Russia apparently aims to be capable of attacking targets in the Baltic Sea region from Lake Ladoga, which is located north of Saint Petersburg and only 40 kilometres from the Finnish border. Since 2023, Russia has been evaluating the deployment of corvettes equipped with cruise missiles there....

Driven by both political camps in Seoul, relations between South Korea and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have deepened significantly since their initiation in 2005. While this intensified relationship was shaped to a large extent by geopolitical developments and increasing...

Following Russia’s attack on Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Western countries have been providing military assistance to Ukraine. However, relative to GDP, the support from the small Baltic and Nordic countries has been greater than that of the larger European NATO countries. This article...

Canada and other members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) are facing higher defence-spending targets in response to growing geopolitical tensions. NATO's 2025 Hague Summit Declaration requires member states to increase their defence spending to five percent of their GDP by 2035....

Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine marked the start of a prolonged confrontation between Moscow and Europe - one that is fundamentally reshaping the parameters of European security. The return of Donald Trump to the White House and his stated intent to quickly end the war in Ukraine and put...

Dispensing with the customary courteous diplomatic language, much of the 47th President's rhetoric concerning the other NATO Allies echoes the valid US criticism that many of them freeride on the US protective defence umbrella without contributing their fair share to the costs of NATO's...

The NATO Hague Summit signalled renewed commitment to transatlantic security, with member states pledging historic increases in defence spending and a broader vision of resilience encompassing cyber, infrastructure, and societal domains. This shift signals more than adaptation; it suggests a...

The NATO Hague Summit signalled renewed commitment to transatlantic security, with member states pledging historic increases in defence spending and a broader vision of resilience encompassing cyber, infrastructure, and societal domains. This shift signals more than adaptation; it suggests a...

As Europe and the United States head into key elections, the strained security situation in northern Kosovo and heightened tensions between Kosovo and Serbia are raising concerns about stability in the region. To restore its credibility, particularly in its pursuit of EU and NATO membership,...

As Europe and the United States head into key elections, the strained security situation in northern Kosovo and heightened tensions between Kosovo and Serbia are raising concerns about stability in the region. To restore its credibility, particularly in its pursuit of EU and NATO membership,...

There is a widespread perception these years that strongmen around the world are winning, posing new geopolitical challenges and threats to the Western liberal order and security architecture. This DIIS Report takes a closer look at one of these strongmen, Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The...

China has become a major player in sovereign lending towards Africa during the past two decades but has recently been faced with increasing defaults. A new African debt crisis is looming. • Differences in the motives of sovereign lending between China and Western creditor countries contribute...

While a second Trump Presidency would be challenging for transatlantic ties, US nuclear assurances to its NATO allies in Europe would likely be the last casualty - not the first - of a fraying relationship. There is an intrinsic incompatibility between the United States completely abandoning its...

This paper is one of the first to show systematically that the motives for sovereign lending to African countries differed considerably between China and Western countries during the last two decades. While Chinese lending mainly served its own economic or geopolitical objectives, which is...

How domestic constituents respond to signals of weakness in foreign wars remains an important question in international relations. This paper studies the impact of battlefield casualties and media coverage on public demand for war termination. To identify the effect of troop fatalities, we...

In its war of attrition against Ukraine, the Kremlin is counting on outnumbering the enemy over a long period in terms of both hardware and personnel. Following the unpopular partial mobilisation in autumn 2022, the recruitment of contract soldiers and volunteer fighters was stepped up...

NATO’s 2023 summit in Vilnius was dominated by Russia’s war against Ukraine. The summit in Washington, D.C., in July 2024 will be influenced by an additional major conflict in NATO’s neighbourhood: the war in Gaza and the related heightened tensions in the Middle East. These have also...

The war in Ukraine has not only dramatically changed Western perceptions of geopolitics, but also influenced risk assess-ments of economic interdependencies between Western economies and China. China has gradually emerged as an important, and in some cases indispensable, supplier to Western...

Zwischen China und dem Westen bestehen gegenseitige Abhängigkeiten, die für beide Seiten das Potenzial haben, bei einem geopolitischen Konflikt hohe wirtschaftliche Kosten entstehen zu lassen. Sollte China tatsächlich eine Invasion Taiwans planen, wäre der Westen bei dann wahrscheinlichen...

This study examines whether there is convergence in military expenditures among NATO countries by using Philips and Sul (2007) convergence methodology. We obtained the primary dataset of 27 NATO member countries between 2009 and 2021 for their military expenditures to accomplish this. The...

Even though the six Western Balkan countries (WB6) have close political ties with the EU, their alignment with the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) has in­creasingly come into focus since the beginning of the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine. The EU should take a...

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the West has been intensively discussing its support strategy. Hawkish positions of strengthening Ukraine via armaments, financial resources, and sanctions against Russia compete with dovish views of avoiding further escalation of the...

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the West has been intensively discussing its support strategy. Hawkish positions of strengthening Ukraine via armaments, financial resources, and sanctions against Russia compete with dovish views of avoiding further escalation of the...

Gethin, Martínez-Toledano and Piketty (2022) analyze the long-run evolution of political cleavages using a new database on socioeconomic determinants of voting from approximately 300 elections in 21 Western democracies between 1948 and 2020. They find that, in the 1950s and 1960s, voting for...

Relations between China and the West appear to be caught in a downward spiral. In the West, there is a widespread perception that China has unduly benefited from economic globalization, while in China, there appears to be increasing concern that the West is seeking to contain China’s rise. In...

Zwischen China und dem Westen bestehen gegenseitige Abhängigkeiten, die für beide Seiten das Potenzial haben, bei einem geopolitischen Konflikt hohe wirtschaftliche Kosten entstehen zu lassen. Sollte China tatsächlich eine Invasion Taiwans planen, wäre der Westen bei dann wahrscheinlichen...

Since February 2022, Ukraine has been defending itself against yet another Russian war of aggression. Now that immediate support - military, diplomatic, financial and humanitarian - for Ukraine has improved, the country’s long-term security needs to be addressed. Looking ahead, security...

How domestic constituents respond to signals of weakness in foreign wars remains an important question in international relations. In this paper, we study the impact of battlefield casualties and media coverage on public demand for war termination. To identify the effect of troop fatalities, we...

Despite the best efforts of the West, the economic sanctions have failed to be as effective as expected, an unsurprising result if we take into account the fact that not all countries (for example, China, India, Israel, Turkey) have joined these sanctions, and those countries (this primarily...

SARS-CoV-2 vaccines give rise to positive externalities on population health, society and the economy in addition to protecting the health of vaccinated individuals. Hence, the social value of such a vaccine exceeds its market value. This paper estimates the willingness to pay (WTP) for a...

The crisis in Ukraine could escalate into war if Russia and the US and its NATO allies cannot resolve their longstanding standoff over the reach of the transatlantic alliance. Mher D Sahakyan, 2020/21 AsiaGlobal Fellow and co-editor of the book China and Eurasia Rethinking Cooperation and...

The war in Ukraine has not only dramatically changed Western perceptions of geopolitics, but also influenced risk assess-ments of economic interdependencies between Western economies and China. China has gradually emerged as an important, and in some cases indispensable, supplier to Western...