Journals
2026 EN
Plakoudas Spyridon · Michnik Wojciech
Is the use of proxies in counter-terrorism effective? The campaign against ISIS in Syria may offer an answer. In 2017, the U.S. captured the capital of ISIS in Syria after a 3-year war. This swift and cheap victory, however, was owed chiefly to the sacrifices of their proxies – the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) – and contrasted the failed proxy war against Assad. This paper will examine this campaign to understand how this combating terrorism proxy campaign differed from the ‘traditional’ U.S. proxy wars and why it succeeded despite the numerous challenges. This paper will enrich the current debate about the U.S. combating terrorism strategies, proxy warfare as a counterterrorism tool and shed light on the current U.S. policy challenges in Syria.
Journals
2026 EN
Burgess Emily Jane
Alice Diamond—leader of the interwar Forty Thieves gang—was portrayed by the contemporary press as an inhabitant of the London ‘underworld’. The ‘underworld’ is denoted within scholarship as a narrative tool used to place ‘othered’ individuals who did not fit the stringent perceptions of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century social ideology. Despite this, the ‘underworld’ was often presented as a real locale within South London, gaining widespread attention and condemnation. By framing Diamond as an ‘Underworld Amazon’, ‘Giant’, and ‘Queen of the Terrors’, the press was able to link female gangsterism and the female body to deemed ‘masculine’ criminality, allowing for commentary over criminal behaviour—namely atavism, violence and ‘the born criminal’. This article shows that the mythmaking surrounding Diamond, the Forty Thieves gang and the ‘underworld’ was used to project female gangsterism as a form of ‘internal terror’ to fuel fears over gender, post-war brutalisation and the changing interwar landscape.
Journals
2026 EN
Murray Simon
This Viewpoint about suffragette Phyllis (Phyll) Murray née Keller (1888–1977) is written by her eldest grandson and includes his reminiscences of his grandmother, as well as some recollections by other relatives. Phyll, as she was commonly known, was a campaigning suffragette in the Votes for Women movement in Edwardian Britain and was confined to Holloway Prison in March 1912. In 1913, she joined Christabel Pankhurst in Paris as her assistant, while also dancing in Pavlova’s Corps de Ballet. This unashamedly personal account traces Phyll’s early life as a young suffragette and then, after the First World War, her marriage in 1919 to Denis Murray, eldest son of Professor Gilbert and Lady Mary Murray, becoming a mother in 1920, a widow in 1930 and an active life in North Cumberland for almost 30 years. In 1950, she moved to Surrey to be close to her daughter Pam and growing family, and stayed there until her death. The author describes his relationship with his grandmother, Phyll, and some of the details of her life in this final period, noting that she was a remarkable woman, hugely skilled, committed to the cause of women’s emancipation and a most loving mother and grandmother.
Journals
2026 EN
Ma Shuzhong · Li Yanchen · Hu Zengxi
+1 more
The 2022 Russia-Ukraine War generated significant global economic disruptions, with unforeseen impacts across multiple sectors. Existing research, however, lacks substantive investigation into the conflict's effects on digital trade. This study bridges this gap through a rigorous quantitative analysis, primarily focusing on China's cross-border e-commerce (CBEC) exports to non-war European regions. Leveraging data from a representative CBEC logistics company in China and a continuous difference-in-differences (DID) design, this research reveals a significant downturn in China's CBEC exports to European countries after the Russia-Ukraine War outbroke. Beyond quantifying this impact, we identify key transmission mechanisms: rising living costs in conflict-adjacent regions and refugee displacement patterns that collectively suppressed e-commerce activity. Our expanded analysis further reveals country-level and product-level heterogeneity. These findings provide nuanced perspectives on geopolitical conflicts’ interplay with international trade dynamics – particularly digital commerce – offering valuable implications for researchers, policymakers, and industry stakeholders.
Journals
2026 EN
Göransson Markus Balázs
The article examines the Hungarian government’s rhetoric on Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine during the early months of the invasion, drawing on the literature on state security identity. It finds that the Hungarian government portrayed the war as an impersonal force, a kind of maelstrom on its doorstep into which Hungary might “drift” if heedless policy proposals by Western states and the Hungarian political opposition were put into practice. According to this rhetoric, it was the Hungarian government’s judicious and patriotic leadership that enabled the country to steer clear of drifting into the war. In contrast with the pro-Western rhetoric of Hungarian governments of the 1990s and 2000s, Hungary was now explicitly identified as a “Central European” state with its own security interests, but one that was threatened by the self-interested and reckless actions of Western states and the Hungarian political opposition.
Journals
2026 EN
Torres-Adán Ángel
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the resulting instability has led to increased public perceptions of the threat of the conflict escalating into a global war. While existing research links threat perceptions to psychological well-being and political attitudes, less is known about their (geo)political causes. How do geopolitics, cues and conspiratorial thinking influence individual assessments of the risk of a global conflict? This study aims to answer this research question by analysing a nationally representative survey conducted in Slovakia in early May 2024. Several hypotheses are tested regarding how geopolitics, elite cues and conspiratorial thinking could influence the public's belief that World War III has started or is about to begin. The findings show that scoring higher on a scale of Western-Russian geopolitical orientations increases the likelihood of believing that WWIII has already begun or is about to commence. Higher levels of trust in the prime minister, a proxy for elite cues, reduce the threat perception. Conspiratorial thinking is positively correlated with threat perceptions. Furthermore, an interaction model reveals that conspiratorial beliefs increase threat perceptions for all but the most pro-Russian respondents.
Journals
2026 EN
Baracani Elena · Danesi Michele
This article sheds light on the foreign policy behaviour of the European Parliament, which is traditionally considered to have a “quite limited” role in this policy domain. It aims to fill a theoretical and empirical gap by using role theory concepts to investigate the behaviour of the Parliament's IX legislature in EU foreign policy towards Ukraine following the Russian war of aggression. It addresses the following research puzzles. How has the EP tried to shape the EU's understanding of its proper response following the Russian war of aggression? What has been the Parliament's foreign policy performance towards Ukraine? Has the EP behaved as a policy entrepreneur advocating foreign policy change to help Ukraine? The empirical analysis is based on the qualitative content analysis of 55 resolutions and in-depth conversations with 27 interviewees. This article makes two main contributions. It suggests a framework, based on role theory concepts, to empirically explore the behaviour of the EP in different cases of EU foreign policy. The specific case examined reveals that the EP behaved as a foreign policy entrepreneur because it was the first EU institution to conceptualise the most critical foreign policy changes that would later become part of the EU response.
Journals
2026 EN
Ünaldilar Sinem · Aydoğan Ünal Betül · Kumova Metin Senem
This article investigates how the Russia–Ukraine war has reshaped the European Union's defence priorities and its pursuit of strategic autonomy. Using advanced text analytics and machine learning methods of over 26,000 European External Action Service (EEAS) documents, we examine shifts in topic prevalence across the Strategic Compass while considering broader geopolitical dynamics, including Brexit, China's positioning and US-NATO relations. Using EEAS documents spanning from one year before to two years after the Russian invasion, we employ a two-stage topic modelling approach. First, we classify EEAS documents under the Strategic Compass dimensions through majority voting, utilising text embedding and supervised learning models, followed by detailed mapping of documents to specific subtopics derived from the Strategic Compass framework by topic modelling. Our findings reveal a significant reorientation from a pre-war emphasis on long-term capability development towards an increased focus on immediate crisis response and strengthened international partnerships postinvasion. While the EU demonstrated enhanced operational capacity and partnership-building, persistent challenges remain in achieving comprehensive strategic autonomy and becoming an international actor. These results suggest that external crises can accelerate strategic autonomy in discourse. However, achieving genuine independence requires more effective crisis response, long-term capability development, and strong partnership management.
Journals
2026 EN
Bílý Matěj
In 1985, the USSR proposed multilateral export controls for the Warsaw Pact in order to protect the ‘scientific-technological’ and ‘military-economic’ potential of its member states. In its aim to identify research, technologies and goods that members should be prohibited from transferring to partners in the West and the developing world, this proposal was analogous to the West's CoCom embargo. Using documents from two former Warsaw Pact countries, the German Democratic Republic and Czechoslovakia, this article provides a new perspective on scientific data and technology exchange in the late Cold War, focusing on what knowledge the East had and thought the world might be interested in, and whether this assumption was correct.
Journals
2026 EN
Morini Mara · Chiapponi Flavio
Political discourse represents a tool for achieving the goals of power that relevant actors intend to pursue, especially in times of crisis or war. Nevertheless, there are few empirical analyses that explore how political leaders employ political communication to rhetorically frame and manage crises. We use content analysis to assess the extent to which the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 led President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to adopt specific patterns of political discourse. This article breaks new ground in its combined focus on political communication and crisis management.