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This paper addresses attitudes around the projection of the EU among Latin American elites, namely the determinants of support for a Free Trade Agreement between the two regions and the trustworthiness of the EU government. We take as data elite surveys conducted in 15 Latin American countries (2014–2019) and consider sociodemographics, ideology, support for democracy, views of foreign powers, exports to the EU, and electoral democracy. Results show that ideology and support for democracy are key determinants of support for an interregional FTA, and that the trustworthiness of governments in the US, China, and Spain covary with attitudes toward the EU. The latter (trust in the government in Spain) proves to be the main driver and, furthermore, its impact is conditional on the economic strength (observed as exports) of the EU: wherever the EU is not a strong economic actor in Latin America, trust in the Spanish government does nothing but improve the image of the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Which factors influence bilateral counterterrorism (CT) cooperation between EU Member States? Although scholars have studied European CT, the question still needs to be answered. This paper addresses the issue by introducing a new theoretical framework that combines CT and Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) literature. As citizens' threat perception increases, governments are pressed to act. Overall, centrist cabinets tend to rely more on cooperation agreements; likewise, pushed by threat perception, left-wing executives also recourse to international cooperation. I tested this framework on a newly collected dataset, which comprehends bilateral CT agreements signed among EU Members from 2002 to 2017. As such, this paper fosters studies on EU CT, focusing on a less debated issue: bilateral cooperation between EU Member States. The results support the initial hypotheses, disclosing a robust influence of threat perception and cabinet ideology on the number of bilateral CT agreements signed. Furthermore, they show that the perception of the threat is more influential on cooperation than the actual impact of terrorism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyses the impact of European Union (EU) funds on corruption in the EU ex-communist countries by following a panel Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach. The panel includes 10 former EU communist countries, over 2007–2019. The key findings reveal that an improvement in the EU funds paid and their rate of absorption can reduce the level of corruption in the long-run in the recipient EU ex-communist countries. This is due to better monitoring of EU funds paid compared with national resources, and a more efficient and fairer channel of EU funds absorption. In parallel with the EU funds, corruption can be controlled in certain conditions by the degree of economic development, size of government, level of democratisation and religiosity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on Euroscepticism tends to portray parties opposing European integration or criticising the European Union (EU) as a family of Eurosceptic parties (either hard or soft). Recent literature, however, offers empirical evidence on the ambivalence and diversity of the EU critique. What is still unclear are the reasons behind the chameleonic nature of Euroscepticism and the implications that this may have for the EU critique and the changes proposed about EU policy or institutions. The present article addresses this question exploring the role of EU crises to capture the changing nature of Euroscepticism and suggests that it is related to contextual pressures on the political debate around the EU. The paper develops this argument and illustrates it through the analysis of the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, covering the EU crises of the last decade, including the recent period of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukraine invasion. Drawing on a corpus of party manifestos and speeches between 2013 and 2022, this study shows that there are three main frames used by the party to criticise the EU. It also concludes that these frames involve distinct political implications for the EU critique and the alternative proposals presented by the party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), despite being regarded as the most developed integration project in the post-Soviet area, has faced different hurdles in acquiring international recognition. Especially, the EU, the EAEU's Significant Other, has been reluctant to formally recognize it, in spite of close ties with EAEU member states as well as of its own self-image as a supporter of regional integrations. This paper focuses on this puzzle and examines how the EU has been discursively explaining its non-recognition of the EAEU at the institutional level. Based on the analysis of EU-articulated narratives since 2010, the paper reveals three dominant representations of the EAEU in the EU discourse: (1) Russia's geopolitical project; (2) a protectionist union; and (3) a dysfunctional union. These narratives have been used by Brussels to create the EAEU's image as a threatening Other, thus justifying why the EU cannot formally recognize the EAEU and officially engage with it. The paper also identifies five different stages of the EU's discursive representation of the EAEU since 2010, when its tone and content varied. The paper concludes that such non-recognition from the Significant Other still limits the EAEU's international agency despite its increasing interest in cooperation with non-Western actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship has fruitfully investigated the effect of international organization (IO) approval on public support for military intervention. Following Jentleson and Britton [Bruce W. Jentleson and Rebecca L. Britton, "Still Pretty Prudent: Post-Cold War American Public Opinion on the Use of Military Force," Journal of Conflict Resolution 42, no. 4 (1998): 395–417], scholars argue that IO approval does not increase already high public support for "foreign policy restraint" (FPR) operations intended to coerce "aggressively threatening" opponents, including terrorists. We challenge this argument, focusing on public support for contributing to military coalitions. The public may wonder whether leaders are sincere when they frame a coalition military operation as having FPR objectives; this may lead the public to put a premium on multilateral validation. We also question the common argument that UN Security Council approval necessarily has a greater positive effect on public support for intervention than approval from regional IOs. Approval from broad-based regional IOs, such as the African Union (AU), may be just as consequential. Data from survey experiments that we conducted in three countries confirm our principal hypotheses: (1) IO approval consistently increases public support for contributing to military coalitions even in counterterrorism cases and (2) the UN and AU approval effects are of comparable magnitude. These findings expand our theoretical understanding of the conditions under which IO approval can increase public support for military intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The post–Cold War environment has ushered in an era of threats from terrorism, organized crime, and their intersections giving rise to the growing literature on the so-called crime–terror nexus. This article takes stock of this literature, assesses its accomplishments and limitations, and considers ways to deepen it conceptually, theoretically, and empirically. To challenge assumptions informing the crime–terror studies and suggest avenues for future research, the article draws on ideas from the scholarship on political economies of violence. These insights are used to probe the (1) non-state actors that form the crime–terror nexus, (2) conditions under which the nexus is likely to emerge, and (3) varied effects of criminal–terrorist intersections. The article emphasizes the ties of criminal and terrorist groups to local politics, society, and economy, and relationships of competition, rather than cooperation, which often characterize these ties. The conditions under which these groups operate cannot be understood without considering the role of the state in criminal–terrorist constellations. The structure of resource economies influences both the preferences of terrorist groups for crime and the consequences of terrorist–criminal convergence, which are also mediated by state participation in crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The overlapping of a series of events in the region has brought the Sahel under the spotlight of many European countries. It has been argued that the peculiar transnational nature of many terrorist groups of the area represents a concrete threat to European security. France, specifically, has led and encouraged a series of European initiatives, which aim to stabilize the region, calling for different degrees of counterterrorism cooperation with its European allies. Many European countries, such as Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, or Italy, have indeed increased their engagement in the area. Yet, not only a variety of new actors are now involved in the response to terrorism, but European cooperation among key actors is also developing along political-strategic, organizational, and procedural dimensions largely unexplored by the existing literature. This paper specifically accounts for the different multilevel configurations of European counterterrorism cooperation in the Sahel between 2012 and 2018. More specifically, the aim of this contribution is twofold. First, theoretically, through the concept of "patchwork" the paper proposes a conceptual framework able to investigate and analyze the apparently confusing multidimensional and multi-actor European cooperation in counterterrorism. Second, it empirically researches and analyzes the types of cooperation and the actors that fulfil key strategic positions in the patchwork. Overall, this paper provides a first complete account of the universe of European actors involved in the region and the types of cooperative patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The consistently low credit-taking rates, 16 percent in 2016 (Global Terrorism Database), continue to challenge the understanding of terrorism as "propaganda of the deed" twenty years after researchers initially pointed out the conundrum. While providing an overview and evaluation of the limited existing literature on credit-taking, this paper draws attention to three core problems in the current literature on terrorist credit-taking, which may have led the low credit-taking rates to appear more puzzling than is due. First, the available explanations struggle to find corroboration when empirically tested and many also show theoretical shortcomings with strong unspoken assumptions and unclear predictions of credit-taking behavior. Second, data structure and data availability unnecessarily narrow our academic understanding of credit-taking. Finally, theories focused on group characteristics such as religious motivation or state sponsorship suffer from severe issues of sample bias due to unintended selection on the dependent variable. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research less prone to the problematic issues identified in the article. A re-orientation toward a less restrictive and more fine-grained understanding of credit-taking is advised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]