According to the accepted wisdom in security studies, unmanned aerial vehicles, also known as drones, have revolutionizing effects on war and world politics. Drones allegedly tilt the military ...balance in favor of the offense, reduce existing asymmetries in military power between major and minor actors, and eliminate close combat from modern battlefields. A new theory about the hider-finder competition between air penetration and air defense shows that drones are vulnerable to air defenses and electronic warfare systems, and that they require support from other force structure assets to be effective. This competition imposes high costs on those who fail to master the set of tactics, techniques, procedures, technologies, and capabilities necessary to limit exposure to enemy fire and to detect enemy targets. Three conflicts that featured extensive employment of drones—the Western Libya military campaign of the second Libyan civil war (2019–2020), the Syrian civil war
(2011–2021), and the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh (2020)—probe the mechanisms of the theory. Drones do not by themselves produce the revolutionary effects that many have attributed to them.
This book examines the European governance of emerging security technologies.The emergence of technologies such as drones, autonomous robotics, artificial intelligence, cyber and biotechnologies has ...stimulated worldwide debates on their use, risks and benefits in both the civilian and the security-related fields. This volume examines the concept of ‘governance’ as an analytical framework and tool to investigate how new and emerging security technologies are governed in practice within the European Union (EU), emphasising the relational configurations among different state and non-state actors. With reference to European governance, it addresses the complex interplay of power relations, interests and framings surrounding the development of policies and strategies for the use of new security technologies. The work examines varied conceptual tools to shed light on the way diverse technologies are embedded in EU policy frameworks. Each contribution identifies actors involved in the governance of a specific technology sector, their multilevel institutional and corporate configurations, and the conflicting forces, values, ethical and legal concerns, as well as security imperatives and economic interests.This book will be of much interest to students of science and technology studies, security studies and EU policy.
In 2017, Italy, France, and Germany jointly supported the setting up of an EU-wide investment screening mechanism to strengthen the EU’s capacity to screen and eventually block foreign investments. ...In a few months, however, the Italian government changed position dramatically, shifting from leading supporter to staunchest opposer of this pol-icy initiative. Such a change of positioning was decisive in both watering down the initial proposal and moving for-ward with the idea of a looser mechanism coordinating national investment screening activities. This article develops an explanation of the Italian government’s changing negotiating stance. We develop an argument that stresses how two factors combined to produce this puzzling outcome. First, we stress the role of political parties as drivers of governments’ foreign economic policy choices. More specifically, we show that the preferences of the parties form-ing the Italian government after the 2018 general elections (the Lega Nord and the Five Star Movement) were crucial in shaping Italy’s evolving stance on this important issue. Second, we highlight the implications of the tension that exists between two different “varieties” of anti-globalism. While “self-proclaimed” anti-globalist political parties usu-ally combine a traditional critique of globalization and opposition to further political integration in the EU, they may be forced to prioritize one over the other when they prove incompatible. In this context, we show how Italian anti-globalist parties’ choice to prioritize anti-Europeanism over anti-globalism led them to prefer strengthening domes-tic-level institutions to screen FDIs rather than allowing the EU to acquire new powers.
5G networks are at the center of geopolitical competition. The United States has denounced market leader Huawei's ability to break into allies' sensitive networks and it has tried to convince ...Europeans to ban the Chinese group from their 5G markets. How are European governments and industries reacting to 5G politicization? This article argues that government‐industry interactions in the handling of politically salient issues are mediated by the country's political system. In executive‐dominated countries, the government would centralize policymaking. In parliament‐dominated countries, the government would delegate politically salient issues to the industry to bypass diffuse power‐sharing and fragmented coalition‐building. The article adds that political economy acts as an intervening variable. In public governance ecosystems, governments and industries interact through informal coordination; in private governance ecosystems, the two actors rely on formal contracting. The empirical analysis focuses on British, Dutch, French, and Italian reactions to 5G politicization, yielding favorable results to the hypotheses.
Abstract
The academic literature has revamped its interest in economic statecraft, geoeconomics, geopoliticization of trade and technology sectors, and in the role of value chains as vectors for ...exerting control over critical technologies. However, there has been less reflection on state-market relations in the production of technological innovation and on the evolution of government business relations. Four recent books address these two important issues from different angles. Mazzucato and Mallaby’s books focus on the right mix of state and market needed to stimulate technological innovation, and they do so from opposite perspectives. Chen and Ripley’s books look, respectively, at the rise of Tencent as one of China’s major big tech companies and the rise of SpaceX as a key private player in the traditionally state-led US space market. These two books are therefore of interest to gauge the evolving relations between government and private businesses in two key areas of current geopolitical competition, the digital and the space sectors. The aim of this review essay is not only to briefly summarize the content of these books and their strengths and weaknesses, but also to use them as a starting point to reflect on the mix of state and market in the production of innovation, and on government-businesses relations in digital markets.
International relations (IR) as a discipline have had a troubled history in Italy. Indeed, the previous academic literature on the topic has highlighted how the lack of critical mass and influence of ...Italian IR scholarship have negatively impacted its visibility at the international level (Lucarelli and Menotti in Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica 32(1):32–82,
2002
; Friedrichs in European approaches to international relations theory: a house with many mansions, Routledge, London,
2004
). However, there are few systematic studies that focus on the scientific publications of Italian scholars in IR. In order to fill this gap, the article presents the results of a study assessing Italian scholars’ impact in peer-reviewed international journals. Specifically, this work aims to make a broader assessment of Italian scholars’ publications from 2011 to 2017 using a database that includes 25 high impact-factor international peer-reviewed journals and five Italian journals. It also aims to identify the gender, geographic origin, affiliation and academic role of Italian scholars, as well as the topic, area, theoretical approach and methodological underpinnings of each article, so as to generate previously unexplored findings on the solidity and impact of Italian IR research both in Italy and abroad.
Contemporary warfare is increasingly shaped by the complex relationship between the privatization of security and technologically driven automation. On the one hand, there is a growing tendency to ...employ private military and security companies for a range of military support tasks. On the other hand, the growing automation of security technologies is bound to make war less manpower intensive. Combat systems will have much more autonomy and humans will be working more closely with machines than they do today. The article provides an original analysis on the interplay between the privatization of security tasks and technologically driven automation and investigates their impact on the defence industry and the armed forces. These two sets of actors are arguably among the most impacted by the multi-faceted relations between privatization and automation. Technological progress creates the need for contractors to maintain and operate platforms that militaries do not have expertise to run. However, technologically driven automation - often developed in value chains far removed from the military-industrial pipeline - might also replace private contractors in non-core security tasks. The possibility to employ automated and autonomous systems will hence impact on the already delicate balance between private contractors and publicly-funded armed forces.
The increasing cost of weapons, decreasing defence budgets and globalization of armaments supply-chain have made defence-industrial cooperation a priority in the European context. However, despite ...strong systemic incentives, European cooperation in defence-industrial activities remains very discontinuous. Why do European countries decide to cooperate with their partners in some instances and refrain from acting cooperatively in others? The present article introduces market size as a variable to elucidate different first and second-tier states' approaches towards European defence-industrial cooperation. While firms settled in larger domestic markets lobby to maintain existing technological capabilities, firms in smaller domestic markets prefer to be competitive in limited sectors of the defence-industrial supply-chain in order to preserve export market niches. The article tests the plausibility of this argument by way of in-depth case studies of the French, German and Italian approaches towards two collaborative armaments projects: the Eurofighter and the A400M.
Recent analyses of international affairs highlight that states are increasingly exploiting the key position of some private industries in critical hubs of global economic networks to gain an ...advantage over their competitors. The key role of private companies in international competition has also significant implications in the cyber-domain, where private actors are the main owners of data and digital infrastructures. In contrast to those who see a transformative effect of cyber, this article draws on comparative political economy and defense policy to identify two different models of state-industry relations in the governance of cybersecurity. The theoretical framework distinguishes between public and private governance ecosystems and identifies different hypotheses on how states and industries interact in cybersecurity governance in France and in the UK. The French public governance is characterized by the presence of formal and informal relations between state and industries, a high degree of public investment in the private sector and centralized institutions. France has also used the EU mainly to advance its industrial interests. In contrast, the UK private governance is characterized by more arm's length relations between the state and industries and a less centralized system. Moreover, the UK, differently to France, has not used the EU channel to advance its industry-related preferences. These results confirm the macro-differences between public and private governance ecosystems and open new relevant avenues to investigate the interplay between political economy structures and European and international pressures in policy-areas with both economic and security implications.
Defence-industrial collaborative activities have gained a central stage in the current European debate, based on the simultaneous presence of two systemic pressures (unipolarity and ..."defence-industrial globalization") that are pushing EU member states towards more cooperation in these issues. Nevertheless, the European defence-industrial panorama still continues to be characterized by both cooperation and conflict. Protectionism, oligopolistic market straining and primary resource to domestic suppliers have prevented a more structured defence-industrial cooperation.
The aim of this article is to add empirical evidence to recent academic works that highlighted how relative gains play a key role in understanding the simultaneous presence of cooperation and conflict in the European security architecture. In doing so, this analysis focuses on the European defence-industrial landscape and specifically on British, French and Italian preferences towards armaments cooperation. To preview the conclusions, France, Italy and the UK have constantly pursued greater intra-European cooperation, in order to increase their power within the international defence-industrial market. However, they have refused to participate in European defence-industrial initiatives when other countries would have a greater advantage from this cooperation. This happened despite strong geopolitical and strategic incentives to cooperate.
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