Abstract How do hegemons respond to relative decline? The existing literature suggests that declining hegemons either cling to the status quo through preventive war and other expansionist measures or retrench. This article argues that hegemonic decline produces incentives for both forms of action. More specifically, I provide a variegated framework that distinguishes between mild and acute decline as two distinct situations through which declining hegemons may pass. Mild hegemonic decline, defined as the diffusion of new technologies from the hegemon to other great powers, incentivises an expansionist strategy by heightening economic competition and strategic vulnerability. However, acute hegemonic decline, defined as a hegemon’s inability to lead a new round of innovative technologies, leads to grand strategic contraction by reducing the scope of the hegemon’s interests and its material capacity to sustain them. The variegated framework is elaborated and tested by analysing Great Britain’s grand strategy from 1880 to 1939.
Abstract Following the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea, most research examining NATO’s response has focused on defence spending. Far less attention has been paid to whether and how NATO members’ military capabilities – the outputs of defence investment – changed in response to the Russian threat. We examine this case to understand how external security threats shape state military capabilities. Using a difference-in-differences research design and leveraging data on NATO military capabilities from 2008 to 2022, we evaluate how proximity to Russia influenced post-2014 capability adjustments among twenty-nine European NATO allies. We find that NATO allies bordering Russia significantly increased military personnel relative to more distant allies, with a similar but less robust pattern for armoured vehicles. While existing research shows that overall NATO defence spending increased after 2014, we show that this did not uniformly translate into more military equipment and personnel across the alliance. These findings reflect enduring challenges with burden-sharing and the influence of domestic political economies over defence matters. While we find no evidence that the capability increases among frontline NATO allies are fully accounted for by higher defence expenditures, these findings suggest that geographic threat exposure independently shapes states’ capability adjustments beyond what spending levels alone predict.
Trust remains the foundation of the financial system, whether digital or physical. Financial trust structures and governance are fundamental to the stability and perception of money in both traditional and digital environments. Financial systems are thus built on two interconnected forms of trust: public trust in societal institutions and inter-organisational trust among financial actors such as banks, businesses, and state agencies. At the core of many hybrid operations lies the objective of weakening public trust in state institutions and social cohesion. Everyday infrastructures such as digital payment systems become plausible targets in a hybrid threat campaign. This study therefore investigates the following research question, 'How do different hybrid threat scenarios impact key value dimensions of consumer trust in digital payment systems?', through a scenario-based multi-criteria threat evaluation survey conducted in Sweden, Finland, and Germany. The study suggests that hybrid threat preparedness must include psychosocial dimensions of technical diagnostics. Financial trust is simultaneously procedural and emotional, and hybrid actors are increasingly adept at targeting both. The evidence affirms the need for a re-conceptualisation of digital financial infrastructure as a domain of national security.
Strategic autonomy has become a central objective of EU external economic policy, with de-risking serving as a key instrument through which the EU seeks to assert this autonomy by mitigating vulnerabilities amid intensifying trade wars. China has long been viewed as supportive of EU strategic autonomy, yet whether such support extends to the EU's de-risking agenda remains unclear. Drawing on role theory and perceptual approaches, this article introduces an analytical framework to assess perception gaps between an actor's self-image and external perceptions and applies it to examine the EU's role projections and altercasting of China in the context of de-risking, as well as their validation by Chinese perceptions. It shows that, on the one hand, the EU uses de-risking to project itself as an autonomous actor vis-& agrave;-vis the United States, a defusing force in Sino-American competition, and a norm broker in economic governance, while implicitly altercasting China as an equal, normatively aligned, and responsible partner expected to act constructively in trade-war dynamics. On the other hand, Chinese perspectives contest these role claims and altercasted images, framing de-risking as a US-led containment strategy, rejecting its stabilising function, and denying its normative legitimacy - revealing clear limits to China's support for EU strategic autonomy.
States can acquire international status through battlefield performance, but they can also pursue it through the fielding of ostentatious prestige platforms that look impressive but, unless properly supported, possess limited battlefield utility. When and how do status concerns influence states’ military force structure choices? This article advances a choice-theoretic model of states’ military force structure choices as a function of external threat and the ease of acquiring status. When threats are high, countries uniformly pursue military effectiveness. But when external threats are low and conditions for status enhancement are propitious due to states confronting a destabilised status hierarchy or enjoying a surfeit of resources, military effectiveness is sacrificed in favour of prestige platforms unsupported by requisite enablers. A paired case study leveraging original archival documents traces the evolution of British and American naval procurement practices in the early twentieth century to illustrate the argument.
