change and geopolitical competition. Depending on the relative strength of these drivers, varying prioritisations of competence or control lead to different hierarchical or non-hierarchical, capacities- or rules-based modes of control. Tracing the evolution of the US national security state and its relations to private corporate experts in the subfield of autonomous weapons systems, we demonstrate that our theoretical argument explains otherwise puzzling intertemporal variation in control modes. Our findings have important policy implications for the institutional design of military innovation.

The potential withdrawal of the United States from European security commitments has raised questions about the future of nuclear deterrence on the continent. This article explores the feasibility of France assuming the role currently played by the United States in the ‘dual-key’ nuclear sharing arrangements with European NATO members. The analysis is divided into five main sections. The article begins by outlining the strategic context in which this analysis takes place, focusing on the potential withdrawal of the United States from European security commitments and the growing emphasis on the European Union’s strategic autonomy. Against this backdrop, the article first examines France’s technical capabilities to lead a dual-key system in Europe, addressing aspects such as the number of nuclear warheads, delivery vectors, and operational compatibility with European allies. Next, it analyses the political and doctrinal implications of a French-led dual-key system, identifying which aspects of French nuclear doctrine might require revision or could create friction. The article also explores potential forums for nuclear dialogue and coordination, as well as the challenges of harmonising France’s national doctrine with a hypothetical extended framework for dual-key countries. In the third section, the article evaluates the political and security utility of a French-based dual-key system. Finally, it assesses the strategic, operational, and doctrinal implications of shifting from a US nuclear provider to a French one, highlighting both potential benefits and challenges. The findings suggest that, while a French-led dual-key system is technically feasible, significant political obstacles must be overcome for successful implementation.

This article examines trolling in international diplomacy. It explores a developing trend in diplomatic communications: encounters which have historically been characterised by formality and politeness have increasingly been used by political leaders to troll their targets. While the second Trump administration embodies this ‘trolling turn’ in diplomacy, it extends beyond MAGA. Many leaders, particularly authoritarians and those with authoritarian tendencies, employ trolling within their communications strategies. Despite growing commentary on this phenomenon, its strategic logic remains underexplored in international relations scholarship.

This article outlines a new theoretical framework explaining the strategic logic of trolling in international diplomacy and details a research agenda to investigate it further. The framework argues that there are five functions of diplomatic trolling: coercion, agenda setting, identification, delegitimisation and (dis)ordering. Using examples from across the world, it highlights that trolling – characterised by aggression, humour, and deception – enables leaders to pursue maximalist objectives while avoiding political costs by denying the seriousness of their comments when challenged. It is an especially attractive strategy for actors who wish to disrupt the existing international order. However, it is a strategy laden with risk. By illuminating diplomatic trolling’s strategic logic, this article enhances understanding of a pressing issue in contemporary statecraft.