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Transnational challenges

There is a growing overlap between the EU’s internal and external security problems. Terrorism, organised crime and unregulated migration not only pose a threat to European internal security, but also have a serious impact on the stability of Europe’s immediate neighbourhood. Very often, they find their roots in conflicts and instability further abroad in Africa or Asia.

For some time, the European Union has been active in international debates on the governance of these challenges, and has created new policy instruments of its own. Already in the early 1990s, the EU successfully linked its home-affairs priorities with its Common Foreign and Security Policy. The 2015 migration crisis showed the limits of that approach, and has sparked a new wave of reforms.

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    27September 2022
    Advancing the cyber resilience agenda with the Western Balkans partners

    On 27 September, the EUISS and the Czech Presidency of the Council of the European Union co-organised an event to deepen the cyber resilience cooperation of the EU and the Western Balkans partners. 

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    01June 2022
    Sanctions, conflict and democratic backsliding
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    This Brief presents an overview of EU sanctions policy, the rationales guiding their imposition and the expected impacts, focusing on the two types of situations in which the EU usually applies its measures: violent conflict and democratic backsliding.
  • 05April 2022
    Workshop: Foreign interference in the digital domain

    The purpose of this workshop was to identify the junctions between the fields of cybersecurity and information manipulation in order to better understand the underpinning challenges for the policymakers and propose potential solutions.

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    31January 2022
    International cyber crisis management regional workshop

    What are cyber crisis and how best to manage them at regional and multilateral level? This was the question explored at our online workshop with the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR).

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    28January 2022
    Europe's energy crisis conundrum
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    The energy crisis that engulfed Europe in 2021 continues to be a major source of concern. This Brief looks at the causes of the crisis, analyses its impacts and proposes strategic responses to enhance the EU’s resilience to energy market volatility as it pursues its ambitious decarbonisation strategy.
  • Wind turbines on snowy mountains
    19January 2022
    Yana Popkostova at the EU External Action Service

    Yana Popkostova gave a talk to EEAS officials on the topic 'The geopolitics of climate and energy: is the EU prepared?'.

  • Cracked ground
    07December 2021
    Yana Popkostova at the Dakar Forum

    Yana Popkostova attended the Dakar International Forum on Peace and Security in Africa, where she moderated a workshop on the impact of demography and climate change in the continent.

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    19November 2021
    Arab Climate Futures
    Of risk and readiness

    This Chaillot Paper shows that successfully tackling climate change in MENA will depend on decisions taken both in the region and outside. Assisting the Arab world in meeting the challenges posed by climate change will be a matter of strategic importance for Europe.

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    27October 2021
    Compliant or complicit? Security implications of the art market
    The traditionally secretive and unregulated nature of the art market makes it uniquely exposed to financial crime and the trafficking of cultural artefacts. This Brief examines how organised crime groups take advantage of the inherent opacity of the art market to fund their illicit activities.
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    20October 2021
    Creativity wanted: Countering the extraterritorial effects of US sanctions
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    The extraterritorial reach of US unilateral sanctions creates both economic and political difficulties for the EU, impinging upon European strategic autonomy. This Brief examines those challenges and explores steps that could be taken to address the situation.

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    31July 2020
    The EU’s chemical weapons sanctions regime
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    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 the EU adopted in October 2018 constitutes the Union’s first coercive instrument against chemical weapons, and is an attempt by the EU to support the multilateral chemical disarmament regime after efforts to frame a response via the United Nations Security Council failed.
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    11June 2020
    From bad to worse? The impact(s) of Covid-19 on conflict dynamics
    The global crisis caused by the Covid-19 outbreak has had particularly disruptive consequences for conflict-affected countries around the world. Armed groups have capitalised on the crisis, while the global distraction caused by the pandemic has made it difficult to seize opportunities for peace. This Brief analyses key repercussions in conflict-affected countries in general, and in five countries in particular: Colombia, Libya, Sudan, Ukraine and Yemen.
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    20May 2020
    Who’s first wins? International crisis response to Covid-19
    China has sought to demonstrate that its authoritarian political system has been more efficient at dealing with the coronavirus crisis than Western liberal democratic systems. This Brief examines the validity of this hypothesis, and concludes that predispositional factors – notably the demographic and age profile of a country – as well as whether a state had been previously exposed to a pandemic or not, were more important in shaping the authorities’ response than the political system in place.
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    30April 2020
    Arctic stress test
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    In the three decades after the Cold War, the perception of ‘Arctic exceptionalism’, the sense that the Arctic region is immune from broader geopolitical tensions, prevailed. However, this notion is currently being challenged: climate change is accelerating the opening of new maritime trade routes and exploitation of natural resources in the region, while great power competition between the US, Russia and China in the Arctic is intensifying, changing regional power dynamics.
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    17April 2020
    Cyber conflict uncoded
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    The complex nature of cyber conflicts makes it difficult to design effective, targeted conflict prevention instruments. Yet existing approaches to prevent conflict in cyberspace have, so far, brought about very little change in state behaviour. How might the EU lead the way in preventing conflicts from escalating or breaking out?
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    17March 2020
    A blacklist is (almost) born
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    In the sanctions practice of the EU, human rights motivations feature prominently, reflecting their centrality to the Union’s foreign policy. This Brief discusses plans to create a new EU sanctions regime addressing gross human rights violations. It examines the various challenges surrounding the initiative and its implementation, and argues that the way forward could be to disaggregate the proposed sanctions regimes into two separate strands: one dealing with breaches of international humanitarian law and a second addressing human rights abuses linked to large-scale transnational corruption.
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    24January 2020
    What if...? 14 futures for 2024
    Edited by
    With contributions from

    According to a famous science fiction film, the future is what you make of it. This Chaillot Paper takes this quote from Back to the Future to heart, proposing 14 different portraits of the future for the year 2024.

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    16December 2019
    The EU as a maritime security provider
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    Maritime security is one of the fundamental strategic interests of the European Union. This Brief focuses on the EU’s ambition to become a maritime security provider in the Indo-Pacific region and explores how might it go about accomplishing this. It shows how a more proactive European involvement in maritime security has the potential to boost ties with Asian countries, promote the Union’s foreign and security objectives in the region and enhance its strategic profile globally.
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    31October 2019
    Guardian of the galaxy: EU cyber sanctions and norms in cyberspace
    Edited by
    With contributions from

    This Chaillot Paper  – which uses space exploration as a metaphor to demystify some of the concepts and challenges linked to cyber-related policymaking –  focuses on the EU’s cyber sanctions regime.

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    18July 2019
    EUISS Yearbook of European Security 2019
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    The 2019 Yearbook of European Security provides an overview of events in 2018 that were significant for European security and charts major developments in the EU’s external action and security and defence policy.

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