Conference Agenda

Efforts to degrade European solidarity in the security dimension rely heavily on shaping perceptions of regional and global international order. Some - for example, Russian influence operations (IO) - push the narrative of declining Western power. In our research, we tried to find a quantifiable way to map perceptions of the global distribution of power, by interviewing experts, former public servants and "pundits" who appear in visual media and comment on global and European security issues.
We conducted interviews with 22 individuals in Hungary who are frequent experts appearing in the media, from those who appeared in the first 5 pages on Google and YouTube (n=43). We wanted to identify whether there are significant differences in the way these experts perceive the distribution of power in IR, as they themselves regularly shape public perceptions of power. We selected 15 countries and asked interviewees to rank their “Power” (coded into three “power dimensions”: military, economic/soft power). Secondly, we asked interviewees to identify their perceived idea on how countries relate to current international order and how much potential they have for changing it. We coded the answers and have created a database quantifying how the interviewed experts perceive the distribution of power and how much potential they envision regarding the change or preservation of the current global order.
Our findings show that two groups emerged: one perceives high potential for changing the status quo, and another perceives more potential for its preservation. When cross-referencing Subjects' appearance numbers and online outreach, it seems that the people who see a more extremely polarized distribution have higher media appearances. We also looked at the dispersion value, identifying the countries with the highest dispersion rates amongst experts. Looking at the Google appearances of countries, it seems that the dispersion rate correlates with low news search appearances, except for Russia. This seems to suggest that Russian efforts to shape perceptions of Russian power have successfully divided experts into seeing Russia as either relatively weak or disproportionately strong.
Our research so far has only focused on a single case study, but further emulating the method could help map European expert perceptions of shifting global power dynamics.

This paper explores whether there is convergence between the EU and other nation-states in perceiving hybrid threats, particularly those emanating from terrorist organizations acting as proxy actors. It investigates whether this like-minded situation is associated with their level of democracy or if democracy is no longer an indicator for perceiving hybrid threats in the same way. The argument is grounded in a comparison between the lists of publicly available designated terrorist organizations and Freedom House’s democracy ratings for the EU and other nation-states, including Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Canada, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Paraguay, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States, through a logistic regression analysis.

While the Western world was rather fast, united and unequivocal in condemning Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the reactions from within the Global South were more varied. Russia’s war on Ukraine is that of a European empire on a country it formerly colonised. Yet, among those countries most sympathetic to Russia’s narrative and most critical of Western support for Ukraine, are many of the countries in the Global South that were formerly colonised by European empires. This paper discusses the origins of such sentiments. It argues that in obtaining rather limited open support from non-Western countries, the Ukrainians are paying the price for perceived and actual Western double standards in European and American past and present conduct in international affairs.

Since the inception of the CSDP, the study of European Security has developed into a productive and vibrant sub-discipline, one that has matured to the point of (partial) institutionalisation within the wider community as well as an increasingly consolidated research agenda. That said, as the track leaders suggest, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has upended many of the conventional assumptions that have informed this scholarship for quite some time (including in related disciplines like International Relations, Regional Studies, and Cultural Studies). This paper engages with the contention that crises offer windows of opportunity for increased epistemological pluralism and theoretical innovation that could favour “dissident voices”. But has the radical shift in the wider strategic landscape of the continent really brought about a revival of otherwise marginalised perspectives in the study of European Security? Are there indications of a post-disciplinary momentum that could indeed change the intellectual trajectory of the “European security mainstream” long-term? To answer these questions, the paper builds on a sociology-of-knowledge framework to guide a set of exploratory case studies of scholarly work on particular areas of European Security that each also speak to one dimension of “mainstreaming” in the sub-discipline: (1) the EEAS (institutional), (2) the CSDP “on the ground” (operational-performative) and of (3) European Geostrategy (political). The overall aim is to develop a route map for a critical yet amicable exercise of (sub-)disciplinary introspection which to some may seem like an unnecessary distraction when to others it is about nothing less than the social purpose of an entire profession – the “European Security Scholar”.

A variety of current challenges – the Russian war against Ukraine, the rise of populism, the possible re-election of Donald Trump as US President, Russian and Chinese pushback against Western influence in the Balkans – suggest that Europe’s existing liberal security order is in crisis. What, however, is the nature and scale of this crisis? And what do answers to these questions suggest about the future prospects for European security? This paper will address these questions by exploring what we may mean by a liberal regional order and how this has played out in Europe since 1945. The analyse will also be situated in the wider debates on liberal international order at the global level and in international relations theory debates about what explains the nature and evolution of international orders. The paper will argue that the liberal European security order which emerged after 1945 and was entrenched after 1989 is underpinned by multiple mutual reinforcing factors which give it a remarkable degree of resilience. The paper will argue that a variety of scenarios are conceivable (some incompatible with one another, others which might co-exist alongside one another): a retrenchment of European liberal ambitions; the capture of the European liberal order by illiberal forces; and the complete collapse of the European liberal order. The last of these scenarios is the least likely, although it can no longer be ruled.