This Article analyses the evolution of the public security defence to justify restrictions on free movement within the EU in the context of the energy sector. Taking the seminal 1984 Campus Oil case as the point of departure for its analysis, the Article focuses on the interplay between public security and energy security and shows two key changes in the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union. First, it demonstrates how the scope of the public security defence in the energy sector has gradually narrowed. Second, it shows how the public security defence has developed to take into account evolving social, technological, and legal contexts in the EU energy sector. Culminating in cases like Hidroelectrica in 2020 and OPAL in 2021, analysis of the relevant case law suggests that, despite the societal dependence on energy and the ongoing geopolitical turmoil in Europe, the Court of Justice interprets exceptions from free movement in an increasingly strict manner, highlighting the primacy of internal market approaches to energy security.

The Brazilian military has recently executed an unexpected return to politics by engaging more actively in domestic policymaking and implementation both before and during the Bolsonaro government, thus jeopardising democratic consolidation. To help understand this development, we examine why the military openly challenges civilian authority over some issues, while remaining silent on others. Whereas prior work emphasises external factors like civilians’ threats to military prerogatives, we argue that contestation of civilian authority stems in no small part from internal military conflict over how to utilise power. The military uses contestation to coordinate prerogatives with civilians and to communicate within the armed forces to increase cohesion. We illustrate this argument with case studies of military contestation surrounding political leadership selection and internal security, using the Army Commander's discourse via Twitter posts and public statements, plus key informant interviews and military publications.

What are the conditions underlying successful implementation of participatory security mechanisms? Drawing on the case of Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl and from the notion of social embeddedness, we argue that participatory security reforms that aim to include citizens in defining security priorities allow for better adoption of reforms in practice. Local level reforms are not implemented in a social vacuum but rather in pre-existing social networks that are key to their adoption in practice by citizens. However, not all social networks are equal, nor do they operate in the same manner. In ‘Neza’, it is through existing clientelistic networks and socially embedded local brokers that the redes vecinales were implemented and adopted by citizens, leading to varied reform adoption patterns at the very local level.

Public approval is a crucial source of executive power in presidential systems. Does the public support female and male presidents similarly? Combining insights from gender and politics research with psychological evidence, this study theorizes sex-based differentials in popularity based on more general expectations linking gender stereotypes to diverging performance evaluations. Using quarterly analyses of eighteen Latin American democracies, South Korea and the Philippines, the analyses compare the levels, dynamics, and policy performance of macro-approval for male and female presidents. As expected, female presidents are less popular, experience exaggerated approval dynamics and their approval is more responsive to security and corruption (though not economic) outcomes. These findings have clear implications for our understandings of mass politics, political accountability and presidentialism.

Discussions of China's rising domestic security expenditure often present this spending as evidence of the Chinese Communist Party's strong coercive capacity. This article argues that a lack of theoretical clarity about domestic security has resulted in flawed conclusions about these expenditures and their implications for China's coercive capacity. Challenging the conventional wisdom, the article analyses China's domestic security spending from 1992 through 2012 and argues that it is important to consider not only the total amount that China spends but also how it spends these resources and the magnitude of the threats that this expenditure must address. It finds that China's domestic security spending is not historically unprecedented, is not expanding as a proportion of national expenditure, and is not necessarily high (or producing high coercive capacity) when compared to other countries. The article also shows that certain locations struggle more to fund their coercive capacity than others, and that these locations overlap with areas where internal security threats may be particularly acute. The challenges that the coercive apparatus must address have also grown over the same period during which domestic security spending has risen. Finally, attempts to improve the political position of China's coercive agents cannot be equated with improvements in their capacity to manage Chinese society. Cumulatively, this reassessment provides more evidence of the limitations on China's coercive capacity than of its strength.

Over the past two decades, the Chinese domestic security apparatus has expanded dramatically. “Stability maintenance” operations have become a top priority for local Chinese authorities. We argue that this trend goes back to the early 1990s, when central Party authorities adopted new governance models that differed dramatically from those of the 1980s. They increased the bureaucratic rank of public security chiefs within the Party apparatus, expanded the reach of the Party political-legal apparatus into a broader range of governance issues, and altered cadre evaluation standards to increase the sensitivity of local authorities to social unrest. We show that the origin of these changes lies in a policy response to the developments of 1989–1991, namely the Tiananmen democracy movement and the collapse of communist political systems in Eastern Europe. Over the past twenty years, these practices have developed into an extensive stability maintenance apparatus, whereby local governance is increasingly oriented around the need to respond to social unrest, whether through concession or repression. Chinese authorities now appear to be rethinking these developments, but the direction of reform remains unclear.