This Special Issue investigates how, by whom, and with what effect law is used in EU foreign policy, moving beyond traditional views of foreign policy as a purely political domain. Against a backdrop of increasing challenges to the rules-based international order, understanding the role of law in the EU's external conduct is critical. Bridging legal and political science scholarship, the Special Issue employs an analytical framework focusing on actors (both institutional, state and non-state, including individual), means (ranging from judicial and non-judicial) and outcomes (legal, policy and ideational). The contributions demonstrate that law is a dynamic and contested resource used instrumentally. A key distinction emerges: EU institutions primarily use law to govern and balance competing interests, while non-state actors and individuals employ it as a tool for contestation, either to defend their own interests or to pursue broader political change. By examining a wide range of policy areas, the Special Issue reveals complex patterns of legal mobilisation. It complicates the narrative of the EU as a purely norm-driven actor and highlights the role of bottom-up dynamics in shaping foreign policy, mirroring broader global tensions between legal idealism and political realism.
The European Union (EU) has reshaped global digital governance through a form of norm entrepreneurship that operates through regulatory sequencing rather than persuasion. By constructing an interlocking regulatory ecosystem across data protection (GDPR), artificial intelligence governance (AI Act) and platform governance (DMA/DSA), the EU has driven norm emergence, anticipatory cascade and structural internalisation beyond its borders. The concept of Regulatory Ecosystem Norm Entrepreneurship (RENE) demonstrates how norms diffuse through market infrastructures, technical standards and architectural constraints, generating path dependence without full ideational convergence. These findings reveal a transformation of normative power in the digital age, where regulatory capacity increasingly substitutes for material dominance in shaping global order.
An important blind spot in the current debate on the extraterritorial application of the European Union's (EU) Charter of Fundamental Rights is the limited engagement with the concept of jurisdiction as it has developed in both public international law (PIL) and international human rights law (IHRL). Applying a jurisdictional lens is crucial because: (i) jurisdiction is inherently about the delimiting spheres of power among different actors and thus the task of delimiting the boundaries of EU law offers valuable insights into the Union's identity as a global actor; and (ii) the rich body of international legal scholarship on PIL and IHRL jurisdiction - and on their interaction - provides a useful framework for assessing the persuasiveness of various approaches to the Charter's extraterritorial scope that have emerged in the literature.
The semiconductor sector has emerged as a central arena of geopolitical rivalry, rekindling concerns regarding the strategic risks associated with economic interdependence. Existing academic debates typically explain vulnerability in interdependent relationships in terms of bilateral power asymmetries or conflicting strategic interests. However, independence can also be shaped by the concept of externalised vulnerability, whereby heightened exposure to disruption and limited mitigation options arise under conditions of geopolitical rivalry due to the presence of an external adversary, rather than conflicts between the interdependent partners themselves. Japan-Taiwan semiconductor cooperation illustrates this dynamic. Vulnerability does not stem from asymmetrical dependence between the two economies, which remain highly complementary and cooperative. Rather, geopolitical tensions in the Taiwan Strait, US-PRC technological rivalry and export control dynamics, generate structural uncertainty that reshapes Japan-Taiwan semiconductor interdependence. Against this backdrop, Japan and Taiwan respond to externalised vulnerability by deepening institutionalised cooperation rather than pursuing decoupling.
India's strategic posture in the Indo-Pacific reflects a deliberate effort to offset its vulnerabilities along the enduring border conflict with the People's Republic of China (PRC) on its northern frontier. Unlike other major Indo-Pacific powers such as Japan, Australia and the United States (US), India faces an enduring territorial dispute with the PRC, rooted in the colonial treaty between British and Tibet that Beijing continues to reject. This dispute has produced one of the world's longest undemarcated borders and has fuelled asymmetric confrontations since the 1962 Indo-Sino war, including the recent crises at Doklam (2017) and the Galwan Valley (2020). Despite the PRC's superior infrastructure and operational capabilities in high-altitude terrain, India has sought to offset for its disadvantage in the continental theatre by adopting a 'compensational deterrence' strategy through naval modernisation, expanded strategic partnerships and a stronger presence in the Indo-Pacific.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has transformed elite sport into a stage for national resistance where athletes act as independent political agents. We adopt an interpretive qualitative method and constructivist framework to evaluate the communicative power of three Ukrainian athletes in athletics, fencing and tennis. By conceptualising the 'alternative front', the research identifies how athlete-led agency functions as 'diplomacy from below' through symbolic and material acts of resistance. These findings challenge institutional norms of neutrality and contribute to International Relations debates on informal representation and the social production of legitimacy during existential crises.
In today's multiplex international system, as integration deepens through political, economic and social linkages, many scholars expect globalisation to reduce militarisation. From this perspective, globalisation is often assumed to shape defence spending in a broadly similar direction across states. However, if we take regime type seriously, this expectation loses its persuasiveness. Building on this literature, we test whether the effect of globalisation on defence spending is conditioned by regime type across 169 countries from 1992 to 2022, using multiple panel model specifications, including dynamic and year fixed-effects models. The results reveal a clear divergence: democracies treat integration as external assurance and reduce their military burden, hybrid regimes exhibit no distinct response to globalisation, while autocracies perceive greater regime risk in integration and hedge through coercive capacity. As a result, in an increasingly embedded world of cooperative institutions, norms and trade interdependence, democracies tend to carry lower military burdens relative to autocracies. This regime-conditioned relationship holds across alternative measures of globalisation.
How do the European Union (EU) and the People's Republic of China (PRC), as leadership-type regional powers, use discourse to shape regional order and structure the roles, responsibilities and expectations of neighbouring states? A corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis (CDA) of European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) documents (2004-21) and Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) texts (2013-21) identifies recurring patterns of role attribution, action modality and expectation framing. The EU performs leadership primarily through procedural legitimation, embedding partners within rules, instruments and administrative pathways, whereas the PRC foregrounds symbolic and relational language, historical narratives and 'win-win' promises. Viewed through the lens of regional leadership, these styles share a logic of discursive governance: repeated formulas stabilise expectations, encode hierarchy and sustain authority without overt coercion. Discursive leadership can thus be conceptualised as a strategic mechanism of regional power.
While civil society advocacy through legal mobilisation has garnered increasing attention, the strategic use of law in EU foreign policy remains comparatively unexplored, especially when compared to fields such as migration, the environment or labour law. Legal mobilisation here is defined in a court-centred, advocacy-oriented sense, closely aligned with the notion of strategic litigation. A methodological framework is proposed to systematically identify instances in which civil society actors invoke EU foreign policy law before the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) to advance broader objectives. Two options are suggested to analyse legal mobilisation: analysing casebooks and exploring databases of CJEU case law. Preliminary findings highlight the central role of interest groups - representing both civil society and economic actors - as drivers of legal mobilisation, the concentration of mobilisation within specific policy areas and the wide-ranging objectives pursued by litigants when leveraging EU foreign policy law.
The judicial field has emerged as a crucial arena for the contentious politics of migration in the European Union (EU). Both people on the move and the civil society organisations (CSOs) assisting them initially entered this arena to defend themselves from criminalisation. This inherently defensive stance, however, has increasingly been paralleled by a new, active approach to litigation that leverages the judicial system as a platform for political contention. This development is especially evident among organisations conducting rescue operations at sea, which have progressively used litigation as a tactic of resistance against state-led repression. The legal mobilisation strategies of CSOs involved in maritime rescue operations off the coast of Libya can be better understood by disentangling their engagement with international, European and Italian law. Based on this analysis, three distinct but overlapping legal mobilisation phases can be identified, each responding to the different mechanisms, challenges and opportunities provided by international, European and Italian jurisdictions.
Situating Securitisation Theory (ST) in Security Studies and reflecting on several conundrums that have animated debates within ST, this Special Issue advances a critique of how integrating 'space' into ST enables empirically grounded modes of theorising and analysing 'non-Western'/Global South contexts. Each contribution approaches security and space as always-becoming processes that shape, and are embedded in, relations. It is not only that relationality and processuality are ontological attributes through which security and space are understood; they are also mutually co-constitutive. This relational, processual and co-constitutive interplay between security and space is accompanied by a shared interest amongst the contributors in interrogating 'the political' through this lens. The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region offers an especially productive vantage point for unpacking the entanglements of 'the political' across notions, domains and scales of security and space. In particular, the study of the MENA contributes to developing an understanding of security and space beyond Western-centric, state-centric and methodologically nationalist assumptions in Security Studies and International Relations.
How does the use of law by non-state actors (NSAs) influence European Union (EU) foreign policy? A comparative analysis of the cases of Israel/Palestine and Morocco/Western Sahara demonstrates that legal mobilisation by NSAs has had divergent impacts on EU foreign policy. On the one hand, legal mobilisation led to long-term effects in the case of EU foreign policy towards Israel/Palestine: through lobbying based on legal framing, NSAs contributed to the reframing of EU-Israel relations, leading to the exclusion of the occupied Palestinian territories from the scope of EU-Israel agreements. On the other hand, litigation in the case of Morocco/Western Sahara had a short-term impact by annulling EU-Morocco agreements due to their extension to Western Sahara without the consent of the Sahrawi people. However, this did not result in a change in the overall understanding of EU-Morocco relations, as reflected in renewed attempts to include Western Sahara under EU-Morocco agreements and in the increasing number of member states recognising Morocco's Autonomy Plan for - and in some cases sovereignty over - Western Sahara as the most viable option. This comparison shows that mobilising law can be a powerful tool for NSAs to influence EU foreign policy, but this requires skilful entrepreneurs able to apply legal principles to concrete facts, as well as a favourable context, to ensure that when legal inconsistencies are highlighted, the EU is capable of engaging in a reframing process to correct them.
