{"title":"Introduction: Political Logics and Academic Rationalities of Securitisation and International Crises","authors":"Andrey Makarychev, Thomas Diez","doi":"10.51870/peow5184","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.51870/peow5184","url":null,"abstract":"This introductory note discusses how the concept of securitisation might be used as a tool for understanding the different logics driving and standing behind foreign policies of major international stakeholders in situations of crises, emergencies and exceptions. The editors look at how securitisation functions as a discursive instrument for reshaping actors’ subjectivities, and how it might be adjusted to the rapid changes in global politics triggered by Russia’s war against Ukraine. They argue that the discursive construction of insecurities is not politically neutral and is driven by certain logics, presumptions and imaginaries. Russia’s war against Ukraine is a particularly important focal point in this regard since it elucidates another crucial question: how do the parties involved in the war securitise and de-securitise – as well as exceptionalise and normalise – specific risks, dangers and threats, and what are the implications of these discursive strategies for international security?","PeriodicalId":38461,"journal":{"name":"Central European Journal of International and Security Studies","volume":"45 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136356175","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Progressive and Regressive Securitisation: Covid, Russian Aggression and the Ethics of Security","authors":"Thomas Diez","doi":"10.51870/pxrr4789","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.51870/pxrr4789","url":null,"abstract":"This paper contributes to the debate about the normative assessment of securitisation in light of Covid-19 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It develops the distinction of progressive and regressive securitisation. In doing so, it emphasises the processual, contextual and ambiguous nature of securitisation. I suggest that progressive securitisation is closely linked to the solidarisation, whereas regressive securitisation implies the pluralisation of international society. The two cases of Covid-19 and Russia illustrate that international order has increasingly been characterised by regressive securitisation and a pluralisation of international society, despite possible alternatives, such as a transnational response to the spread of Covid-19. They have thus contributed to the further demise of the post–Cold War liberal order, which despite its problems, has involved a re-orientation of security away from state territory and national identity as the core referent objects. I end with a plea to take the ethics of security more seriously again, and in particular to scrutinise the ways in which our own behaviour reinforces regressive securitisation.","PeriodicalId":38461,"journal":{"name":"Central European Journal of International and Security Studies","volume":"190 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136355380","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Borders in Central Europe After the Schengen Agreement","authors":"P. Soukupová","doi":"10.51870/jlle1709","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.51870/jlle1709","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":38461,"journal":{"name":"Central European Journal of International and Security Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42527379","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"William N. Still: American Sea Power in the Old World: the United States Navy in European and Near Eastern Waters, 1865-1917","authors":"Anna Matilde Bassoli","doi":"10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim080120107","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim080120107","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":38461,"journal":{"name":"Central European Journal of International and Security Studies","volume":"124 49","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41247918","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Conflict Dynamics as a Narrative Process: The Evolution of Competing Conflict Narratives between Russia and Ukraine and the Narratives of the International Human Rights Bodies between 2014 and 2022","authors":"Oksana Myshlovska","doi":"10.51870/gdim2629","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.51870/gdim2629","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing on the studies on narrative processes underlying conflict escalation, this article examines the constitution and evolution of conflicting narratives between Russia and Ukraine as expressed in their foreign policy discourse and key political pronouncements between 2014 and 2022. Furthermore, it compares Russia’s and Ukraine’s official narratives with those developed by the international human rights community using the example of the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) created by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in March 2014. This comparative analysis aims to understand the differences between discursive elements constituting narratives of the parties in conflict and of an international body aiming to achieve accountability for human rights violations as a basis for reconciliation, which could serve as entries for peacebuilding. Finally, the theoretical framework of conflict escalation as a narrative process proposed by Cobb (2013) is used to understand the dynamics of conflict escalation from 2014 to 2022. The mapping and analysis of narratives undertaken in the article show the key issue of contention between Russia and Ukraine during the studied period was the interpretation of the legitimacy of the use of force. The key consequence of the discursive attribution of conflict escalation and violence became the evolving political legitimisation of the use of force fuelling conflict escalation and protraction.","PeriodicalId":38461,"journal":{"name":"Central European Journal of International and Security Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49545982","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Did Germany Contribute to Deterrence Failure against Russia in Early 2022?","authors":"Jonas J. Driedger","doi":"10.51870/tlxc9266","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.51870/tlxc9266","url":null,"abstract":"With signs of Russia’s aggressive intentions mounting since Fall 2021, Ukraine and NATO allies criticised Germany for not sufficiently contributing to Western efforts at deterring a Russian invasion. The article evaluates this claim by applying deterrence theory and using congruence analysis on foundational policy documents, expert literature and interviews of Russian and Western policymakers. It establishes that states contribute to collective extended deterrence the more they have the capabilities to harm assets that are highly valued by the revisionist and the more the revisionist has reasons to believe that these capabilities would be used if it enacted aggression. The article then evaluates Germany’s potential deterrence contributions, establishing that Germany’s vast arms industry and economic clout allowed it to significantly threaten the Russian regime through economic destabilisation and prospects of high-casualty fighting. It then gauges Germany’s actual deterrence contributions, finding them to have been significantly smaller: Germany deliberately avoided military threats and deliveries of arms to Ukraine. And while Germany did early on threaten to use its significant economic clout against Russia, it remained vague and non-committal over core issues of Russian economic interests, such as the Nord Stream 2 pipeline system. The results provide and inform further hypotheses on the causes of German behaviour and indirect influences on deterrence against Russia. They also urge reconsiderations of strategic thinking in Berlin and elsewhere.","PeriodicalId":38461,"journal":{"name":"Central European Journal of International and Security Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45568668","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Constructive Role Ambiguity and How Russia Couldn’t ‘Get Away’ with Its 2022 Ukrainian Invasion","authors":"Alexander Bendix","doi":"10.51870/jacl8393","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.51870/jacl8393","url":null,"abstract":"Since 2008, the Russian government conducted two invasions of sovereign territory in Eastern Europe prior to the current crisis in Ukraine. In 2008 Russian troops invaded Georgia, dramatically beginning a process of slowly dismantling the sovereignty of a self-identified European state. In 2014 Russia annexed Crimea and de facto established two pro-Russian independent oblasts inside Ukrainian territory. Throughout this process, and despite outrage, Western nations continued to interact favourably with Russia, allowing sanctions to lapse. However, the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 changed this standard interaction dramatically. But why was Russia unable to get away with this invasion?\u0000\u0000Using role theory, I shall show how the construction of the Russian ‘[co]compatriot defender’ role conception has been used to strategically mask contradictory foreign policy behaviour. By analysing UN Security Council speeches, I will show how the operationalisation of constructed role ambiguity was used to ‘shield’ this role from contradictions between Russia’s behaviour and western nations’ expectations. Constructed ambiguity was deployed with regards to passportisation and the liberal norms of R2P and humanitarian intervention, thus preventing role conflict between Russia and Western nations. However, since 2022 Western nations have ceased to buy into this role ambiguity.","PeriodicalId":38461,"journal":{"name":"Central European Journal of International and Security Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47368110","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Russian Private Military and Ukraine: Hybrid Surrogate Warfare and Russian State Policy by Other Means","authors":"Emmet Foley, C. Kaunert","doi":"10.51870/ulju5827","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.51870/ulju5827","url":null,"abstract":"This article investigates the Russian government’s reliance on commercial soldiers in the hybrid war efforts against Ukraine until the invasion in February 2022. Russian private military companies (PMCs), such as RUSCORP and the Wagner group, have already been active in Syria and Africa over the last years, signalling the resurgence of Russian machinations on the world stage. They also played a key part in the annexation of Crimea in 2014, as well as the struggles on Ukraine’s Eastern border areas around Luhansk and Donbas. The article shows that PMCs have become an integral part of the Kremlin’s approach to foreign policy. Unlike Western PMCs, which can arguably augment their ability to provide effective public security, Russian PMCs are used to construct insecurities to the point of fighting hybrid surrogate wars. While they fulfil the same outcome for the Russian state to be strengthened through the public-private security arrangements, their function is radically different: (1) providing deniability without the deployment of Russian troops, (2) providing military ambiguity and (3) thus, furthering the Kremlin’s foreign policy objectives. The significance of the deployment of these PMCs is that they are an extension of the Russian security apparatus, closely linked to the FSB, GRU and SVR, and with similar command and control structures, staffed by former members of the Russian security services.","PeriodicalId":38461,"journal":{"name":"Central European Journal of International and Security Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70847464","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Can 'Realists' and 'Hawks' Agree? Half-measures and Compromises on the Road to Invasion of Ukraine","authors":"Vojtěch Bahenský","doi":"10.51870/tsvt5559","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.51870/tsvt5559","url":null,"abstract":"The debate on the failure of the efforts to avert the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 is dominated by two narratives presented as mutually exclusive. On the one hand, 'hawks' chastise the West for failing to forcefully confront Russian adventurism earlier. On the other hand, 'realists' criticise the West's overreach in efforts to incorporate Ukraine into the Western structures. Both views implicitly contend that there was only one way to prevent the war. This paper argues that those positions are, in fact, not incompatible and failure to prevent war lies in the habitual mismatch between strategic goals and resources, implicitly recognised by both sides of the debate. Ambitious goals and meagre resources constituted a middle-of-the-road compromise, inadvertently increasing the risk of the war by encouraging Russia to take the opportunity to challenge the West's weakly backed ambitions. In an attempt to draw some tentative lessons, the paper concludes by exploring some hypotheses on why such mismatches between goals and resources occur and persist.","PeriodicalId":38461,"journal":{"name":"Central European Journal of International and Security Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41926235","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Looking for Stepan Bandera: The Myth of Ukrainian Nationalism and the Russian ‘Special Operation’","authors":"M. Shevtsova","doi":"10.51870/gwws9820","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.51870/gwws9820","url":null,"abstract":"The so-called ‘denazification’ of Ukraine and the need to free the country from the radical nationalists was used by the Russian government as a central argument to justify the military invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. However, the discussion of radical right-wing nationalist groups allegedly active in Ukraine and violently oppressing the Russian-speaking population have been maintained by the governing regime in Russia already since the so-called Euromaidan protests in 2013-2014. The word ‘banderivtsi’, disciples or sons and daughters of Stepan Bandera, the leader of the Ukrainian nationalist organisations OUN and UPA, became widely used, first, by Russian pro-governmental media who this way referred to what they presented as the nationalist population of Ukraine. Consequently, the Ukrainians started using the term themselves, in an ironic way, to re-appropriate it and re-establish the national identity reshaped by the years of informational and actual wars. The present piece discusses the centrality of the concept of Ukrainian nationalism in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. It examines how, seeking further separation from Russia, the Ukrainian government has been changing its memory politics towards a significantly modified perception and interpretation of the shared past. It argues that building parallels between attacking ‘nationalist Ukraine’ and the victory over Nazi Germany central to the glorious past of Russia within the state memory politics was used by Kremlin to justify the military action in the neighbouring country.","PeriodicalId":38461,"journal":{"name":"Central European Journal of International and Security Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44169302","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}