An update from the European Journal of International Security
Our journal European Journal of International Security (EJIS) bring you their latest updates.
Over the past month EJIS has been proud to publish a range of high-quality articles available on FirstView, alongside our fourth and final issue of 2026.
NATO military capabilities and the Russian threat: A difference-in-differences analysis of the 2014 Russian invasion by Ryan Van Wie and Jordan Becker asks whether Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine led NATO allies to build more military capability. Average capabilities among European allies kept falling until 2022, even as budgets rose. But the six allies that border Russia (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Norway and Finland) increased their troop numbers significantly compared with allies further away. The authors argue that deterrence rests on the forces allies actually field, not only on what they spend. Panos Vasileiadis' Hegemonic decline and grand strategy: A variegated framework asks how hegemons respond to relative decline. Existing theory says they either expand or retrench. Vasileiadis argues that the type of decline decides which. In “mild” decline, technology spreads from the hegemon to its rivals, and the hegemon is pushed towards expansion. In “acute” decline, it fails to lead the next wave of innovation and pulls back into a narrower sphere of interest. Europe, strategic constraint, and the politics of dependence: Rethinking strength, treaties, and the transatlantic bargain by Besfort Rrecaj asks why Europe is so often seen as strategically weak, suggesting that Europe’s perceived strategic weakness stems less from political complacency than from “deliberate legal, institutional, and normative constraints” built into the post-WWII security order.
We've also published our fourth and final issue of 2026, which runs from sabotage to trolling to robotics. Highlights include:
- Sand in the gears: Sabotage in world politics by Joshua Rovner, Rory Cormac and Lennart Maschmeyer. One of the most popular articles of the issue, it defines sabotage as the weaponisation of friction to degrade a target’s systems from within. It also argues that sabotage works best for enabling other tools of statecraft, not as a tool on its own.
- International lulz: Exploring the strategic logic of trolling in diplomacyby Huw Dylan and Thomas Colley sets out a framework with five functions of diplomatic trolling: coercion, agenda setting, identification, delegitimisation and (dis)ordering.
- The more-than-human biopolitics of swarming – complexity, emergence, and control in military robotics by Jens Hälterlein is an excellent article that analyses how military robotic swarms are changing ideas of command and control, and what that means for international humanitarian law.
New: video abstracts and written summaries
EJIS authors can now create a video abstract or a written summary of their article, to help their research reach audiences beyond academia. Our first written summary, by Ryan Van Wie and Jordan Becker, is now online on the BISA website. Authors are welcome to produce a summary or video abstract to bring their EJIS articles to a wider audience!