This article explores how Jordan and Lebanon have reconfigured EU resilience-building in the context of migration governance. By introducing the Contestation as Learning repertoires, its contribution is to operationalize the micro foundations of policy learning to understand why domestic political priorities and existing orders are stabilized although collaboration between EU and Southern Mediterranean Countries has clearly intensified in terms of financing and sectoral coordination. The research identifies three phases in this process: (i) the pre‑2011 Euro‑Mediterranean institutional development, (ii) the post‑2011 shock and reactive policy patchwork, and (iii) from 2016 onward a period of managed interdependence marked by intensified instruments. Drawing on process-tracing of elite interviews and document analysis of policies and evaluations, it is shown how EU–partner country bargains produce repertoires of contestation that generate strategic learning. High collaboration can accelerate the wrong lessons when its measurement is narrowed to counting activities and when implementation micro-rules remain a domestic monopoly. When the learning is negative and at surface-level, this often results in unproductive failing policies and cooperation.
This paper explores how and why prevailing trends have traditionally limited the scholarly concept of intelligence to the activities of sovereign states. Although this is slowly changing, ‘private sector intelligence’ is frequently misapplied to government contractors, overshadowing corporations’ own intelligence activities. This paper examines the topography of private sector intelligence, highlighting blurred boundaries between security intelligence and commercial areas like Competitive Intelligence, and the ethically questionable domain of covert action, demonstrating that despite reluctance in some sectors, private sector intelligence really does exist.
Russia’s all-out war against Ukraine has exposed the persistence of imperial grammar beneath the surface of the post-Cold War world order, rendering visible dynamics that existing frameworks have struggled to name. Engaging with Svitlana Biedarieva's Ambicoloniality and War as a springboard, this contribution maps the mutual ignorances, historic frustrations, and tokenistic appropriations that have shaped post- and decolonial studies, and argues for the untapped potential of Eastern European cases to expand and refine the field. It proposes ambicoloniality as a paradigmatic arc for emerging post-Soviet decolonial studies at the nexus of area studies and international relations. Three broader lessons follow: that decolonization must go hand in hand with de-imperialization, requiring shadow work – the integration of one’s part in imperial projects; that imperial/colonial difference is constructed through intersecting ethnic, social, and gendered hierarchies; and that Ukraine as a method offers a generative lens for rethinking Europe from its internal peripheries.
This article explores constructions of political violence within the Corona journal of the British Colonial Service. Analysing news summaries, parliamentary reports, and other pieces, the article explores how the language of ‘terrorism’ was attached to ongoing events including in Malaya, Kenya, and Cyprus. Two arguments are made. First, the journal presupposes international familiarity with the language of ‘terrorism’ and its pertinence to diverse threats to British imperialism. Second, heterogeneous applications of this language illustrate racialised assumptions in colonial conceptions of Britain’s ‘others’. Three contributions are made. First, we extend work on terrorism discourse through original engagement with an important, entirely neglected, text. Second, we offer new evidence of the longevity of ‘terrorism’ discourse, highlighting continuities in framings of this threat from the mid-twentieth century onward. Third, by tracking different applications of the language of ‘terrorism’, we also extend contemporary discussion on the prominence of race in terrorism discourse.
