Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 created a paradigm shift in the European mindset and ontology of peace. The previously dominant methodological liberalism has given away to methodological nationalism cherishing an “armed peace.” Within the evolving security-focused perspective’s emphasis on armament, many argue that deterrence and a culture of preparedness requires unanimity for the sake of national security. This article examines how peacebuilding can counter epistemic exclusionism within “fear-stricken societies” and re-open space for the recognition of plural epistemologies. It develops a theoretical framework that bridges critical peacebuilding, agonistic pluralism, and pluriversality to explore the practices of peace which enable coexistence without consensus and living with conflict. Building on the relational ontology of peace, this article highlights how peace is enacted through situated encounters that suspend, rather than resolve, antagonism. Using the militarization of Sápmi as an illustrative case, it traces how informal engagements and sites of contestation between Sámi actors and state security institutions can enable a liminal pluriverse beyond formal rights frameworks, even as recognition remains fragile and contested. Such agonistic encounters can ground pragmatic peace practices, widen the space for dissent, and sustain critical hope under conditions of insecurity.
Disinformation has become a systemic challenge to democratic governance, eroding trust, weakening social cohesion, and complicating the work of public institutions. This article reframes the issue as a question of community resilience and examines how such resilience can be assessed at the local level. Building on resilience theory and indicator-based methodology, it develops a maturity-model framework across four domains: policy, governance, and regulation; education and public awareness; technology; and media, communication, and information. The framework is explored in a pilot/diagnostic study involving two related Norwegian local-governance respondent settings: elected councilors in one anonymized municipality and administrative respondents from a broader municipal sample. Across both settings, the results indicate a broadly similar pattern: communication-related capacities are more developed than educational, participatory, and technologically advanced ones, while resilience remains uneven and only partly institutionalized overall. Conceptually, the study links disinformation research to community-resilience theory; methodologically, the instrument should be understood as a governance-oriented diagnostic framework for assessing and comparing the maturity of local countermeasures.
This essay reviews a decade of literature on the EU strategic shift, encompassing efforts to forge a common vision of strategic autonomy, to integrate the European defence industry, and increase military spending. Mainstream approaches grounded in integration theory and IR are shaped by ontological assumptions that constrain the treatment of relevant actors, preference formation, and the relationship between economic and security dynamics. Combined with disciplinary entrenchment, these assumptions yield theoretically partial and often empirically underdeveloped accounts of the shift and may contribute to the legitimisation of a significant process of rearmament. This review argues that international political economy (IPE) frameworks are better suited to examining how global geopolitical and geoeconomic transformations interact with European security and industrial restructuring, including how security priorities reshape industrial policy while industrial interests and structures influence strategic priorities. It further advocates critical interdisciplinary research on European rearmament, drawing on historical materialist IPE to examine how this economy-security relationship is historically constituted and sustained through particular configurations of social forces, institutions, and material interests.
From a ‘globalist’ new world order to the alleged ‘replacement’ of national populations through ‘dangerous alien Others’, conspiracy theories about global politics are thriving and increasingly entering the mainstream discourse. This paper analyses the ideological force, functions and effects of far-right conspiracy theories. Drawing on Lacanian Ontological Security Studies, it relates conspiracy theories to the ontological lack around which our identities and social orders are constituted. This lack generates the subject’s affective drive to identify with specific political projects that offer the elusive promise of ontological security. Given the regular frustration of this desire for self-coherence and certainty, this article understands conspiracy theories as affective coping mechanisms that simultaneously produce and reduce anxiety by driving the search for ontological completeness, while explaining this constant failure. Using the conspiracy theory of the great replacement as an empirical example, the article argues that conspiracy theories fulfil three central ideological functions: (1) grounding and essentialization, (2) Othering and (3) perpetuation of crisis through which they generate and sustain the radical investment in far-right projects.
This article examines the March 2026 US–Iran escalation as a case that reveals an intensification in the temporal organisation of contemporary warfare. Using the early phase of the March 2026 US–Iran escalation, the article analyses publicly available official statements and contemporary reporting to examine how claims of military success emerged alongside continued operations, troop deployments, and the rejection of ceasefire conditions. Rather than treating this as rhetorical inconsistency or strategic misrepresentation, the article argues it reflects a structural shift in how war is temporally organised. Building on Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality and Virilio’s analysis of speed, the article introduces the concept of temporal decoupling to describe the weakening relationship between victory and ending. Under conditions of accelerated communication and real-time operational cycles, declarations, actions, and interpretations no longer unfold sequentially but coexist within a compressed temporal frame in which contradiction can persist without resolution. The analysis suggests that, in this case, victory operated as a circulating claim rather than a terminal marker, challenging established assumptions within war termination theory and raising broader implications for how military success, political communication, and democratic accountability are understood in contemporary conflict.
