Announced at the 2023 G20 summit in New Delhi, the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) is a multimodal network of rail links, ports, hydrogen pipelines, electricity grids and digital cables connecting India to Europe via the Arabian Gulf, Jordan, Israel and the Mediterranean ports of Piraeus, Marseille and Trieste. This paper argues that IMEC is strategic for the European Union: it advances the Global Gateway, deepens the partnership with the Gulf, offers an alternative to the Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab chokepoints, and complements the Middle Corridor through Central Asia.
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European warning systems were built to spot discrete crises, military mobilisation and visible escalation, yet strategic competition increasingly unfolds through gradual influence operations that condition the informational and cognitive environment below conflict thresholds. This paper introduces cognitive early warning: an anticipatory approach that tracks emerging trajectories of influence, such as narrative convergence, coordinated amplification and the alignment of informational pressure with political, economic or diplomatic moves, before they become visible crises.
Adversaries operating below the threshold of open conflict can shape narratives and generate political pressure faster than the European Union can deliberate, coordinate and respond. This paper names that structural vulnerability the cognitive tempo gap: the mismatch between the speed of adversarial information operations and the slower tempo of democratic decision-making. It argues that the EU’s multi-layered institutional architecture and fragmented information flows make it particularly exposed, as illustrated by the competing narratives of the early phase of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
When an AI targeting system compresses the decision to kill into 20 seconds of human review, legal judgment becomes a rubber stamp and responsibility dissolves across code, data, and contractors. This paper argues the EU can close that accountability gap without a new treaty, by making "Authority by Design" a condition of market access and defence funding, so any provider wanting into Europe must build human control and auditability into the system architecture itself. It sets out a five-part TRACE framework to be embedded in the EU's defence procurement regimes.
In 2025 Latvia did three things that look unconnected: it phased Russian out of its schools, finished a fence along its border with Russia, and saw its parliament vote to leave a Council of Europe treaty on violence against women. This paper argues they share one mechanism, "selective re-nationalisation," a sector-by-sector reassertion of sovereignty by a frontline state that stays inside the European order even as it renegotiates its terms. It proposes a security-sensitive EU coordination platform to keep such reforms proportionate and inclusive.
The EU has spent around €1.8 billion on critical raw materials since 2014, barely enough to open one and a half mines the size of Finland's Sakatti. This paper argues that Europe's Critical Raw Materials Act is undercut by a structural mismatch: the security benefits of mining lithium and rare earths are continental, but the environmental and political costs fall on single communities, as stalled projects in Portugal and Spain show. It proposes financial risk-pooling and a shift from damage mitigation to positive local incentives, built on instruments the EU already has.
On 28 April 2025, a cascading power failure left 47 million people across Spain and Portugal without electricity, with no attacker involved. This paper argues that Europe's smart cities are building exactly this fragility in by design, and that fragmented EU cyber rules cannot yet govern the risk. It proposes four system-level fixes.
From Cohesion to Capability: A European Strategic Coordination Agency for the EU’s Outermost Regions
No EU defence instrument treats the outermost regions as anything more than recipients of cohesion policy, despite assets like the Azores' NATO airbase, spaceport, and vast Atlantic waters. This paper argues they are underused strategic assets and proposes a dedicated agency to connect these peripheral territories, and the SMEs based there, with European defence.
As the EU's flagship defence projects shift with each six-month presidency - from the Baltic Defence Line to the Drone Wall to Mediterranean maritime security - long-term planning collapses. This article uses the Polish-Danish-Cypriot trio to expose the structural flaw, and proposes a Treaty-compatible reform: likeminded, size-balanced trios built around a genuinely shared programme.
With 82% of South Ossetia's budget funded by Moscow and Abkhazia structurally tied to Russian tourism and trade, this article examines how fiscal transfers, infrastructure, and sectoral dependence entrench de facto separation in Georgia's breakaway regions - and what it means for European security.
From ISIS recruiting teenagers on gaming platforms to al-Qaeda generating propaganda with generative AI, jihadist networks are weaponising artificial intelligence for radicalisation at scale. This policy paper maps the evolving threat to European security and assesses the EU's legal and institutional response - from the AI Act to Europol's Counter-Terrorism Centre.
As few as 250 malicious documents can poison an LLM regardless of its size - and Kremlin-aligned networks are already exploiting this at scale. Drawing on an original audit of twelve chatbots, this brief argues Europe should act through the DSA now and the AI Act upstream, treating narrative poisoning as a defined systemic risk.
Rather than building a European Army, the EU should become NATO's financial engine. This article proposes a triangular coordination model between NATO, the EDA, and the European Commission - drawing on the US-Israel JPMG precedent - backed by a unified European Defence Readiness and Resilience Plan inspired by NextGenerationEU.
EU-NATO cooperation on hybrid threats produces parallel systems that adversaries exploit by design. This paper argues the core problem is not political disagreement but fragmented civil-military coordination, and proposes a single fix: a permanent EU-NATO Hybrid Coordination Cell with a joint threat assessment mandate and predefined escalation protocols.
A Space Security Threat Intelligence Matrix for the EU: Bridging Technical Events and Strategic Risk
Russia's 2021 ASAT test and the KA-SAT cyberattack exposed a critical gap: the EU can detect space threats but cannot systematically link them to actor rationale, regime context, and escalation risk. This paper proposes a two-layered Space Security Threat Intelligence Matrix - synchronised with ESA SPACE-SHIELD - and a dedicated analytical unit within EUSPA to translate technical data into actionable policy intelligence.
EDIP can prioritise defence supply chains in a crisis - but has no mechanism to allocate scarce raw materials between its own grant beneficiaries competing for the same gallium. This policy brief proposes two interlocking fixes: a classified Defence Raw Materials Visibility Platform and a rule-based Allocation Mechanism, both implementable without new legislation.
Article 2(3) of the EU AI Act creates a blank cheque: any AI system labelled a national security tool escapes the entire accountability framework. This paper argues the exception is becoming a constitutional blind spot and proposes a calibrated fix — confidential justification documents, sunset clauses, and restricted EU-level notification — fully compatible with Article 4(2) TEU.