The adoption of Regulation (EU) 2026/1744 changes an important part of the European Union's approach to algorithmic discrimination.
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This paper asks whether institutionalized cooperation among EU member states has been an efficient model for responding to the shift in power relations caused by the energy crisis that followed Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
This paper examines the Voluntary Relocation Exercise from Greece (2020-2023), through which 5.059 people were relocated to thirteen Member States and three associated countries, with over 95 per cent of commitments implemented despite the COVID-19 pandemic.
European foreign ministries and EU external-action institutions operate in an environment shaped by artificial intelligence, accelerated information flows, cyber operations, foreign information manipulation and intensifying geopolitical competition.
Global politics are rapidly shifting, and Europe has an urgent need to adapt. In the United States, isolationist policies have threatened European peace, economic stability and security.
This paper examines the relationship between the acquisition of Portuguese nationality, Union citizenship and intra-EU mobility.
Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) lists the values on which the Union is founded: human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and human rights. For a long time, these values were treated as political principles rather than binding legal standards.
This paper examines what happens when AI is used not by a hostile outsider, but by one ally against another.
From 2024-2026, Kuwait reforms its nationality laws to grant the executive unchecked power to revoke citizenship retroactively. By August 3035 approximately 50,000 people had been denationalised, many of them women having renounced their other nationality upon marrying Kuwaiti men and are therefore now stateless.
Europe has become better at detecting foreign information manipulation and interference. It is still difficult to establish when a campaign changes decisions in a particular place and puts pressure on a public service. This paper proposes Territorial Function Coupling as a way to investigate that passage.
As NATO adapts to high-intensity, multi-domain operations, its effectiveness depends not only on technological and procedural interoperability but also on cultural cohesion among its members.
The war in Ukraine has generated unprecedented security, humanitarian, and institutional pressures on the European Union's eastern border, creating spillover effects that exceed the response capacity of traditional border management frameworks.
Discussions of European digital dependencies often focus on U.S. software but China’s role in European network infrastructure deserves equal attention. This paper analyzes why the EU has struggled to regulate the risks posed by Huawei and ZTE.
European security strategy increasingly relies on deeper cooperation with Indo-Pacific democracies, particularly Japan and South Korea, in defence-industrial development and AI-enabled technologies.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the way cybersecurity is organised, understood, and practised in Europe. Machine-learning systems can identify anomalies, process threat intelligence, prioritise alerts, and support incident response at a speed that is difficult for human operators to match.
Officially launched in May 2023 under the G7 Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment, the Lobito Corridor received further political endorsement during the G20 Summit in New Delhi in September 2023.
European military artificial intelligence governance has focused largely on whether AI systems can be developed and deployed responsibly. This paper argues that this approach misses an important dimension: crisis stability. AI can compress military decision-making timelines and influence how uncertainty is perceived.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has transformed the European Union’s role in security and defence. Yet its communication has not consistently kept pace with its actions.
European public administrations are rapidly embedding automated decision making and artificial intelligence into the exercise of public power.
European energy security is no longer only a question of supply, storage and import dependence. It is also a problem of infrastructure warning.
The 2026 European security environment is defined by an unprecedented convergence of systemic pressures—a state of perpetual poly-crisis where technological vulnerabilities intersect with democratic erosion.
Education is a fundamental right that is protected under the EU Charter and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
The "Future of Energy in the CFSP" project aims to examine and clarify the EU's energy insecurity. The study considers data collected from Eurostat and indicators addressing the EU’s import dependency, energy intensity, and domestic production rate of energy.
The European Union was built as a peace project, and Article 41(2) of the Treaty on European Union reflects this by barring the Union's budget from funding operations with military or defence implications.
This paper examines the relationship between France’s Force de Frappe and the evolving Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) of the European Union.
On 1 March 2026, an Iranian-manufactured drone launched from Lebanon struck RAF Akrotiri on the island of Cyprus. Hours later, the European Commission was asked whether Article 42.7 TEU, the EU’s mutual defence clause, had been discussed. The answer was no .
Russia’s war against Ukraine has exposed vulnerabilities in the European Union’s model of economic interdependence, particularly its reliance on Russian energy and globally integrated supply chains.
Machine learning systems are usually evaluated based on how they performed on historical test data. But good performance during testing does not necessarily mean that the system will perform the same way under real operational conditions.
Machine learning tools are entering European judicial systems unevenly, and this deployment raises a security question distinct from the bias and transparency framing that has dominated the debate.
In recent years, the European Union has found itself having to confront security and stability crises without institutions sufficiently prepared, flexible, and reactive to address them.
European analysts largely agree the Russia–China partnership is asymmetric: Western sanctions have made Russia dependent on Chinese markets, technology and finance, handing Beijing leverage. This paper asks whether European institutions have written that judgement into official strategy.
Ireland's historic neutrality is being called into question in the context of an increasingly erratic US ally and an unpredictable geopolitical arena.
Europe’s security environment increasingly blurs the boundary between internal democratic resilience and external geopolitical threats.
The current geopolitical state of affairs poses a lot of global threats which cannot be resolved by a state on its own. This has motivated the EU and Member States to join forces in the field of intelligence and security services in order to ensure stronger protection against common threats.
In its drive towards net-zero emissions, the European Union’s climate targets depend on sourcing critical minerals, such as lithium, from the Global South. Although presented as a mutually beneficial partnership, this strategy presents a geopolitical contradiction.
The European Union needs to translate societal preparedness into faster, accountable action at the point of disruption.
The European Union’s pursuit of digital sovereignty has become closely linked to its efforts to regulate artificial intelligence (AI).
AI deployment in the European defence sector underscores critical security concerns. The 2026 Munich Security Conference showed how the US is turning away from the transatlantic alliance, urging Europe to “take responsibility” for its own defence.
This paper argues that Brazil should be comprehended as a strategically relevant partner for European energy security in the context of the EU’s decarbonisation agenda.
The Sudanese civil war, which broke out in 2023 as a result of conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), has provoked a humanitarian and regional security crisis with direct implications for the European Union.
Europe’s Military Mobility challenge is no longer primarily a lack of coordination or policy ambition, but the consistent implementation of existing and emerging measures across the reinforcement network.
European democracies are increasingly facing overlapping crises, from the COVID-19 pandemic to geopolitical instability, while political polarization continues to undermine public trust in democratic institutions.
Misinformation and disinformation are widely recognized as central challenges in AI governance, yet current approaches focus predominantly on model outputs rather than the data infrastructure that produces them. This paper argues that such focus is misplaced.
The European Central Bank (ECB) sets a single interest rate for seventeen structurally distinct economies.
France’s misjudgment in the run-up to Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine is commonly framed as an intelligence failure. This paper argues that this label is incomplete because France did not lack warning: Russian capabilities were recognised and extensive US/UK intelligence was available.
High-intensity conflicts demand continuous adaptation to rapidly evolving adversarial countermeasures. The European defense innovation ecosystem must adapt by prioritising capabilities that combine functionality with adaptability and resilience.
The outbreak of the war in Ukraine in February 2022 reshaped the concept of European integration and intensified the debate over the Union’s institutional future.
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.
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.
European air forces depend on Link 16 — a US-controlled system subject to ITAR rules and vulnerable to transatlantic breakdown. This paper proposes integrating tactical data link capabilities into the IRIS² LEO constellation, giving Europe a sovereign, beyond-line-of-sight communications layer that functions independently of US encryption and infrastructure.
The debate on Europe's nuclear end-state — Franco-British umbrella, full autonomy, or US dependence — is deadlocked by strategic cacophony. This paper argues for a different entry point: investing now in the survivability, C3I, and early-warning infrastructure that any deterrence architecture will require, regardless of which end-state prevails.
Portugal implemented 74.5% of its Defence Equality Action Plan — yet gender perspectives remain largely absent from operational planning. This paper uses the Portuguese case to diagnose why institutionalisation fails to translate into operational integration, and proposes five reforms for the 2026-2030 cycle.
DNA synthesis now costs under $0.10 per base pair — and AI can design pathogens calibrated to evade the EU's detection systems. This paper proposes the European Bio-Shield: agnostic metagenomic sentinel networks, mandatory synthesis screening, and a GDPR-compliant data architecture — all for €320 million, less than 0.02% of COVID-19's cost.
Germany wore rainbow wristbands in Doha while signing a 15-year LNG deal. This paper dissects the EU's structural contradiction in the Gulf — real leverage through €161.7 billion in trade, squandered by normative incoherence, institutional paralysis, and unanimity rules — and proposes activating the CFSP passerelle clause to unlock qualified majority voting.
79% of Europeans fear disinformation yet 61% believe they can spot it — a gap that Generative AI is rapidly widening. This paper argues that EDMO must evolve from a passive observatory into an independent, DSA-anchored regulatory authority equipped with citizen-driven flagging and algorithmic circuit breakers to defend democratic decision-making at scale.
While NATO fractures over Greenland, China quietly builds ports, shipping lanes, and dual-use research stations across the Arctic. This article argues that conventional military deterrence is no longer sufficient — and that the EU must become NATO's geoeconomic shield against Beijing's below-threshold Arctic expansion.
Europol, Frontex, and CSDP missions in Ukraine operate in parallel — with no formalised protocol for real-time coordination. This paper uses EUAM Ukraine as a stress test of the EU's fragmented security architecture and proposes a concrete, Treaty-compatible fix: an EU Integrated Security Coordination Protocol.
Microsoft hosts 18 EU defence agencies — and the EU AI Act explicitly exempts military AI from its cybersecurity rules. This policy brief identifies the regulatory blind spots where DMA data silos and gatekeeper lock-in create sovereignty chokepoints, and proposes four concrete fixes: an EDA-led AI framework, a DMA interoperability taskforce, NIS2-backed audits, and EDIP-funded sovereign cloud pilots.
Europe has 230+ defence tech startups but no structured pipeline connecting them to military end users. This paper proposes Civil-Military Innovation Sprints — short, time-bound problem-solving engagements — to shift alignment between innovators and armed forces to the earliest possible stage of the development cycle.
77% of European cultural organisations have experienced visa rejections for invited professionals — not due to security risks, but because algorithmic border systems cannot read cultural labour. This paper proposes three governance reforms to end the institutional contradiction between the EU's soft power investments and its own border architecture.
From Belarus's structural dependence to Hungary's careful hedging — China does not promote a universal model of space cooperation. This analysis maps Beijing's engagement across European periphery states and outlines five institutional reforms the EU must implement to secure genuine space autonomy.
From Lithuania's 90% export collapse to Europe's rare earth exposure — this policy report examines how China weaponises trade and proposes three concrete reforms to the EU's Anti-Coercion Instrument: a "green light" activation procedure, an EU Resilience Office, and a Resilience Fund.
The Zuuvch Ovoo deposit alone could supply nearly 20% of the EU's annual uranium demand — yet Mongolia barely registers on Brussels' radar. This article maps the geopolitical constraints, the French-Mongolian partnership led by Orano, and the policy tools the EU must deploy to turn passive diversification into active integration.
Over 7 million internally displaced people, millions of them children growing up in uncertainty. This article argues that psychological resilience and child-focused urban policy are not soft issues but core security infrastructure — and proposes three operational instruments for Ukrainian cities in 2026.
Europe is spending more on defence — but not smartly. This article proposes a sequential financing model that connects SMEs through structured ecosystem dynamics and development thresholds, transforming fragmented funding into a self-sustaining European defence industrial base.
Europe does not face a choice between NATO and strategic autonomy — it faces a choice between structural dependence and credible burden-sharing. This article argues for a sequenced, capability-first approach under the SAFE framework, targeting intelligence, military mobility, and air defence as the most urgent asymmetries to close.
EU enlargement in the Western Balkans is not stalled — it is structurally broken. This article argues that unanimity requirements and the absence of phased integration mechanisms have created a strategic grey zone in Southeast Europe, and proposes a legally grounded two-track reform: targeted QMV expansion and phased security integration through energy, cybersecurity, CSDP, and PESCO.
From energy price shocks to supply chain disruptions and financial volatility — this article maps how maritime instability in critical chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz exposes the EU's structural dependence on external sea lanes, and why existing security frameworks are not enough.
The EIB finances infrastructure in fragile and conflict-affected regions — but its risk models ignore field-level intelligence. This article argues for a structured intelligence liaison capability within the EIB to close the gap between ground-truth reporting and institutional decision-making.
Pushbacks in Greece, detention camps in Lithuania, and rapid turnbacks in Poland — this article examines the structural gap between the EU's humanitarian commitments and Member States' border practices, and proposes concrete reforms to restore coherence to EU border governance.
Only 41% of Norwegian officer cadets meet NATO's language threshold for joint operations — and conscription is about to make it worse. This article examines Europe's persistent military language gap and proposes a four-pronged fix: standardised testing, expanded training, multinational integration, and careful use of real-time translation technology.
Where SAFE falls short, could an intergovernmental European Defence Mechanism fill the gap? This article applies the Pringle framework to argue that an EDM modelled on the ESM can enable joint procurement with non-EU partners — including the UK — while remaining fully compliant with Article 125 TFEU.
Can the EU act swiftly in a crisis without sacrificing democratic accountability? This article proposes a European Emergency Competence Framework — built on existing Treaty provisions — that enables rapid executive action while embedding hard parliamentary oversight and automatic sunset clauses.
How Europe can move from reactive diversification to active protection: a policy framework built on a European Energy Protection Force, 180-day strategic reserves, and quantum grid modernisation to withstand the next energy shock.
China's cyber strategy as a diagnostic mirror: how Beijing's Military-Civil Fusion doctrine and state-linked threat actors expose Europe's fragmented governance, legacy infrastructure gaps, and supply chain vulnerabilities — and what Brussels must do next.