Raising awareness of both existing and emerging foreign and security policy challenges facing the European Union, EUISS Briefs provide key information in a concise, focused format.
Early warning systems (EWS) are at the heart of conflict prevention strategies. This Brief argues that the gap between early warning and early action persists because of challenges in transforming early warning policy recommendations into early response.
This Brief explores Armenia’s Russia policy after the 2018 Velvet Revolution in the light of the country’s defeat in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, resulting in a larger regional role for Turkey, which has exacerbated Armenia’s security dilemma.
Foresight plays an important role in defence planning and is an essential part of Russian military science. Despite some similarities to Western perspectives, there are distinctive aspects to Russian foresight thinking, which places particular emphasis on geopolitical and...
The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic has heightened fears about the EU’s trade, resources and technology dependencies. This Brief outlines the challenges facing the Union’s supply security and explores how any EU trade diversification strategy needs to tackle three core risk...
Despite routine declarations that connect Sahelian terrorism to climatic and environmental factors, available scientific evidence does not allow us to conclude whether (and what) climatic factors impact (and how) conflict variability and terrorism. This Brief explores why.
Policy experts and decision-makers can improve their ability to think about the future in a number of ways, including by admitting that future developments may invalidate current assumptions and actions. This Brief shows how applying the discipline of strategic foresight to the...
China’s and Russia’s shared antagonism against the West fuels cooperation at bilateral and multilateral levels. In its normative dimension, this cooperation is driven by the overarching aim of defining and re-interpreting existing international norms in a way that reflects the...
Concerns about the erosion of the ‘taboo’ on chemical weapons use have deepened in recent years, in particular following the chemical weapons attacks that have taken place in the Syrian conflict. The sanctions regime against the proliferation and use of chemical weapons which...
Despite the direction offered by the EU Global Strategy, there is as yet no common approach to how member state governments understand threats to the EU’s security. Under the new Strategic Compass initiative – designed to provide enhanced politico-strategic direction for EU...
This Brief analyses the current dynamics underpinning the Belarusian-Russian relationship and its possible future trajectory in the light of new factors which limit Belarus’s room for foreign policy manoeuvre. It highlights how, under increasing pressure from Russia and faced...
