As social identities are not static but made, actors constantly invest in their public image, financially, institutionally, and aesthetically. This article examines and compares two vignettes of NATO’s public (visual) diplomacy and strategic communication. It shows the changing nature of the visual communication that NATO has applied to rationalise its military force and to fix its collective identity. In addition, the article illustrates that the changing visual communication of the alliance shapes and is shaped by its identity constructions and its quest for ontological security. For the vignette of a force comparison report from 1984, authored by the NATO Information Service, I argue that technical images are conditioning the sensible and possible by normalising the deployment of military force and disciplining anxieties about the self, deterrence, and defence. This look is based on spatial divisions, absent people, and relational objects. Compared to the vignette of NATO’s more recent social media campaign, #NATO2030, published in 2021, I argue that the latter reveals the progressive nature of the alliance by gaze to gender, diversity, and collective security. This shift from a deterrence-fixed to a human-faced episteme symbolises NATO’s ability to secure a stable self while adopting its public diplomacy.

Why is there no NATO in Asia? Literature on this question is selective and incomplete. This paper develops a new theory with determinate predictions regarding patron and clients’ alliance design preferences, the alliances that result, the commitments therein, and alliance duration. A subtle but nonetheless persistent form of entrapment problem exists with clients that don’t want a war yet fear adversary aggression. Clients’ commitment to collective security is a hand-tying costly signal that assures the patron of client resolve to defend the status quo and reduces the probability and costs of entrapment. Patrons will rationally prefer to join in an alliance clients who have already made a collective security commitment. Clients are more likely, the paper shows, to make such commitments when their adversary credibly threatens to militarily occupy at least one of them. This is more likely in land than in sea theatres. When clients fail to realise collective security, patron efforts to impose it on them will fail, will result in short lived multilateralism, and will force bilateralism on the patron. The paper uses new archival evidence from Britain and Australia to show how this strategic framework explains variation in alliance design in Europe and Asia.

Leaders play a central role in world politics, and threat perception is a crucial element in the study and practice of International Relations (IR). Yet existing accounts of how leaders perceive threats are inadequate, drawing on an incomplete notion of leaders as (ir)rational information processors that pays no attention to the leader’s experience of danger as it unfolds in time and how such experience is structured. By integrating a framework developed by linguist Ray Jackendoff to describe the experience of language with the study of danger in International Relations, and by employing an interpretive textual analysis technique to danger descriptions made by world leaders embedded in different historical and cultural settings constructing different security dangers, I develop and illustrate the ‘danger framework’. In describing the unique features with which leaders experience security dangers, the danger framework theorises the qualia of danger experience and how it is organised into the conscious field of leaders. In doing so, the paper makes progress on three problems for existing accounts of threat perception in IR, illuminates important research puzzles, and provides the literature on experience and Ontological Security Studies (OSS) with micro-foundations.

While much critical scholarship has pointed out that liberal peacebuilding can contribute to consolidating authoritarianism in host countries, little is known about the political effects in the deployer country. This article analyses the relationship between foreign and domestic peace processes and far-right forces in Brazil. We ask if Brazil’s leadership role in the United Nations’ Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (2004–17) and its own domestic pacification efforts in Rio de Janeiro with the Pacifying Police Units (2008–14) contributed to the strengthening of the far right in Brazil. Relying on a combination of literature review, document analysis, and fieldwork interviews, we argue that Brazil’s engagement in liberal peacebuilding processes strengthened the far right in Brazil in two important ways. The first was through a military capture of politics, as a large portion of the military elite that participated in both interventions enabled the military to take a more prominent role in Brazil’s domestic politics. Second, Port-au-Prince and Rio de Janeiro became crucial sites for experimentation with a range of policy ideas that Bolsonaro later capitalised on, namely, a punitive turn in security policies and the mobilisation of conservative Evangelical actors and morals to support and justify the military occupation.

Germany’s 2022 Zeitenwende (watershed) has been widely interpreted as a break with Berlin’s decades-long attempts to offer security ‘with rather than against Russia’. In the 1970s, West Germany’s social democrat-led government had embarked on Ostpolitik (Eastern policy) as a way of normalising relations with the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and other Soviet satellites by fostering closer economic ties with Moscow. This policy was extended by subsequent governments and even endured, though in new form, after the fall of the Berlin wall. Ostpolitik is now commonly seen to have culminated in a Kremlin-friendly political landscape and an economy dependent on Russian gas. More than two years after Zeitenwende, the jury is still out as to whether Ostpolitik has been dismantled or simply remains on hold. This article shows that although German politics has experienced a seismic shift since the invasion, forces of continuity remain in operation. Ostpolitik was always in part the symptom of a desire to do realpolitik in Europe. This urge is unlikely to disappear.

This article challenges the perception of Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) as a revolutionary shift driven by the explosion of publicly accessible data. Instead, we argue that the rise of OSINT reflects an evolution of traditional intelligence practices: the collection, processing, analysis and dissemination of vast amounts of information. While the exponential growth of open–source data is reshaping the intelligence landscape, it is neither revolutionizing nor democratizing intelligence. Rather, it is prompting both state and non–state actors to explore how best to integrate OSINT practices and enhance digital literacy within their communities. Core OSINT challenges – information overload, reliability, and legal and ethical concerns – remain consistent with broader intelligence issues. Addressing these challenges provides a foundation for consolidating OSINT as a community of practice, and linking it to debates on the disputed role of security expertise in the public debate.

Retaining operational effectiveness in a low-carbon world will require military innovation and change. Indeed, there has been growing acknowledgement within some defence ministries that as the world decarbonises a military energy transition is essential. In this paper, we illustrate how calls for a military energy transition have gained renewed traction within the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) since 2018. Empirically, we draw on semi-structured interviews with 46 officials and armed forces personnel, conducted by the authors between June and October 2023. To structure our analysis, we adopt a multilevel perspective (MLP) from the field of Sustainability Transitions. Combining the MLP with insights from the literature on military innovation, we shed light on the ways proponents of ‘low-carbon warfare’ have challenged the ‘high-carbon’ sociotechnical regime that currently dominates the MoD. We also explain why more rapid and disruptive change has been stymied. By centring attention on the extent of ‘alignment’ between internal and external sources of change, our MLP makes a valuable contribution to understanding why the struggle for military change often unfolds in non-linear ways.

Lists have come to define terrorism. In the absence of an agreed-upon definition of what constitutes terrorism, proscription, or the inclusion of non-state armed groups on terrorist lists, has created a new category, a new reality. The material and symbolic consequences of these lists have been explored in human rights law and critical terrorism studies literature. But as the world seems to shift away from the terrorist framing, what happens to the ‘terrorists’ stuck on these lists?

Grounded in empirical research with listed non-state armed groups the article explores how listed actors themselves react to the listings. They should not be seen as mere passive recipients of these labels and lists – they are active agents and able to cope strategically with this stigma. Building on Rebecca Adler-Nissen’s work on stigma in world politics, the article shifts the focus from state to non-state actors and assesses how different listed groups cope using Adler-Nissen’s typology of stigma recognition, stigma rejection, and counter-stigmatisation. This diversity in reaction is unpacked through three case studies (ETA, Hezbollah, and FARC). While some armed groups have tried to explicitly reject the label imposed on them, others have embraced it.

The article traces what happens to the ‘terrorists’, how they are reacting, and whether they can ever escape their condition. Listing regimes have enabled the continuation of the war on terror through their embeddedness in the multilateral system, creating a permanence that can endlessly be reactivated.

This article brings a pragmatic perspective to the analysis of threat perception in two important ways. First, as does the philosophical tradition of pragmatism, the article joins perception (or knowledge) together with response (action). Perception and response, knowledge and action, are inextricably linked as people learn through the creation of knowledge what is useful in the world. It is in this sense that pragmatists understand the perception and response to threats as evolved practices that are conjoined. Second, the paper explores threat perception and response under the condition of radical uncertainty. I explore the kinds of strategies leaders can use to respond to perceived threat in a context of radical uncertainty, the defining characteristic of contemporary world politics, and explore the advantages of pragmatic strategies that proceed to look for ‘what works in the world’ as provisional responses to perceived threats through iterative, ongoing experimental processes.

Threat perception in international relations has received much academic attention and continues to do so. Other contributions to this special section on how leaders feel security dangers or perceive threats with radical uncertainty are closely intertwined with this article’s focus on threats that are vague and not immediately perceptible. Humans possess a capacity for thinking about and imagining the future known as prospection. Faced with threatening futures, can governments prepare their civil servants to systematically manage uncertainties and anticipate dangers? Drawing on empirical data from interviews with foresight practitioners in the United Kingdom and Singapore, this article examines how governments are nudging civil servants to deploy futures techniques as part of threat perception.

Threat perception provokes a range of behaviour, from cooperation to conflict. Correctly interpreting others’ behaviour, and responding optimally, is thought to be aided by ‘stepping into their shoes’ (i.e. mentalising) to understand the threats they have perceived. But IR scholarship on the effects of attempting this exercise has yielded mixed findings. One missing component in this research is a clear understanding of the link between effort and accuracy. I use a US-based survey experiment (study N = 839; pilot N = 297) and a novel analytic approach to study mentalising accuracy in the domain of threat perception. I find that accurately estimating why someone feels threatened by either climate change or illegal immigration is conditional on sharing a belief in the issue’s overall dangerousness. Similar beliefs about dangerousness are not proxies for shared political identities, and accuracy for those with dissimilar beliefs does not exceed chance. Focusing first on the emotional states of those who felt threatened did not significantly improve accuracy. These findings suggest that: (1) effort does not guarantee accuracy in estimating the threats others see; (2) emotion understanding may not be a solution to threat mis-estimation; and (3) misperception can arise from basic task difficulty, even without information constraints or deception.

This article serves as the introduction to a Special Issue of the European Journal of International Security titled ‘What the War on Terror Leaves Behind’. In it, we seek to contextualise and summarise the diverse contributions of this collection, which is animated by four overarching questions: (i) More than 20 years after the attacks of 11 September 2001, is the War on Terror now, finally, over? (ii) What, if any, legacies remain from the post-9/11 way of thinking and doing counterterrorism? (iii) What is the significance of the War on Terror’s legacies or absence thereof? and, (iv) How do the War on Terror’s impacts and effects sit within other historical contexts and (dis)continuities? The article begins with a brief overview of some of the conceptual and political ambiguities of the War on Terror itself, before situating the issue in relation to issues of continuity and change anticipated by the four questions above. A second section then explores the urgency of these questions for academic debate, and in the ‘real world’ of international security as experienced by states, communities, and other subjects. A third section then summarises the argument and contributions of the articles in the issue –highlighting the lack of agreement on key issues within these debates.

Irredentist disputes have produced distinct political ethnoterritories under the de jure sovereignty of recognised parent states, but the de facto political authority of external national homelands. This study problematises the relationship between national homeland and claimed ethnoterritory as a nested game in which, in addition to bargaining with each other, they face internal competition, outbidding, and changing costs of conflict, ultimately reducing commitment to external-facing bargains. This study contends that homelands pursuing irredentist conflict can reduce uncertainty and increase commitment from ethnoterritories by building hegemonic cross-border clientelist pyramids that link ethnoterritorial publics’ and elites’ political survival and livelihoods to supporting homelands’ preferences. Further, these structures marginalise alternative elites who may seek to contravene preferences by escalating conflict and increasing costs on homelands or bargaining across ethnic cleavages. Case studies of protracted conflicts in Cyprus, Kosovo, and Croatia support this argument and further find that public-sector distribution linked to the homeland is most effective in reducing competition and uncertainty, thereby increasing long-term commitment to preferences.

Contemporary reckoning with the catastrophic outcomes of the post-9/11 era opens important questions for the future of counterterrorism policy. It also raises significant issues for thinking through the future priorities and purposes of security scholarship. In this article we make two core claims. First, recent years have seen considerable mainstreaming of ostensibly critical ideas on (counter)terrorism within political debate, media commentary, and – crucially – security policy. Second, such ideas – including around the futility of ‘war’ on terror; the ineffectiveness of torture; the unstable framing of threats such as radicalisation; and the inefficiency of excessive counterterrorism expenditure – were widely dismissed as lacking in policy relevance, even being utopian, when articulated by critically oriented scholars. This development, we argue, raises important ontological questions around the ending of security paradigms such as the war on terror. It also prompts vital political, epistemological, and normative questions around the status of overtly critical scholarship when its ideas and recommendations achieve wider currency.

This article further theorises and develops the notion of a threat of abandonment while trying to elucidate the applicability and usefulness of this concept in the case of Ukraine in its fight against Russia since 2014. If Ukraine perceives the European Union (EU) as weakened by multiple crises, it may translate this image into a scenario of less attention to Ukraine and its problems, and – ultimately – to a threat of abandonment, of being left alone with a powerful aggressor. Theoretically, we employ a perceptual approach. We contribute to the literature on threats of abandonment, linking it to the existence of critical expectation gaps and introducing amplifying conditions that tend to result in such gaps: a broken frame of involvement and a perceived moral injury. We also introduce a set of key factors behind a perceived risk or threat of abandonment. Empirically, we investigate how Ukrainian elites think, feel, and speak about the threat of abandonment and to what extent the two amplifying conditions were perceived to be present. Our data come from 50 in-depth interviews with Ukrainian decision makers (2016–17, C3EU Jean Monnet Network) and 53 experts’ comments published in 2022 by a Ukrainian leading social research group, Razumkov’s Centre.

Recent critical scholarship on terrorism has centred on matters of race, class, and gender regarding how counterterrorism policies are connected to multiple systems of hierarchical power relations. This article builds upon this scholarship and looks towards the future. It engages with understandings of emancipatory futures in critical scholarship on terrorism while drawing upon abolitionist and anarchist political thought to expand understandings of such futures. Anarchist and abolitionist thinking are useful for considering futures beyond the ‘global war on terror’ (GWOT) because of their anti-state and anti-domination orientations and focus on building alternatives to prevent and manage violence apart from contemporary ‘counterterrorism’. After providing an outline of anarchist and abolitionist thought, the article connects these to contemporary examples drawn from the United States and Nepal. In doing so, it theorises and imagines futures for preventing violence and building public security that are linkedto anarchist and abolitionist understandings of violence and the state. In contrast to ‘power politics’ which centres on the state, an anarchist abolitionist approach explores how safety and security can be reimagined and remadein the absence of a state.

According to conventional wisdom, a great power engaging in international retrenchment regularly incurs tremendous costs. Following its withdrawal from a commitment abroad, the argument goes, windows of opportunity emerge that rivals exploit to their benefit, thus imposing significant costs on the retrenching great power. I argue that pundits and policymakers consistently overestimate the dangers associated with strategic withdrawals: great powers can – and in the past frequently have – successfully engaged in international retrenchment without creating opportunities for their rivals to gain significant strategic benefits. To make this case, I develop a new typology of international retrenchment strategies based on the kind and degree of disengagement they entail and demonstrate that most types do not regularly pave the way for rival gains. I support my argument through a series of plausibility probes: the Soviet retrenchment from Romania in the 1950s; the US retrenchment from Korea in the 1970s; and the US retrenchment from Western Europe in the 1990s.

The significantly divergent trajectories of terrorism and climate change as security issues for Western states in the early years of the 21st century represent a puzzle. While sharing some attributes – uncertainty and the primacy of risk-management responses – climate change clearly represents a more fundamental threat to life than terrorism. Despite this, terrorism has occupied a prominent place on states’ security agendas, while climate change has been decidedly marginal. This paper explores this divergence. Employing the securitisation framework, the paper maps the approach to terrorism and climate change as ‘security’ issues among key proponents of the ‘war on terror’, before exploring why these two issues were treated in such different ways. This analysis suggests a clear inclination to define and approach terrorism as an urgent security threat necessitating emergency measures: a willingness not evident in the case of climate change. While noting elements of the latter that militated against its securitisation, the paper points to the role of ideology – the beliefs and commitments of political leaders in particular – in driving choices around the construction of the security agenda. It concludes by suggesting that unlike the response to terrorism, impediments to enacting emergency measures to address the climate crisis remain.