Suchergebnisse

Finland promoted a value-based agenda as the President of the European Union (EU) Council in 2019. The focus was especially on the defence of the rule of law principle. A role as a strong value promoter departs from the pragmatic and cautious tradition of Finnish EU policy. In this article, I will ask why Finland chose to promote values, and what kind of political debate preceded its Presidency term. Second, I will look at the actual promotion of the common values during the Presidency. Third, I will provide some evaluations of the success of Finland's value-based approach. The analysis draws from comprehensive documentary sources related to Finnish EU policy and her Presidency term, and from 33 semi-structured research interviews among the key Finnish politicians, civil servants and civil society organization representatives in 2020. The article shows that values were thoroughly debated before the term and their relevance increased as the Presidency approached. Finland also succeeded in promoting several values, especially by linking them to practical questions. The article argues that evaluating the success of Finland's approach is more contentious, which may be tackled several ways.

Aiming at analysing all major security risks to a country, comprehensive National Risk Assessments (NRAs) can be used as a foundation for national security policies. Doing so manifests a modernist dream of securing societies through the anticipatory governance of risks. Yet, this dream resembles a nightmare of undemocratic state control in the name of security. Based on a critique of the politics of NRAs, this article offers a theoretical framework for evaluating their scientific and political credentials. Drawing on political theory of technocratic expert rule, ethical criteria of epistemic reliability and political representation are introduced to the debate. These criteria are then applied to an analysis of the NRAs of Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Iceland. I argue that although these NRAs are convincing correctives to the risk perceptions of politicians and civil society, they are insufficiently reliable and representative for defining the scope and priorities of national security policies at large.

This article examines how Russian geostrategic communication is entangled in global gender politics. The aim is to understand the resonance of disinformation in relation to culturalized, ethnicized and racialized narratives of gender, or "gendered boundarymaking." The analysis is based on focus group discussions with Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian individuals, asked to share their impressions of news articles from the Russian media agency Sputnik, which all depicted Sweden as a warning example of multiculturalism and feminism gone "too far." In the discussions, participants opposed a gender equal "self" to a patriarchal immigrant "other," narrated Sweden as a country exceptionally concerned with gender, and tapped into competing temporalities of progress and decline. The article contributes to research on geostrategic communication by showing how disinformation efforts draw upon gendered national identities and debates about gender and immigration. More importantly, the article demonstrates that such gendered boundarymaking shapes audiences' interpretations in crucial ways. Rather than viewing disinformation only from a state-centered lens of national security, in isolation from racism, Islamophobia, anti-feminism, and queerphobia within Western societies, research should acknowledge the interconnections between geostrategic communication and everyday boundarymaking. This will be pivotal to developing counterstrategies to disinformation, whether Russian or homegrown.

While divided cities are characterized by spatially cemented segregation and polarized divisions, the trembling city is organized around transient and transformative borders. We conceptualize this notion of urban space to capture Freetown's war-peace transition in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Ex-combatants settled on the city margins, bringing with them spatial strategies from war-fighting into the city by recreating a system of bases. The Sierra Leone Police (SLP) re-emerged with external support, seeking to compartmentalize and fixate Freetown through a combination of force and negotiation. We use borders and bordering to understand policing as attempts by both ex-combatants and the SLP to border in as well as out; defensively against external interference and offensively to make territorial claims. By extension, it is tensions in these practices between attempts to defend and harden borders, and at the same time, expand and soften them that trigger a tremble. The city tremble was a reminder of the possibility of war that Freetown very easily could return to. It also became a more general and inconspicuous condition of the city as an inhabited space, where multiple and often incompatible and conflictual spatial logics, strategies, and practices of policing clashed, overlapped and co-existed uneasily.

Peace research has taken a local turn. Yet, conceptual ambiguities, risks of romanticization, and critiques of co-option of the "local" point to the need to look for novel ways to think about the interactions of actors ranging from the global to the local level. Gearoid Millar proposes a trans-scalar approach to peace based on a "consistency of purpose" and a "parity of esteem" for actors across scales. This article analyzes the concept of trans-scalarity in the peace process in Ituri, a province in the northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Drawing on qualitative data from more than a year of research in the DRC, I argue that while a trans-scalar approach was taken to end violence, it was not applied to transitional justice initiatives. The result was a negative, rather than a positive peace. By showing the high, but still untapped, potential of trans-scalarity, the article makes three contributions. First, it advances the debate on the local turn by adding empirical insights on trans-scalarity and further developing the concept's theoretical foundations. Second, it provides novel empirical insights on the transitional justice process in the DRC. Third, it links scholarship on peacebuilding and transitional justice, which have often remained disconnected.

This article offers a critical outlook on existing debates on state recognition and proposes future research directions. It argues that existing knowledge on state recognition and the dominant discourses, norms and practices needs to be problematized and freed from power-driven, conservative, positivist and legal interpretations and reoriented in new directions in order to generate more critical, contextual and emancipatory knowledge. The article proposes two major areas for future research on state recognition, which should: (a) expose the politics of knowledge, and positionality, and seek epistemic justice and decolonization of state recognition studies; and (b) study more thoroughly recognitionality techniques encompassing diplomatic discourses, performances and entangled agencies. Accordingly, this article seeks to promote a long overdue debate on the need for re-visioning state recognition in world politics.

Peace research has taken a local turn. Yet, conceptual ambiguities, risks of romanticization, and critiques of co-option of the "local" point to the need to look for novel ways to think about the interactions of actors ranging from the global to the local level. Gearoid Millar proposes a trans-scalar approach to peace based on a "consistency of purpose" and a "parity of esteem" for actors across scales. This article analyzes the concept of trans-scalarity in the peace process in Ituri, a province in the northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Drawing on qualitative data from more than a year of research in the DRC, I argue that while a trans-scalar approach was taken to end violence, it was not applied to transitional justice initiatives. The result was a negative, rather than a positive peace. By showing the high, but still untapped, potential of trans-scalarity, the article makes three contributions. First, it advances the debate on the local turn by adding empirical insights on trans-scalarity and further developing the concept's theoretical foundations. Second, it provides novel empirical insights on the transitional justice process in the DRC. Third, it links scholarship on peacebuilding and transitional justice, which have often remained disconnected.

This article examines how Russian geostrategic communication is entangled in global gender politics. The aim is to understand the resonance of disinformation in relation to culturalized, ethnicized and racialized narratives of gender, or "gendered boundarymaking." The analysis is based on focus group discussions with Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian individuals, asked to share their impressions of news articles from the Russian media agency Sputnik, which all depicted Sweden as a warning example of multiculturalism and feminism gone "too far." In the discussions, participants opposed a gender equal "self" to a patriarchal immigrant "other," narrated Sweden as a country exceptionally concerned with gender, and tapped into competing temporalities of progress and decline. The article contributes to research on geostrategic communication by showing how disinformation efforts draw upon gendered national identities and debates about gender and immigration. More importantly, the article demonstrates that such gendered boundarymaking shapes audiences' interpretations in crucial ways. Rather than viewing disinformation only from a state-centered lens of national security, in isolation from racism, Islamophobia, anti-feminism, and queerphobia within Western societies, research should acknowledge the interconnections between geostrategic communication and everyday boundarymaking. This will be pivotal to developing counterstrategies to disinformation, whether Russian or homegrown.

This article offers a critical outlook on existing debates on state recognition and proposes future research directions. It argues that existing knowledge on state recognition and the dominant discourses, norms and practices needs to be problematized and freed from power-driven, conservative, positivist and legal interpretations and reoriented in new directions in order to generate more critical, contextual and emancipatory knowledge. The article proposes two major areas for future research on state recognition, which should: (a) expose the politics of knowledge, and positionality, and seek epistemic justice and decolonization of state recognition studies; and (b) study more thoroughly recognitionality techniques encompassing diplomatic discourses, performances and entangled agencies. Accordingly, this article seeks to promote a long overdue debate on the need for re-visioning state recognition in world politics.

The article analyses the evolution of European diplomacy over two decades, to assess the impact of the European External Action Service (EEAS) creation alongside consecutive waves of enlargement. Data is drawn from two original datasets about European Union (EU) member states' diplomatic representations within the EU and across the globe. It shows that member states have maintained and strengthened their substantial diplomatic footprint across the EU's territory, expanding it to include new members and making Brussels a diplomatic hub also for non-member countries. In parallel, and despite the establishment of the EEAS, member states have maintained and even increased their networks of diplomatic representations across the globe, alongside more numerous and more politically active EU Delegations (EUDs). At the same time, member states have been reducing their diplomats' numbers, as the cases of Austria, France, Germany and Italy show. This delicate balancing act has been made possible not only by contemporary technological developments, but also by European cooperation, as in the case of EUDs hosting member states' representations in non-member countries, a development referred to as co-location. Therefore, whereas the continued presence of national embassies on the ground could be interpreted as detracting from the EEAS, the existence of EUDs contributes also to other, more indirect but certainly novel, forms of diplomatic cooperation under a single European roof.

Within the architecture of the United Nations (UN), formal recognition of the contributions of historically marginalised individuals and communities to peacebuilding denotes a positive shift in rhetoric and practice. Alongside broader institutional moves towards 'sustaining peace'; the emergence of a 'Youth, Peace and Security' agenda since 2015 formalises attention to youth as positive contributors to peacebuilding and in responding to violence. This article situates the Youth, Peace and Security agenda within broader institutional and academic attention on 'inclusive peace'. It considers the ongoing challenges in legitimising youth inclusion; and positions this emergent agenda in relation to the gains made by the Women, Peace and Security agenda, and the establishment of the UN's sustaining peace agenda. These explorations demonstrate the value of considering the evolution of inclusive peace agendas together, while remaining mindful of their distinctive characteristics, to better understand the potential of inclusive approaches to peace. It argues that the Youth, Peace and Security agenda should be understood as a key element of shifts in UN peacebuilding practice towards inclusivity that enable visibility and legitimacy to a broader range of peace actors. We suggest that greater recognition of the contributions of youth to the broader 'inclusive and sustaining peace' mandates is needed.

In 2014, Sweden's Feminist Foreign Policy (FFP) was announced with a fanfare. This article critically interrogates how Sweden implements the FFP through digital diplomacy by investigating the extent of Sweden's gender equality activities on Twitter since the introduction of the FFP and by tracing gendered online abuse in digital diplomacy. I focus on Swedish embassy tweets towards two countries where feminism is highly contested – Poland and Hungary. The theoretical inspiration comes from discursive approaches to the spoken and unspoken, enriched by feminist observations about the non-binary character of voice/silence. The method applied is gender-driven quantitative and qualitative content analysis. The findings demonstrate that the FFP has not set any significant mark on digital diplomacy in the analyzed cases. The launching of the FFP went completely unnoticed and posts related to gender equality have actually decreased since 2014. There are no traces of ambassadors being subjected to gendered online abuse, but heavily xenophobic and paternalistic language is directed at Sweden as a representative of liberal policies. The article contributes to the literature on digital diplomacy by highlighting the (lack of) links between foreign policy and digital diplomacy and it addresses a gap by focusing on gender in digital diplomacy.

What do we speak of when we speak of 'hybrid warfare', a notion that has become prominent in discussions of European security? The article shows that this question is difficult to answer, as the hybrid warfare discourse is not only vague, but also consists of multiple, and at times contradictory, narratives. While talking and writing about supposedly the same thing, participants in the hybrid warfare debate often suggest markedly different ideas about the precise nature and target of the threat, offer different responses and draw upon different expertise. Grounding our argument in critical scholarship on narratives, security knowledge and hybrid warfare, we build a framework for studying security narratives around the four elements of threat, threatened value, response and underlying knowledge. This framework is utilised in a case study of Czechia, a country that has played a pioneering and outsized role in European hybrid warfare debates. We identify three narratives of hybrid warfare – defence, counterinfluence and education – which present markedly different understandings of 'hybrid warfare', and ways to defend against it. Our intervention hopes to contribute to disentangling the contradictions of the hybrid warfare discourse, itself a necessary precondition for both sound state policy and an informed public debate.

This article explores the political, strategic and emotional issue of victim groups deciding to continue or discontinue central components of a justice campaign in the aftermath of receiving 'truth'. Drawing on in-depth interviews, the article focuses on relatives and other stakeholders' varying positions on (dis)continuing the annual Bloody Sunday commemoration march after the publication of the Report of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry and the UK Prime Minister's apology for the massacre. I demonstrate that there has emerged an, at times, acrimonious schism between those who feel the apology and report were sufficient to stop the march and those who believe them to be insufficient. Thus, while much of the literature on political apology evaluates its effects on the dyadic relationship between victim and perpetrator, this article develops Sara Ahmed's concept of 'overing' to demonstrate that the ostensible moment of truth can create unanticipated and deleterious intra-victim tensions. The article concludes by suggesting practical measures emerging from the findings that other justice campaigns may consider.